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  KDE Commit-Digest for 24th February 2008
Developer Posted by Danny Allen on Saturday 01/Mar/2008, @19:41
from the not-for-the-whiners dept.
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: More work on runners, bindings into WebKit, and the beginnings of better composite manager support in Plasma, with support for multiple feed sources in the RSS Plasmoid. The addition of a "BBall", "Show Desktop", "KMLDonkey", and "IM Presence" (using Decibel) Plasma applets. An alternative alt+tab window switcher (similar to Compiz Fusion's "Cover Switch" effect). SuperKaramba gets support for Qt 4.4 "widgets-on-canvas". A long-overdue "major" rewrite of KCron is undertaken. Undo support in the KShortcutsEditor dialog. New plugins in Digikam and Krita. Various improvements in KTorrent and Amarok 2.0. Interface work and MusicBrainz integration in KsCD (student project). Lots of work on page transition effects in KPresenter. The start of work on integrating online reader support into Akregator. Kubrick, a Rubik's Cube game, is imported into playground/games. KDiamond moves from playground/games to kdereview, Kollision from kdereview to kdegames for KDE 4.1. kdebase (trunk, KDE 4.1) now requires Qt 4.4. Akonalendar (a small app to demonstrate Akonadi KCal models), and the Quasar graphics library are imported into KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here.


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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Games framework
by T. J. Brumfield on Saturday 01/Mar/2008, @20:38
Wasn't there a new app/framework to easily create other games? I thought it was largely designed around board and game games. I can't recall the name and I wanted to check up on it.
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KDE and Google
by T. J. Brumfield on Saturday 01/Mar/2008, @20:44
I posted this a week or two ago and didn't get many replies, but the Dot has been busy and it may have been missed.

I was thinking long and hard, and I believe KDE should form a strategic partnership with Google in much the same way Mozilla did.

As far as the API goes, you only get so many uses for your API key, so KDE couldn't just take the API and use it without paying for it, or striking a deal. They'd go over API usage with all the people who use KDE.

However, imagine Google contributing code to NEPOMUK and improving Strigi.
Imagine fully integrating Google services like GCalendar, GTalk and Gmail into your desktop.
Imagine easily integrating Google Docs to share documents.
Imagine being able to search an index with your account, and have it know that what you're looking for is on another computer you've used recently.

KDE 4 is now cross-platform. With plasmoids, open APIs, and the beginning of the Semantic Desktop, you could fully integrate your desktop experience with an online community, and simultaneously integrate online services into your desktop.

The partnership would profit both parties, and the end users would get much better features.

You could take it even further. It could create in-roads for KDE usage in the Enterprise environment through the strength of the Google brand. I can tell you first hand that integrating Sharepoint is very costly. Imagine an OSS alternative that allows the entire enterprise to communicate via email, calendar, IM, share documents, collaborate, search, etc. intuitively, and directly through your desktop apps.

We need to brainstorm this, and someone needs to approach Google about this.
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Ubuntu brainstorm (again)
by scanady on Saturday 01/Mar/2008, @20:50
Thanks for the always wonderful commit digest Danny! For anyone who hasn't yet heard about KDE on Ubuntu Brainstorm, please vote the following idea up. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/478/ . I know I already submitted this as a comment on the dot elsewhere, but I'd really like to see it get voted up. The more distros out there that treat KDE like a first class citizen, the better off KDE will be. Thanks for your vote in advance!
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Thanks, Martin!
by Anon on Sunday 02/Mar/2008, @02:07
I'd like to thank Martin Gräßlin for being one of the few third-parties to be contributing to the KWin effects (and I'd pre-emptively invite those of you who'd dismiss his efforts as "pointless eye-candy" to stick a sock in it, thankyou :)) - I for one hope to see more of this from you!

There's a youtube video here - as usual, I suspect the standard disclaimers of "it's faster when you're not running recording software" apply:

http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=sjNKZVKgXP8

Not to reduce his achievements, but this fairly rich effect, with complex motion, fading, 3D stuff, onscreen text etc, is achieved in a scant 818 lines, much of which is comments and general boilerplate:

http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/kwin/effects/coverswitch.cpp?revision=779045

I wonder if the reason more people aren't stepping up to help with this is that they feel it must be much harder than it really is?
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Open Bugs
by Loki on Sunday 02/Mar/2008, @03:48
16124 Open Bugs. That's quite a lot for a open source project. Are there any plans to close them in the near future?
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superkaramba?
by bruno m. on Sunday 02/Mar/2008, @09:09
(not trying to emulate aseigo, shift key not working. damn ms wireless kb)

i might be modded a troll here, but this is a legit question: i thought one of the goals of plasma was to get rid of all these disjointed pieces of software that composed kde. and from what i'm seeing, plasma is indeed integrating sk's functionality, already. so why is superkaramba still being worked on?

(and, no, this is not flamebait)
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Nepomuk and Dolphin
by Josep on Sunday 02/Mar/2008, @09:34
I don't know if it is my fault but since KDE 4.0.0 rating and comment files in Dolphin don't work, only tags are remembered.
I remember that this used to work for me prior 4.0.0 release, and it was a handy feature.
Is this only happening to me?
I'm using current 4.0 svn branch with soprano 2.0.2.
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Speed? SPEED?
by KDE user on Sunday 02/Mar/2008, @12:45
I must admit that I was, in the beginning, rather sceptical of the new look of KDE4. But I use it now for weeks, and I like it. It's great, it's the right way to go, and I see the potential, and I like it. I have to say this in advance, because in day-to-day usage, the shortcomings are still obvious. All the new features mentioned in the commit digest don't help here...

However, despite everything, despite all new features, is there anybody working at thing like speed and stability?? KDE4 (openSUSE, snapshot always updated) keeps to suck for me in this respects :(.

Examples:

"Show desktop" icon: Takes seconds
"Log off": When "darkening" the desktop for the log off window, I can in fact see the deskopt redrawn line by line. Haven't had that since my early Amiga times.
"Desktop effects": unusable because of speed, bugs, and stability since the beginning of KDE4
"Settings": .kde4-directory has to be erased every couple of days

and so on... everything feels sluggish. I can't pinpoint anything, it's just that Windows XP on the same machine runs like hell, and KDE feels like having lost 1 Ghz or something like that.

The machine is a AMD dual core with an GeForce 6. The proprietary NVidia driver should have been correctly set up.
However, I don't really see why me as a user should have to fiddle with settings for the festest way to do desktop effects and stuff, and doing "NVIDA_HACK" environment variables and stuff like that... but that's another point. Even in the most basic settings KDE4 is still way behing of Windows in terms of "catchiness" and "stability" on this machine, and this I don't like..
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WebKit
by Zayed on Sunday 02/Mar/2008, @22:01
Will it be ready for kde4.1 ?
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KGET Web Interface
by Fred on Monday 03/Mar/2008, @03:52
I'm not sure I like this. From a architectural viewpoint, I think this is not the way to go. For apps like this, a separate "engine" should be made, wich can run as a daemon on a server. Then, one can choose a client to communicate with the server: a KDE/QT client, a web client, a CLI, etc. For a single machine setup, the daemon runs on the local machine. One could even accept multiple deamons. Look at the way MLdonkey does it. That's the correct approach. Same thing for Amarok: Create a amarok "engine" that run's as a daemon on a server, then use Amarok (the KDE app) for communicating with it. Next, a web client, a CLI, etc could be made. I'm sure more apps could be architected this way. Use open standard for the communications where available. Another app that comes to mind is Ktorrent.

Just my $0.02
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Google Summer of Code submissions
by Max on Tuesday 04/Mar/2008, @21:19
http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Summer_of_Code/2008

Please provide more submissions to Google Summer of Code projects.

Please also tell all your friends about GSoC, both mentors and students that would like to make extra cash in the summer.

Maybe we could have a separate dot topic for this, so more people notice. (just a suggestion)
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Kwin Desktop effects at Google Summer of Code?
by Max on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @00:48
Will there be any new Desktop effects for Kwin at this years GSoC?

I looked at the site, and there don't seem to be any projects submitted under Kwin. Are they under a different heading, or am I just not looking in the right place?
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Great to watch it grow...
by danielHL on Thursday 06/Mar/2008, @15:18
Hey there. I've been building KDE4 from trunk since it produced anything clickable on the desktop. I updated almost every second day and watching your progress was really fun. Lately I've been on a trip for about a week and was away from my PC. Rebuilding took a while longer but it is absolutely wicked what can change in just one week of absence.

I've never been this deep into a live development process - sometimes it makes me think I've become the wrong type of engineer ;-)

Keep up the great work!

CU and greets form Germany
danielHL
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