Launching today for those of you lucky enough to have KDE 3.4 installed is... Get Hot New Wallpapers!
Using the excellent Get Hot New Stuff platform and its KDE library KNewStuff I added Get New Wallpapers button to the desktop configuration module. It looks like KDE Look man Frank has now added the feed from kde-look.org so you can get the current 10 latest, greatest and most downloaded wallpapers at the touch of a button.
There's some improvements I ought to make for the next release, using aseigo's Hot New Button for example and making it update to the downloaded wallpaper automatically. Also the feed mixes newest, highest rated and most downloaded so you get all three wallpaper selections together in the same list.
And of course there's plenty more content on kde-look to mine for: icon themes, splash screens, colour schemes etc. Widget styles would be harder since they are compiled.
Test it out and then think up some more places we could use Get Hot New Stuff.
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Xine
An excellent place to use khotnewstuff would be to have an icon on the desktop - 'Set up my media player'.
At the moment no distro distributes xine properly eg with stuff like DVD playback enabled because of licensing, legal and patent issues - so why not let the user set up it themselves?
Have an icon on the desktop that loads a QT-based installer program that grabs and installs the latest version of xine-lib, kaffeine, all the codecs, and libdvdcss from the net.
This would solve the problems associated with distros bundling horrible crappy cut down versions of xine which they have deliberately knobbled so that they can't play dvd's, and xvid etc. It would be cool as hell too
Re: Xine
This could be a solution, but it's too hard to implement. For example, some distros use RPMs, some use DEBs, some use ebuilds and so on (and don't forget *BSD). The app would not know where to setup the libs too - to /usr, /usr/local or /opt. Some distros (like Gentoo) provide a "normal" xine with full functionality. Those whose distro gives a crippled version can use PLF's repository (http://plf.zarb.org/).
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