The Avant Window Navigator team made quite a leap yesterday, when they released version 0.3.2 of their dock-like application. The announcement comes after a whole year of bugfixing and improving overall performance. Though the next version after 0.2.6 should have been 0.2.8, developers didn't show enough interest, which resulted in its cancellation.

Avant Window Navigator 0.3.2 brings quite a lot of goodies for everyone, be they users, packagers or developers:

· a long-awaited "Automatically start Awn on login" feature
· improved compatibility with Metacity
· a useful notification in case you start Awn without enabling a compositing manager first
· except tasks, most applet icons can now be easily changed by dragging and dropping the desired icon onto it
· the Vala version dependency is now at 0.5.4
· the applet's metadata files were moved to a new location; awn-applets-migration script was included to automatically make the migration
· cairo contexts and surfaces can now be used to paint AppletSimple-based applets with text and images
· standardized applet context menu API
· more advanced custom icon support through AwnIcons

There are also some known issues in this release in the form of a still buggy autohide feature, an unstable keyfile-based config, a poor handling of multiple screens and the inability to move the dock from the default bottom position.

About Awn

Avant Window Navigator is a dock-like bar that resides at the bottom of the screen, hosting application launchers, task lists, third-party applets and open windows. It also accepts C, Vala and Python written extensions like system trays and clocks that can be added to the dock. Awn will currently not work without compositing support from window managers like Metacity, Xfwm4, KWin or Compiz.

Download Avant Window Navigator 0.3.2 right now from Softpedia.