In this week's KDE CVS-Digest (all on one page): Kttsd adds support for Italian Festival voices.
Umbrello improves import from ArtisanSW, Visio, ArgoUML, Fujaba and NSUML.
KSpread has a new insert calendar plugin.
Konqueror loses its Cut/Copy/Paste buttons.
KDE begins move to Subversion and discusses future roadmap.
Dot Categories:
Comments
> Maybe in 4.0 we can get rid of some overlapping apps
> Juk, Amarok, Kaffeine, Noatun, Kaboodle
If you would install less 3rd party applications then you would have less overlapping applications.
Okay... should have reread the post.
I cite Amarok and Kaffeine in that list because both are considered best in what they do by a fair amount of ppl (perhaps I should have included Kmplayer too, to crowd even more that list). It means that for some people, aside from KDE Apps (Juk, Noatun, Kaboodle), there are even more apps installed.
Also, Amarok have good features no other player has. It should be considered in 4.0, even if only to suck the good features of it into JuK. As it is now, JuK (at least for me) isn't enough of a music manager/player. Amarok on the other hand, is fairly complete, and, IMHO, the only thing that keeps it from KDEmm is GUI weirdness.
On a lot of that, you are fairly accurate, although most of those are third-party, not core KDE apps.
However, you're just completely wrong about Kate. Kate is better than KDevelop or Quanta. Yes, that's what I think. It does what I want, rather than a billion other things, and it loads in around a split second.. If it is removed in KDE 4, I will just stay on KDE 3.5 until someone adds it again. It really is that important to my desktop usage.
What about renaming some of the apps? Don't get me wrong, I love KDE for it's good design, but I am not convinced of the "K" naming schema. In some places it's ok for me (Konqueror, Kate, amaroK, ...). But IMHO it looks ugly if a name starts with two upper case letters (KDevelop, KMenu, KWrite, KWord...).
My suggestion would be to do a general renaming in such cases (e.g. kDevelop, or KDE Develop, whatever).
What do you think?
> What do you think?
You are caring too much about really unimportant things
> You are caring too much about really unimportant things
That may be true in general, however, in this case I am not sure ;-)
It's not only that the names "look ugly". To me, it looks like a typing error and while I am not a psychologist, I wonder, if less technical users might have a problem to even start using KDE if the names are subconsciously classified as 'geeky' ;-)
the names are very important, not the internal name,
that may be anything, I can live with that.
As long that a user does not see any reference to
stupid choosen names (how wonderfull the aplication may be)
except maybe in the about dialog.
example:
"krename", a perfect name would be "File Renamer", menu entry in
kicker should be the nice name, window title should be the nice
name, documentation entry should be the nice name, web page for
krename should start with: "File Renamer for the kde desktop"
In the example, I've talked about "kicker", guess what, kicker is
allright, it sound good, once you learn what it is, it sticks,
same for konqueror, and some others. K3b, I don't know, kind of works.
kmail, why? it might be a perfect application name, but please,
remove every reference to the name! It's silly.
I see the argument, but am not convinced of it ;-)
E.g., what about our three Text editors?
Text Editor 1 (-->KEdit)
Text Editor 2 (-->Kwrite)
Text Editor 3 (-->Kate)
And all of this in the submenu "Text editors"? ;-)
I also think, KDE should "signal" the user that this is a "real" KDE app, not an app that "just" works (more or less) well together with it (OOo).
KEdit - get rid of it once Kate & KWrite get bidi.
KWrite - "Text Editor"
Kate - "Programmer's Editor"
Only used the Text editors as an example, unfortunately there are more of them (multimedia players, picture viewer).
But the other argument is: do we (or better: the KDE project) want that everybody speeks of "the Text Editor" (now: KWrite), "the Text Processor" (now: KWord), or "the File Renamer"?
Or is it better to give the KDE applications a KDE-ish name?
Last not least, I don't think anyone can bring KDE in a special direction. But one can make some suggestions, how to make things better, maybe the application authors (those who decide on the names of their apps) change their mind...
> It's not only that the names "look ugly". To me, it looks like a typing error and while I am not a psychologist, I wonder, if less technical users might have a problem to even start using KDE if the names are subconsciously classified as 'geeky' ;-)
IMHO the "less technical users" should use the description in the KMenu.
KWrite => Text editor
KGhostView => PS/PDF viewer
etc.
Yes they could. I tried it myself at the beginning. Those replacement strings are simply badly chosen. If I start the "Text Editor" I still want to know if it is beloved NEdit or just KWrite/Kate or KEdit. And yes - I don´t want to show both, appnames and their descriptions, in the "KMenu". That looks odd, too.
If he or she already uses KDE, okay. But if not (and most users do NOT use KDE), the argument fails. Nobody is talking about the program "Text editor" or "PS/PDF viewer". We all are talking about KEdit, KWrite or Kate (or KGhostView or KPDF), don't we? And if 2 of 3 programs (program names) look weird (at least for some of us ;-) )... I am not sure this is good for KDE...
Also: If I as non-native-speaker have to pronounce "KWrite", it sounds a bit silly ;-)
A suggestion would be to pronounce the "K" as in "key", but e.g. to change the name to "kWrite" (or "key Develop"/"kDevelop"). This way the "k" would get a meaning beyond of KDE. And the K in KDE would also get another meaning. KDE, the "key Desktop Environment"...
> KGhostView => PS/PDF viewer
Why is this even in the K menu at all? I've been using KDE since the pre-1.0 betas, and I can honestly never recall ever invoking it from the K menu. I have, however, clicked on PS/PDF files to open them quite a lot.
It seems to me that the K menu should be a list of applications that users will want to run. It also seems to me that reading a PDF is not something that many users consider to be "running an application".
Things like Kate, KWord, etc, belong in there because they are often invoked outside of the context of a particular document. KGhostview is different because you cannot create documents with it, so you'll always be invoking it within the context of a preexisting document - i.e. you'll be double-clicking on it in Konqueror and not running it from the K menu.
Do any users actually need KGhostview in the K menu? If not, or if they are an extreme minority, wouldn't it be better to omit it for clarity? The last thing newbies need when they open the K menu is a bunch of meaningless gobbledegook getting in the way of the bits they actually need to get to.
Excellent idea... but IMHO it should be an option...
Just keep in mind that the KMenu also shows what applications are available on the system. It's similar to the main menu of an application that shows what functionality it offers.
I hoped that the TOM (Task oriented menu) would become reality, but it seems as if Aaron just doesn't have the time to finish it. :(
http://www.urbanlizard.com/~aseigo/index.html.part
I support this, not because I care about the names, but for the sake of keyboard navigation in the K Menu.
Right now, you have 10 apps starting with K in a menu, so you can't just hit the first letter in the name to go there. You want KMail? Well you have to hit K, which will get you to Kamuni (yes I made that up) and you still have to hit the down arrow a bunch of times to get where you want.
If the names don't start with K, then you just hit the first letter and most of the time you have the right one selected.
In my SuSE distro is a feature that lets you hit two or more letters, and the first matching name is chosen (and the letters you entered are underlined).
Non-issue since K Mrnu defaults to showing description (app name) and not the other way around.
Lets fix the gmail bug first! It was killed in 3.3.2 but has managed to creep in again. I hope 3.4 does it or else i'll have to wait till 4.0 :-(
since i dont know what bug i have to vote for i give my vote here :)
plz make konq load gmail, so i can ditch mozilla (not that i hate mozilla, i just like to have 'one to rule em all')
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83786
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94755
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93482
Done ;)
Is the difference between QT3.x and QT4 that huge. How much has to get changed?
No, both QuickTime 3 and QuickTime 4 are very outdated by now.
More than between Qt 2.x and Qt 3.x, that's for sure.
Porting to Qt 4: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/porting4.html
What's New in Qt 4: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-intro.html
Well, it's all about priorities. Lost of work, all kinds of dependencies, constraints on time and personnel. Looks like a normal project to me :-)
Seriously. I propose some sort of roadmap mangement. Put it al in bugzilla and count the votes or put a website online with all roadmap choices and a voting system. That way we get the most wanted stuff first, and that's the Open source (Bazar Style) way of doing this.
Actually i post this because i saw that _all_ the other post are in the '.' thread. i personally dont like the '.' tread.
So i make a THANKS DEREK thread, to thank our beloveth Derek for his work, since it seems every-posting-body forgot about it this time.
Lets make this thread as fat as the above one!
THANKS AGAIN DEREK :)
_cies.
Why was it removed? It was autogenerated anyway, it didn't hurt anybody.
:-(
Give me back the table with the icons that immediately showed where something happened.
Ah, there is just a wrong link in the story, the layout is here:
http://cvs-digest.org/index.php?issue=feb182005