0 A.D., a historical real-time strategy game, has reached alpha 8. The new version brings a new civilization: Persian and also, single-player games can finally be saved / restored.

Amarok 2.5 has been recently released and is now available in the Kubuntu Backports PPA for Kubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot users.

Nuvola Player (previously Google Music Frame) is a music player especially designed for cloud music. Even though it's only a "frame", it's a great application that comes with features such as Ubuntu Sound Menu (mpris2 - also works with some GNOME Shell extensions) support, notifications, multimedia keys, Unity quicklists and many extra features thanks to user scripts (like last.fm scrobbling for Google Music, etc.).

Nuvola Player got Grooveshark, Hype Machine and 8tracks support recently (in addition to Google Music) and we've talked about this already, but if you like using stable releases, you'll be glad to know that Nuvola Player 1.0 has finally been released.

TeamViewer is an application for remote control, desktop sharing and file transfer between computers, great for meetings, presentations, support and more. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux (even though it comes in a .deb or .rpm, it uses Wine which comes bundled with it) as well as Android or iPhone. The application is free for personal use only.

Cairo Dock is evolving to something more than just a dock. After getting its own custom GNOME session a while back, the latest alpha got a feature that I for one didn't expect to see in a dock: global menu (Application menu).

Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 (stable) has finally been released. The new version comes with a revamped user interface and many new features, but also without some of its old features: App and Source Center are no longer available in Ubuntu Tweak because, according to the Ubuntu Tweak developer, even though these features were liked by many users, they caused a lot of problems and also, they weren't exactly tweaks.

By the way, if you want to search for PPAs, you can use Y PPA Manager.

There used to be many such applications for GNOME 2, but they can't change the background anymore because they still use GConf, while the background settings are now stored in DConf. And since XML Animated Background Creator is easy to use and install on any Linux distribution, I've upgraded it to work with GNOME 3 (it works with any "shell": Unity, GNOME Shell, fallback session).

Among its most important features are captcha recognition, automatic archive extraction and reconnect (useful for most file sharing websites: pyLoad disconnects your Internet connection and then reconnects so you get a new IP so you can continue downloading, bypassing limits imposed by various websites).

ffDiaporama is a multi-platform application for creating videos from photos or movie clips. It supports various transition effects, titles/annotations, music and more.

The application has been created by one of the Videoporama developers (by the way, the Videoporama development has stopped), but unlike Videoporama, ffDiaporama is written in C++ instead of Python.

Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, has started working on a GNOME Shell fork called Cinnamon, which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2, with emphasis on "making users feel at home and providing them with an easy to use and comfortable desktop experience":