A brief post as I’m still traveling for work. Here are a couple big and small packages in development that I’m excited about:

• Flyback: A GUI wrapper for rsync and rsnapshot to make backup easier, that is often compared to Apple’s Time Machine. It’s a python script that creates a GUI for the user and makes it simple to create and schedule backups of a user’s directories and files. Choose which directory, files, hidden files, and it sends the back up to a directory of your choosing. It’s still very early in development, and I didn’t see a way to send a backup to a network share that’s mounted in GNOME. But I believe most users don’t backup enough, and for a distribution like that Foresight, that “just works”, backup should be added to the list of things that just work for a user.
• GNOME-DO: A Quicksilver-like application that is difficult to explain, but can increase your productivity ten fold by making it easy to quickly open applications, jump between open windows and more. See more at Download Squad including a video of GNOME-Do in action.
• Publishr, a small one, but looks useful, Publishr adds a “publish” plug-in to GIMP to make it easy to send your images to Picasa or Flickr. Sure, F-Spot has had this feature forever, but there are a lot of times when I’m editing a screenshot that I want to send to Flickr that I won’t put in my F-Spot library, and this plugin will help skip a step by having to use Flickr’s web upload feature.

I’m definitely going to keep an eye on these applications, and may add to my Foresight repository when I get some time.