In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Much work in Amarok, with the implementation of a CoverFlow-esque OpenGL album art visualisation, codenamed "CoverBling", and Service Framework and Plasmification efforts. Sample OpenGL-based applets added to Plasma,, with Plasmoids to watch for changes to files, for browsing files, and to monitor network interfaces. General progress in the 2d projection and KML in Marble, OpenPrinting, and KOrganizer Theming Summer of Code projects. KWallet support in KRDC. KMines essentially rewritten with a QGraphicsView base, with support for multiple background SVG themes in KGoldRunner. More manipulation and view work in Kreative3d. Implementation of Kubelka-Munk paint mixing research in Krita. Internet integration in Kaider, with a WebQuery view and example script to use Google Translate. okular becomes usable as a print preview component. KTrace, a "strace" interface for KDE 4 added to playground/sysadmin. Beginnings of support for ComunIP, a Brazilian IM protocol in Kopete. More progress in the porting of Digikam and KTorrent to KDE 4. The start of a rewrite of the Oxygen widget style. KBFX, an alternate K menu, moves to kdereview.
Comments
It might just be that Krita is really usable without tutorials ;)
Today Gilles finished base porting of Digikam to KDE4. Unstable as hell so don't try it with your prize winning photo collection but... :)
YEAH!
Love digikam...
It imho only needs a huge GUI cleanup (though a lot of work has already been done).
Great work, thanks. Digikam is a great application and it's nice to see it arrive in KDE4 :)
But what?
A fresh little screenshot of digiKam under KDE4...
http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/243
Gilles Caulier
Looks nice, but why vertical tabs?
Anyone knows whether KDE 4.0 will include Redhat's beautiful Liberation fonts to be used as default? They are much more a pleasure to look at than any default fonts used by KDE at the moment. Their license appears to be good for Linux and KDE too. Thanx.
I'd imagine that's up to the distros, not the KDE devs.
Are you implying that KDE developers do not include any fonts in the generic KDE version that they release to the distros?
Yes. What KDE currently provides to the distributions are tarballs of the source code and data and instructions on how to build them.
The distributions are responsible for providing the dependencies ( libraries, data ) needed to compile and run KDE.
Something I forgot to mention in my first post is that it is certainly possible to recommend or suggest the inclusion of certain fonts with KDE applications, and I think there were discussions about doing that.
yes, i'd love to see us have a "KDE4 looks best if the following fonts are used: *list of fonts*." then we could provide default settings with some assumptions as to fonts and even note OSes that don't provide those fonts along with kde4 libs as officially deficient by definition =)
Such recommendations or guidelines...sounds like a job for Captain HIG or CIGMan.
The only readable font on a computer screen is MS New Times Roman i Windows.
When I import this font to KDE it renders unreadable. Why is this?
And why isn't there a readable font at all in Linux? (I haven't tried those Liberation fonts, I don't like Red Hat)
You don't have to use or even like RedHat to use the liberation fonts. They are freely downloadable to anyone to be used with any distro.
I have to try that. Looks like they are total copies of the best MS fonts.
It only took 10 years.
The point is to be metric copies of the fonts (i.e. to render documents exactly the same when those fonts are used).
I honestly prefer the dejavu fonts (and bitstream).
> why isn't there a readable font at all in Linux?
Hmm, I wonder what I've actually been reading all these years...
With readable I mean with similar rendering and kerning as in print.
I can't read large chunks of text with bad kerning.
I'm not the only one to think that Windows does it best:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html?hi=joel
Qt3 doesn't do kerning, so you have to wait for KDE4 for that to work.
It only took 10 years.
Not to feed a troll, but why do you hate RedHat? They have done more for Linux than any other company and they have remained steadfast in the whole patent debacle with Microsoft. They are a pure Linux, pure Open Source company with one of the best distributions out there. Fedora, for being essentially a bleeding-edge RHEL beta is surprisingly stable and of high quality. Red Hat hires a lot of people who contribute to critical parts of the Linux stack:
See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions for a list of things RedHat has done for Linux and Open Source.
I can't believe people are sour about the Fedora/RHEL split, which was not at ALL a bad idea. That's the only thing I could consider to be a negative of RedHat.
Linux yes, but what did they do for KDE?
True, they're not big KDE fans, but KDE needs linux as well...
And besides, RedHat is mentioned in several KDE-application at the credit section.
No, Kde doesn't need Linux. It runs on BSD, Solaris and Unixes.
And soon on OSX and Windows, I've heard.
"And soon on OSX and Windows, I've heard."
kdelibs and many of its apps will run on Windows & OS X, but it is almost certain that the *desktop* itself (Plasma, panels, window manager) won't.
Please do note that RH is totally turning around its former KDE policies and their releases are getting to be really good.
So, please do give them a second chance.
"Please do note that RH is totally turning around its former KDE policies and their releases are getting to be really good.
So, please do give them a second chance."
Oh? How so? And since when? I've seen nothing to suggest this.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureKDE4
Are you serious? They (or rather, Fedora - not Red Hat proper) are simply packaging a (likely very immature) KDE4.0 instead of KDE3.5.x, largely due to the fact that Qt3 is being EOL'd. How does this represent an improvement at all, let alone one that would inspire us to "give them a second chance"?
at LinuxTag (about a month ago) I played with fedora (the main red-hat distro for end users) we saw a kde that was packages just "as is", which is a huge leap for them as the previous ones were severely changed from kde proper.
the package quality has basically gone up tremendously in their release of the latest 3.5.x ones.
i'm not sure how you got to the link from kde4. that part is irrelevant to the points made here.
Oh, I won't then.
Ok, I will then.
I said "don't like", I didn't say "hate".
Fontconfig settings are very important in font readability. I like to turn off anti-aliasing and turn up sub-pixel rendering/hinting, while turning off auto-hinting. Play around with your ~/.fonts.conf and see what works for you. Also try making sure the binary interpreter is enabled when you build freetype.
Thanks for the tips.
Sub-pixel rendering, all kinds of hinting, both the binary interpreter and the auto-hinter, are all various techniques to do anti-aliasing. You can not have any of that without having anti-aliasing.
I beg to differ. The binary interpreter vs. the auto-hinter IS relevant when anti-aliasing is not enabled. I have seen first hand the difference with a number of fonts. The glyphs still have to be properly shaped, regardless of whether you are also anti-aliasing them.
What I didn't say is that I have anti-aliasing off only for fonts in the range of 8-12 points. Fonts outside that range, or fonts that are bold or italic I do have set to be anti-aliased because they look better. But interface or document fonts in that range look a lot better without anti-aliasing. In my personal opinion, of course.
I can't answer the question, but I just want to mention that DejaVu has slightly better hinting than Liberation, to my sight.
An DejaVu is much more complete than liberation. Liberation has been created to fill the gap of fonts with the same metrics as microsoft default fonts which is good to display correctly documents created on the windows platform for instance. DejaVu, a spinoff of Vera doesn't have the metrics constraints and therefore are easier to develop and improve. Liberation is nice to have but i think is very far from reaching the quality and the completeness of DejaVu.
I hate the idea of K apps on Windows/OSX, but, anyway:
As far as I know Plasma won't be port to windows/OSX, so if amarok will may use Plasma for the context view, isn't this making it unportable to windows/OSX? (I know the libraries of plasma are part of kde, but they can be use under windows/OSX?)
Is it possible that Kopete could use windows lists skins (somehow like Adium?
Are you aiming to the same look whit the new Oxygen Widget Style? (Somethings just look amazing, but it lacks contrast and it look a little plain)
I'm with you I don't really like the idea of KDE being ported to windows, they want KDE? they should go to linux, oh well at least I will be able to force my friends to download KOffice so that we can have colaborative editing :D.
go look up "opensource" asap....
people can work on whatever they want.
I dual-boot for gaming, and I predominately use Windows at work. I was really looking forward to being able to install Amarok on Windows personally. I hope the decision to include Plasma in Amarok doesn't preclude Amarok from a Windows port.
I would like to see an official answer on this.
here is your official answer: us amarok developers have no intention not allowing amarok to work on windows.
that said, most of us (if not all) work on linux/unix, and our focus is on the linux desktop. our focus is, and will be, on linux. but i see no reasons why an enterprising developer cannot port amarok to windows---with kdelibs working on windows, amarok will have the ability to be functional as well.
the plasma integration should not directly affect the porting effort at this time :)
I think the ability of writing cross platform KDE apps is good: many people want to write cross platform programs and they will use another toolkit unless KDE libs are ported to Windows and Mac OS.
I use Linux at home, but I have to use Windows on work because of this damn outlook/exchange thing.
I would LOVE to use Kate, Quanta and Amarok on my work.
I don't really understand why so much hate for people wanting apps ported to windows. This will probably bring much more developers to use qt, kde and ultimately Linux.
> isn't this making it unportable to windows/OSX
not at all, actually. libplasma itself is actually pretty damn portable. bizarre, i know ;-)