In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma progress, with new Plasmoids: Browser, Notes, 3D Earth Model, Twitter, Desktop, and Tiger (scripting example), and the development of a mouse cursor data engine. Bug fixing spree in TagLib, K3b, and the Kopete Cryptography plugin. Support for encrypted storage devices in Solid, with better integration of device support in Amarok. Further integration of Plasma in Amarok. Work on making Konsole follow KDE settings more strictly. Much work on revamping Ark for KDE 4. Various functionality improvements in Umbrello. The start of a new version of the Smoke bindings access mechanism, Smoke2. Continued work in kdegames, with the import of KBlocks, a Tetris-like replacement for KSirtet. Rewrite of search-and-replace in Kate. Import of the Kubelka-Munk mixing algorithm, with a restoration of the MetaData framework in Krita. Work to enable networked document collaboration imported in KOffice. GetHotNewStuff experimentally reactivated in okular. A rewrite of the global shortcuts system added to KDE SVN. Pixmap Cache Summer of Code project merged into kdelibs, in time for KDE 4.0. KBoard, renamed Tagua, is removed from KDE SVN to continue in an external code repository.
Comments
> I meant the crappy command line interface, of course.
How does it get easier than:
7z a foo.7z file1 file2 file3 ...
for compressing and
7z x foo.7z
for decompressing?
And as a GUI, the latest Krusader (1.80.0) supports 7z.
I believe peazip does as well, but neither are official gui ports of 7-zip.
Which plasma video? What is everybody talking about? I see no links to a video :(
look at the digest itself :-)
...my most hated UI glitch is still in there - gross that's UGLY:
please please please someone fix the columns to automatically fit into the damn windows, *please* .. it was annoying in the KDE3 file dialogs and is still so, even if some windows have to be made a bit wider- please make it all go awaaaaayyyy.... maybe the twitching will stop with that, too.
Also, I hope someone is supervising the usability of Oxygen on small resolutions (icon borders)..
What would be awesome aswell is if Plasma could not only support SVGs with animation, but also MNGs, for example for icons - much less resource intensive and still kewl.
And what you said about the media notifier stuff is right Aaron - but I hope people will be able to put those Plasma blobs in a container of their choice, i.e. in a boring old style window f.e., or on the desktop, or in those slicker expanders..
well anyways good work keep on it.
I have to agree that columns auto-width function needs some work.
But about oxygen, small resolution , handheld and such should really use
something more simple, so I don't think that developers time should be wasted
to adapt it to little displays.
> I hope someone is supervising the usability of Oxygen on small resolutions (icon borders)
Sure, David Miller is doing that.
Why would the mayor of Toronto be interested in some flowerish icon theme when he has far more important issues to tackle?
> Mayor David Miller has a vision for Toronto. He wants to build a revitalized
> city of strong, safe neighbourhoods, clean streets, effective public services, ...
scnr >:==)
I prefer using SVG (scalable vector graphics) for everything rather than raster "fixed" images.
Nice work! Thank you all so much. I am happy for anything that keeps a commercial OS out of my life. Thank you!
Does the global shortcut system also involve mouse gestures? Its rewrite reminded me of the mouse gesture recognition, and if I remember correctly, it was seen as being needed to rewrite that, too because being limited and/or messy(?). Is there anything planned? Will the old system have to stay if there's no rewrite?
Some more advanced systems: a freehand system on kde-apps and a recognition system from a Trolltech employee:
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Freehand+Gestures?content=30108
http://www.thelins.se/index.php?title=Mouse_Gesture_Recognizer
(which was also being featured here: http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq18-mousegestures.html )
hm... i'd love to see such easy to handle mouse gestures like in opera for konqueror (and maybe dolphin). hope they are going to improve them and the menu where you can find them... i didn't know for years that kde is capable of mouse gestures
ha!
The "Freehand Gestures" is actually my old project from before I decided to work on integrating Magnatune.com into Amarok. I though that was dead, buried and forgotten :-)
I spend all my allotted "hacking time" on Amarok now, so I have not had any time to work on it since unfortunately. If somebody wants to pick it up, they are more than welcome ( and I will help them get started ). In the repository, there is actually the basics of a pretty unique gesture editor where you just draw a gesture a number of time and the editor calculates the parameters based on the variations in your drawing of the gesture.
- Nikolaj
Rocker gestures please! Pretty please! Or just forget the pleads and implement it.
(Rocker gestures = click and hold one button, and then click the other one)
Opera has it, and at least one of the FF gesture plugins.
Also, is the voice recognition still in, after the rewrite?
The vid is absolutely great and cause of that: plasma is absolutely stunning ^^ the only 2 things i worry about are those:
1.) the widgets are really fast, but when you resize them they get really slow.. is this just a work in progress and in the future it won't make any differnece or isn't that an avoidable problem?
2.) the alpha 1 and before had a zoom function on the desktop... it wasn't really fast (problem mentione above) but it worked.. where has it's functionality gone.. i havn't seen any blog entry that this features had been canceled (has it? the button are still there and it has also been mentioned in the vid (3 zoom steps???))
but all in all you've all done really great work... i hope i'll have enough time in the near future to help you coding
friendly greetings
bernhard
for the first question, I think thats because when you resize a Plasmoid, the SVG image needs to be resized and rendered.I Guess it will not change in future.
as I heared in IRC and Mailing List, people are working on Zoom functionality.
well... i know that the svg image needs to be rendered new.. but why does it behave so slow AFTER resizing?
maybe because it has to be rerendered all the time or something? the SVG/icon cache just got in, it might solve it.
As an answer to question 2:
I worked on the zooming, but for some reason the connection between the buttons and the zooming functions were removed. I have recently started to continue working on the zooming functionality (after some time with a broken build environment). Work on it has been dead since my initial commits. There has been some discussion recently on the panel-devel mailing list.
As far as speed goes, I am planning on replacing the applet with a shaded rectangle around the bounding box. Because it won't be drawing the svgs when zooming, there should be a significant speed increase.
For more information on the functionality, see here:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/panel-devel/2007-July/001511.html
Well, I can truly say I'm blown away by all the fantastic work going on - getting better every day! One thing I'd like to discuss is the colors of the menu bar, arrows and window decoration in KDE applications like Konqueror, Dolphin, digikam and KOffice suite for example. Currently it's a monotonous sort of gray/white, reminiscent of windows 95 (no offence meant!). I was very impressed by the soft blue colors in (gasp!) Office 2003, which had options highlighted in orange - a combo better on the eye than the previous white/gray/blue. I was thinking maybe we could have a soft green gradient default color for our menu bars and arrows (though all customizable in true KDE fashion), perhaps with soft red?/yellow? highlight of options. I showed an example of what I mean in the attachment. It's Firefox with the Office2003 skin. Please note that by no means am I suggesting we copy what others do, but simply draw inspiration and make our own better alternative.
I realize there's still plenty of time til KDE 4 is released, but what do our gui gurus have planned? Will we depart from the old-school colors and forge something better? If this post sounds annoying or rude, then it was not meant in that way. I hope the community can have a friendly and frank discussion over these areas.
Good luck with all your projects!
That's a good comment. I personally would like to see a more colourful, vibrant colour scheme supplied out of the box, along with more backgrounds in various applications to add some variety.
The desktop itself is well on the way there.
With regards to the competition, Microsoft have noticeably put effort into de-graying their applications and desktop over the past few years and I think it looks better for it - although very strong colours can be fatiguing if you have to look at them for extended periods of time. If I remember rightly (it has been a while since I used Microsoft Office seriously ) I replaced the strong blue colours with something else on Publisher 2003 for this reason.
As for what colours would replace grey, that's not an easy question. KDE's traditional colours have been light blue. The KDE 4 logo uses a various darker shades of blue and the desktop itself currently uses translucent black backgrounds with translucent 'silver' borders.
From what I've seen the new Oxygen widget style and theme however were gray. I like gray personally, and dark tones, but often I like to use a touch of gold for a highlight color to dress up a gray theme.