KDE Commit-Digest for 30th September 2007

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Beginnings of a list view, and an applet browser integrated into Plasma. Optimisations in Konqueror. More work, including image practice support in Parley. XMP metadata support in Digikam, with new splashscreens announced. Work on playlists in Amarok 2. The Noatun music player becomes a KPart, with musings on its KDE 4 future. Further work on Phonon, with developments on the GStreamer backend. KNetworkManager is ported to work with NetworkManager 0.7. Deep refactoring in the Eigen 2 library rewrite. Kickoff is ported to KDE 4 as a candidate menu replacement option. A plan is hatched to get Kopete ready for the KDE 4.0 release. Import of the KBreakout game to playground/games in KDE SVN. Final moves in the recent KDE SVN reorganisation effort. The KDE Bug Tracker starts to be upgraded to Bugzilla 3.0.

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Comments

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

Games are somewhat of a low priority, but I'd like to make two requests to the wonderful KDE coding community out there.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Men%27s_Morris

It is a fairly simple game, but there aren't many computerized versions of the game. A few digests back I saw that someone was making a backend to develop board games, and I'm not sure if that could be used or not. But I thought it would be a nice addition to the KDE-Games, and something new for people to play since so very few people have heard of it.

2 - I'm a big fan of rougelikes, and games like Nethack/Slash'em have a whole slew of graphical options when playing the game, such as using SDL/X11/GTK/QT/Allego/etc, but I was hoping someone would update the QT portion of the code to use QT4/kdelibs and add support for scalable SVG tiles.

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

1. given that it seems a normal board game, you can offer the developers of tagua some help... you don't need coding skills but rather knowledge of the rules of a boardgame to make tagua support it, so no reason why you can't do that yourself.

by David C. (not verified)

I'd like to see some "Tower defense" game. There are many, but the best I've seen so far are:
- Desktop tower defense: http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/game.asp
- Vector tower defense: http://www.vectortd.com/play/
- Budapest defenders: http://alt.tnt.tv/tntoriginals/thecompany/budapestdefenders/index.htm

I think the ratio "easiness of programming"/"fun" is quite high for these sort of games. Even it would be possible to use the same "engine" for all them and link it to "Get hot new stuff" to allow the people to create their own versions.

Regards,
David C

by NamShub (not verified)

I have the beginning of the start of almost the sketch of something close to a game that might become a TD-like game for KDE some day... (and you though kde4 betas were unstable...)

I welcome any help...

by Tower Defense (not verified)

That's wonderful! I also fell in love with the TD games. Have you tried to contact the creators of those flash games? Maybe they can lend you some of their artwork.

by Stefan (not verified)

Wow. I'm also working on a KDefense. A friend of mine is a good C++ programmer with interests in the low-level area, and I have good experiences with Qt. Today, we spent two hours on discussing the data structure holding the creeps' and towers' positions, and decided to implement a Kd-tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kd-tree) for good performance with collision detection, targeting and such. Another friend of mine is going to draw some SVG graphics.

by The Vicar (not verified)

I would like a version of Bezique, please!

Detailed rules:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezique

There is a quite good shareware version here for Windows that could be used to give ideas:

http://www.fortedownloads.com/Malcolm-Bain-Bezique/

It is a great game as it has more complex play than most card games and relies on BOTH skill and luck.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

To name the ones I really liked:
- The Noatun music player becomes a KPart (ok, I admit, I really hate noatun, if should have vanished a long ago IMHO)
- Further work on Phonon, with developments on the GStreamer backend. (starting to look good, this adds a lot of video and audio support already)
- A plan is hatched to get Kopete ready for the KDE 4.0 release. (shipping without a icq/msn/gtalk solution was really looking bad).

I just hope that someday instant messaging clients for unix/linux will support audio and video for msn/gtalk.. well I can at least dream of it :)

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

I don't think a lot of people use it at all. I would really prefer a lot that Codeine/Video player would be ported fully to KDE4, as it can play sounds just as well as noatun, except that it doesn't set itself in the System tray and is faster to start. It also remember where it was last time in the media file, which is nice.
I really think only one simple media player should be installed by default with KDE4, and codeine seems to me the simpler and faster one.
Of course, I do not mean by that that more complex apps with different goals like Amarok, Kplayer or Kaffeine should be discarded, just that we only need one simple app that does the job without providing any additional service.
Especially since it would help integration with Web browsers of this particular app, as there would be only one target.

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

I'm curious what relation KDE4's noatun has with KDE3's noatun. It might be a totally different app (Amarok pretty much is code-wise).

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

Well, if it's exactly like Codeine, it'll be OK. :-)
But if it's a completely different app, then maybe renaming it would be a good idea.

by anonymous coward (not verified)

Just like the previous poster, I've always hated noatun. It has never worked for me (as in: play a sound!), but it reliably gets in my way.
I hate noatun. Thinking about it, if I had a kde-svn account, my first action would be to delete it :)

Now seriously, can't it *please* be replaced by kmplayer, kaffeine/amarok/juk, ANYTHING?

by manyoso (not verified)

First, please people calm down.

Second, I think you guys are being very rude.

That said, the commit digest is incorrect. Noatun has been removed from KDE's svn altogether. Charles just committed this kpartified Noatun so he'd have it under version history should he ever decide to change his mind and unremove Noatun.

But as of right now, Noatun is no longer.

by Vide (not verified)

Noatun is dead, all hail noatun!!

(finally hehehe)

by shamaz (not verified)

You are really an "anonymous coward".
It's not surprising that you don't have a kde-svn account.

by anonymous coward (not verified)

Dear manyoso, dear shamaz,

I don't think I'm rude. I expressed my opinion, and I know that this opinion is probably quite close to the negative end of the spectrum. I also could have written a lot more text to make sure noone feels offended.

I have not. It's my opinion, and I'm fine with you disagreeing. I never attacked noatun's author (don't know who he is. Charles?), but simply expressed the fact that I hate this piece of software. Now you might argue this is unconstructive criticism. Point is, I don't even want noatun to be improved. There's a lot of good alternatives (which I happily use), so it'd be best for me if noatun simply disappeared from "open with..." menus and the like.

Dear Charles, I don't like your software. That doesn't mean I don't like you. How could I know?

shamaz, could it be that you WANT to be offended?

by Anon (not verified)

Hmm, I don't seem to have noatun in the "open with" dialog, possibly because I don't have it installed. If you have it there, you must have it installed. This seems backward to me, considering your dislike of it and my indifference. Instead of heaping curses upon it, you might be better off uninstalling it and then not worrying about it anymore. imho

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

Codeine is a bit basic, I'd rather see Koos morph KMplayer's standalone UI into the Codeine one, or see Kaffeine get some usability work (eg Codeine has exactly the functionality a video player needs). Kaffeine unfortunately still aims to be amarok^2 for video and audio. Pitty, it does work great...

We now have KMplayer, Kaffeine and Codeine. Codeine is unfortunately as far as I can tell unmaintained, though it's the best by far in terms of usability. Kaffeine and KMplayer are distinctively different, and codeine wouldn't be needed if these two would be a bit more focused on what they're supposed to do (play video).

meh, longtime frustration for me. I stayed with the 0.4.2 release of Kaffeine for a long time, now I use codeine. But I want SOME of the Kaffeine stuff (eg playing speed, better DVD support etc) - yet not it's bloath. meh meh meh :(

by Leo S (not verified)

I don't know if they really have to converge. I'm quite happy using Codeine for 99% of videos, and a more complex player (VLC for me) to get at the more obscure features that I need once in a while. Some features (like playing speed) could get into Codeine as keyboard shortcuts, but I don't think it's possible to make Codeine full featured without losing the UI simplicity. I don't really see that as a problem though.

by Morty (not verified)

And what does Noatun have to do with Codeine/Video player, it's applications for completly different use cases. Noatun is not supposed to be a simple player, never was. Noatun main use is as a playlist capable player, comparable to but using a different approach than Juk or Amarok(In many cases what some people complaining about Amaroks playlist should use).

The simple player you are talking abuot, comparable to Codeine/Video player with simple interface and fast start up is Kaboodle.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

You may be right but it seemed to me recently that Noatun was the default app for most media files in a default KDE installation.
It seems to me that it's logical to configure the mime types of media to be owned by the fast, simple app as mime-app link seems to me essentialy related to view/hear a file when clicking on it in the file manager or when downloading it from the net. I don't want for instance amarok to be started when I click on a mp3 file in Konqueror. I use amarok to organize the collection, not to have a fast view. The same way I won't use digikam as an image viewer, I prefer to have Kuickshow for that.
If there was any confusion to me, it probably comes from these settings. In any case, I don't think Kaboodle and Noatun, with all their merits, are used a lot now compared to other players. And that's probably for good reasons, so setting them aside seems logical to me.

by Morty (not verified)

I agree, the complex players like Noatun, JuK and Amarok should newer be the default applications for media files. But that's a configuration bug/issue, not really related to the applications at all. But it's a really huge missunderstanding of the applications capabilities and use cases, mostly from the distributions it seem(they have now started to use Amarok as default on mp3 etc, really annoying). This missconfiguring is the only reason Kaboodle has seen little use, it's a gem few know about.

When I click on a media file I want it played, nothing more. I don't want to add it to my playlist/collection or open a huge playlist in case I want to listen to more media afterwards. If I want that I'll open the application holding the collection and add it, using add or drag and drop or whatever.

When clicking I want something like Kaboodle/Codeine/Videoplayer to simply play it.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

Exactly.
That's a small suggestion for KDE4 to the devs : assign mime type of media files to quick, fast loading apps. :-)

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

We're thinking of having a simple mode in Amarok that would be used when playing a file from Konqueror or Dolphin. Its not a use-case that Amarok was really meant for, but it'd be silly to ignore the fact that Amarok gets used this way.

But its one of those long-term goals, I wouldn't expect to see it anytime soon.

by Andre (not verified)

Amarok is great but I installed yesterday the Lsongs tool from Freespire on Feisty which wasn't further developed since 2005. Usability wise the playlist concept of iTunes is fantastic. One library for all files. And playlists. And ripping and playing CDs also works excellent. Music is here more similar to bookmarks. You create a playlist with 15 titles and just burn it. In a non-corporate context we could thin of other uses, such as export a playlist as a torrent, share files with a person,

What annoys me in Amarok is the nested menus items for Internet Radio and so on. But I was amazed to see that Lsongs understands PLS streams. Although Amarok is so much more advanced I wonder why I still felt in love with the iTunes ripoff. The reason is of course that Lsongs copies 1:1 some things Apple just did right. For instance I enter a CD and Lsongs just displays it and allows 1 click ripping. Unfortunately Lsongs does not support podcasts yet. Linux largely did not notice the podcast phenonemon because available podcatchers were inconvenient.

Feisty:
-------
For your sources list:
deb http://apt2.freespire.org/CNRUbuntu skipjack-feisty main restricted
For your commandline
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lsongs

by Odysseus (not verified)

Kmplayer using cairo rather than Qt? Any particular reason?

I was also wondering about this.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Dosen't Qt 4.1 support cairo in the same way it supports openGL?
If true, they could be actually using cairo throught Qt.

My understanding is that KMPlayer is slowly migrating away from the Qt/KDE land.

Not a big loss since KPlayer has always been far better anyway.

Makes sense to have a cross desktop solution, but if there is any dependency on Qt, using cairo doesn't make much sense. It would only be beneficial if kmplayer doesn't link to Qt at all, otherwise you get cairo-equivalent features for free with Qt.

by Koos Vriezen (not verified)

I don't think that it's possible to create a KPart without Qt. And from the cross desktop perspective, trying to wrap the Qt API over another graphic library is just one big pain I guess.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Sorry if I'm mistaken, but isn't that precisely what Qt does in Mac OS X and Windows? Wrapping its own API over the native painting engine?

by Koos Vriezen (not verified)

In my case, it's about cross Kde/Qt to Hildon/Gtk. I did wrap glib, curl, gvfs in Qt compatible API and initially also QPainter before reimplementing the painting code.

by Koos Vriezen (not verified)

I don't understand why some people can't see that kmplayer is a konquer plugin and keep on comparing the stand alone applications, which is explicitly positioned as _simple_.
Secondly, I don't think KMPlayer is drifting away from Qt/Kde land. Remember it's a konqueror plugin, tightly bound to the KPart infrastructure.

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

I like it very much.

As a plugin and as a stand-alone application. I especially like the fact that all mplayer shortcuts work as expected.

by Segedunum (not verified)

The component that is equivalent to Cairo in KDE is Arthur.

Personally, I've never had much luck with KMPlayer over the years.

by Koos Vriezen (not verified)

Actually it replaced the Qt painting. IMO cairo graphics is superior for my usage in compare to Qt. However I have not investigated yet the improvements in Qt4, so this is purely based on Qt3.
Another good reason to chose a cross desktop painting library is because of the porting to the Maemo platform, which is Gtk based.
What's the reason for asking, any problems with Cairo?

The graphics part has been a focus in the development of Qt4, so if you haven't seen it, you have definitely missed something.
I think this benchmark still holds true:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2006/10/benchmarks.html
Yes, Cairo has seen improvements since then, but so has Qt. And Qt is still multiple times faster. And Cairo is slow (not only in comparison. So no, this is not redundant information).
Isn't it better/easier to use Qt's API if you use Qt anyway? Also, this way it's one dependency less.

Regarding Maemo: Don't Qt apps run on it? And what about porting it to Qtopia?

by Koos Vriezen (not verified)

Up till version 0.10.0, released this week, KMPlayer uses Kde3/Qt3. It would be totally insane to try this to link to Qt4 for painting. Porting to Kde4 has just began, and thanks that all painting code is in one visitor class, it's actually relatively easy to move to another painting library.
The painting speed comparison is not really relevant to wherefore it's used in KMPlayer. It's fast enough right now and SMIL can't do complex drawings, like SVG can.
Dependency on cairo isn't really noticable. The libcairo.so exports 244 functions, and all being C, also lazy linked. Qt's libQtCore.so.4.3.1 OTOH exports 2505 symbols, libQtGui.so.4.3.1 exports 9805 (T ones) and not or hardly lazy. Which means that a very tiny performance hit on a Kde desktop, but a huge performance degrade on N800 when compiled with Qt4.
Qtopia, being a very nice platform for specialized and small memory devices, is IMO a huge step back on a consumer device like the N800 running a real X server. My contributions to Kde between 3.0 and 3.2 where on a PC that had less memory than the N800, to give an idea.
If there was a Qt port back when I ported it, I surely would have used it (at least tried it, a program loading time of more than a few seconds is deadly of course).

So you will eventually link to QtCore only and do the UI with cairo?

I'm interested to see how that goes on the maemo platform. It is a very enticing target.

by Koos Vriezen (not verified)

That would be the holy grail, but notice the smiley.

by Koos Vriezen (not verified)

Btw, lets not fall in the discussion that although we all love Qt, everything has to be implemented with Qt. In real live, one must choose the best tool for the job. Sometimes one is lucky it has a nice API, sometimes it takes a little more effort to master. That's how it goes.

fine :-)

We appreciate your work!

by Odysseus (not verified)

"What's the reason for asking, any problems with Cairo?"

Nope, not really, it just seemed to me that it would have been a conscious decision to move away from the Qt canvas, and I was just interested in the why part, it's always good to know peoples practical reasons for choosing one solution over another (thats just the architect in me, I guess).

John.

by Sad Coward (not verified)

Curses! no new (plasma) eyecandy :(

It's gonna be another long week...

by Nick L. (not verified)

For me the kickoff model is not very practical too. The classical model is as intuitive as it gets : choose the category of the program you want to run vertically and move horizontally to get all the available relative applications. It really looks old but it can't get any simpler. The favorites section is a good idea, but still it is also implemented in the old menu. However, I really don't care what the menu structure will be. Alt + F2 + app name = just like shooting. Pointing and trying to figure out where the application lies is nowhere as fast ...

by Nick L. (not verified)

Sorry, opened new topic by mistake ...

by archangel (not verified)

It has a learning curve, like anything. But don't mistake your trained convenience for actual convenience. The two major difficulties KickOff solves are scalability of the vertical/horizontal motion profile (i.e. nesting depth and screen size) and accessibility of function. This is simplification, not for the GNOME model of hiding function, but for improving access to the existing functionality.

First off, if you have seen the demo/usability study, you will notice that the functionality you describe, the simple nested menu method, is implemented. If you've ever used an iPod or similar device, you will notice the form-factor-related constraint on the display of the menu is similar. The user-friendliness of limiting selection distance should not be underestimated. Less motion is required to perform the same action.

Second, just because it's a visual change, doesn't mean it's just for show. This is a visual interface, in case you forgot. The nesting of functions is a necessity in any system over a certain size. Classification of items by function and type is the most basic heuristic, implemented in the existing menu, and most others. KickOff doesn't abandon this heuristic - in fact, it refines its use, attempting to better separate disparate functions and group items better. The separation of applications, devices, and system functions into equally close tabs, rather than grouping them together on one long menu, presents an arguably more accessible visual interface.

by Zayed (not verified)

What is happened to K3B? There is no news about it. I hope there is something new for KDE 4.0. In general it needs to redesign its interface (frankly I hate the file browser in main window of K3B). Also, K3B need to rework the workflow.

by Alan Denton (not verified)

According to lead developer Sebastian Trüg in a recent interview (at http://dot.kde.org/1177530148/), he's focussing on the 1.1 alpha. After 1.1 is released, then he plans to port K3b to the KDE 4 libraries.