UMPlayer is a new cross-platform Mplayer front-end that supports CSS skins, easily searching, watching and downloading YouTube videos, lots of ShoutCast radio stations and more. Check out our initial post on UMPlayer for more info.

A message on the Ubuntu devel mailing list mentions that the current state of Unity will be brought up for discussion and if needed, the Classic GNOME Desktop may be default after all in Ubuntu 11.04:

GNOME Shell Extensions is a collections of extensions providing additional functionality for GNOME Shell. The first public release was made two days ago but the extensions didn't really work because of a bug in GNOME Shell - which was fixed today.

GNOME 3 has finally been released a few minutes ago. You can check out all the new features (videos and screenshots) @ gnome3.org - but unfortunately the website is down at the time I'm writing this post. The videos are also available on the GNOME Desktop YouTube channel.

Due to a GNOME Shell bug (which doesn't seem to like my graphics card), I couldn't record a proper video so I've joined all the videos provided on the gnome3.org website into a single video with all the major new features in GNOME 3:

Skype 2.2 beta brings "Skype Access" support which you can use to connect to "over 500,000 WiFi hotspots worldwide using your Skype Credit", improved audio and video quality.

Audacious music player is a fork of Beep Media Player (BMP), which itself forked from XMMS. It looks a lot like Winamp 2.x (and the playlist, song adding functions and so on, are similar to Winamp) but it also comes with a GTK interface.

The clean interface, amazing functionality with lots of plugins and a low memory footprint have helped Audacious become the default music player in Lubuntu 11.04 (replacing Aqualung).

(Audacious - GTK interface)

(Audacious - Winamp 2.x interface)

If you've been following the Gnome Shell development, you probably know that it doesn't provide a GUI tool to tweak some basic settings like changing the GTK, Gnome Shell theme or icon theme, re-enable the minimize and maximize buttons, and so on.

For this reason, John Stowers has created "Gnome Tweak Tool", a 'power user' application you can use to tweak Gnome 3. But I think this tool will become very popular for any Gnome 3 user and not just power users considering how useful it already is. Read on!

Gedit Collaboration is a really interesting plugin that provides collaborative editing meaning two or more people can work on the same files, create new files and folders and so on. The plugin allows you to collaborate both with other Gedit and Gobby users.

Check out this video created by jessevdk (the Gedit Collaboration plugin developer):

Pinta 0.8 was released last week and seeing that its PPA still provides version 0.5, I've uploaded it to the WebUpd8 PPA. For some reason, even the Ubuntu 11.04 repositories haven't been updated since Pinta 0.6 so starting today I'll also be providing Natty packages for Pinta.