Mayanna - a Menu Utility for Linux... And a Whole Lot More

One of the cooler software projects for Linux I've seen come down the pipe in a while is called Mayanna. Not sure what that means, but in practice, it's the name of a new menu bar applet for Gnome Linux that takes the place of your menu system, along with a lot of other goodies.

For starters, if you look at the screen shots of this (and are familiar with Linux), and think, "hey, that Mayanna looks an awful lot like Gimmie," then you're right. Gimmie is a project I've watched for a while, a project that pretty much does the same thing, and looks the same, and it's for a reason. Gimmie's developer has really slowed down, almost to a stop, and has given the developer of Mayanna permission to continue and extend the idea with Mayanna.

And wow, am I ever glad this is happening. Back in October of 2007, I wrote a review of Gimmie, and was generally positive about it. Seif Lotfy, one of the Gimmie developers (and now the lead developer of Mayanna) wrote a reply to my review and mentioned that Gimmie was about to go through a couple new versions and that this would be happening in the next month. I'm still waiting. In the meantime, development stalled, and the rest of the Gimmie team decided to fork the project, which is how Mayanna was born.

And like I said, I'm really glad to see it. Because Mayanna (like Gimmie before it), offers more than just a quick view of your system preferences, administrative tools and applications. If I wanted that, I'd just use the Gnome system menu. No, Mayanna offers more than that.

What?

Taken from the project's page are the following features: