Marble Maps 1.0

It could be argued that Android is the most widely used and distributed version of Linux. And even though Google is seemingly fighting to make its new Android frameworks as proprietary as possible, its Android core remains open source and at the heart of other mobile open source operating systems. This may be why some Linux projects are expanding into Android development as an extension of their more traditional roots. The KDE project is one of those pioneering spirits. KDE Connect (above) links your phone to your desktop, while Marble Maps takes this further, testing KDE's long-promised platform agnosticism by porting the Marble libraries to Android and creating a whole new app for browsing OpenStreetMap data in the process.

Marble Maps itself is a navigation app that uses the same data and rendering routines as its desktop counterpart. This is evident from the first launch, where the vectors are rendered as finely as your phone's display will allow. On any screen with a high DPI, it looks amazing. It's also quicker than the standard open source OpenStreetMap app, OsmAnd, but it's also bereft of many of its features. There's the same routing planning you get at http://www.openstreetmap.org, but very little else. No control over caching, no plugins, no tracking, no importing – none of the features that make OsmAnd so useful. But this is just a first release, and because of the beautiful rendering and quick screen update, we'd still recommend Marble Maps as the app to use when you're lost in a city, just as long as that city is in Germany, where there's even 3D building data, or the rest of Europe or the USA where OpenStreetMap details are highest.

Project Website

https://marble.kde.org/

Marble isn't the only KDE app making its way to Android; there's also a version of KStars, too.

Desktop Twitterer

Anatine 1.1.0

If there's anyone still brave enough to look at Twitter, it remains a social media platform that has its uses. It's unrivaled for its ability to capture news events as they unfold, for example, and there are still many Linux developers and open source advocates sharing their thoughts with the world via its 140 characters. But the initial glut of Linux clients that followed its launch way back in March 2006 have mostly dried out. It's seems most users are happy to use the now permanently web-bound Tweetdeck or stick with their old Twitter clients.

But there's also Anatine, which is definitely worth a look if you need a desktop client. Anatine isn't strictly a desktop application, though. It's built around an encapsulation of the mobile twitter site (mobile.twitter.com) using the Electron Node/Javascript and Chromium framework, which means it's basically a browser loading a single page. This also means you can customize the experience as if you were using a single application, and what's particularly good about Anatine is its use of keyboard shortcuts and a rather excellent dark mode implemented via easily editable CSS.

Anatine can be run directly from the download (although it's a zip bomb, so be careful) and needs a single login to get going. This is because it's using an official web portal, rather than accessing your account via a limited access API, which is what destroys many third-party Twitter clients. When logged in, Anatine is simple, quick, and looks great on-screen. It doesn't have the power of Tweetdeck, but neither does it eat up the same amount of RAM and resources, and it lets you easily keep on top of your Twitter updates or ignore them completely.

Project Website

https://github.com/sindresorhus/anatin

Filter out the hate, and Twitter is still a good way of keeping in touch with the open source community.