In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Further XMP tag support in Digikam. Beginnings of a Plasma lock/logout applet and a weather applet, to display data from the existing weather data engine. Continued work on the new Plasma-based KNewsTicker applet. Continued work and development ideas in Parley. More various developments and optimisations in KHTML. Jamendo album download support in Amarok 2.0. Interface usability work in Kopete. Shredding functionality removed from KGPG. Fixes in the Sonnet spellchecking solution for KDE 4. Work on the foundations of KChart 2 in KOffice. Lancelot and Raptor develop as alternatives to the Kickoff menu of KDE 4.0. Okteta, a planned successor to KHexEdit, uploaded to playground/utils. KOffice 1.9.95 and KDE 4.0 Beta 4/KDE Platform RC1 are tagged for future release.
Comments
Hi guys,
First of all, I have to say I'm sorry because of this. We (or I?) simply ran out of time for 4.0. I preferred to develop a quality stuff rather than releasing a feature that wasn't to be as good as I expected.
Now, I did this because I wanted an easy way of swapping between trackers (kuiserverjobtracker, kwidgetjobtracker...) that before wasn't and I had to do some adaptations on KIO code for that. Now it should be easy to adapt code to just set one or another.
I listened to some constructive criticism and it shined me. It was getting so much space, and we also wanted to make the kuiserver inside plasma or something. There were too many things on the air.
With Qt 4.4 we have the ability of adding actual widgets to plasma, so I will work on this stuff hard to make it a success for KDE 4.1.
Is just a matter of quality, and I hope you will like it when seeing it as a new feature.
Thanks for all your polite comments and ideas, you really rock guys.
That's great that it will continue to be worked on and appear in the future - it's an immensely popular feature! Thanks for taking the time to keep us informed, and set out minds at ease :)
I'm very glad that this idea wasn't droped completely and forever. It's definitely one of the coolest features KDE 4 will have.
Thanks for the information - i'm looking forward to 4.1 impatiently. :-)
Stevie
Rafael, I browsed your blog every week to get informations about kuiserver. It's so revolutionary... we could get rid of the system tray with it.
Think also to all the application stdout, not only the progress. I dream of a kuiserver with progress, stdout, events and commands... with such a thing we wouldn't use the taskbar or the system tray anymore.
Keep on the good work!
Sometimes KDE developers seem to neglect the existence of their own bugzilla, so I'm posting this wish here:
Please, make it possible to spellcheck two languages at once. I often have to make posts or write e-mails in two languages (Russian and English) and there's no easy way to spellcheck them.
Wasn't that one of the killer features of sonnet?
( http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/kde-4-sonnet/ )
Sonnet is MIA unfortunately. :(
MIA?
Missing in Action - my guess.
The main Sonnet developer, a linguist named Jacob Rideout, disappeared from the face of the earth sometimes at the end of February. As far as I know Zack Rusin took over the development of Sonnet but I don't know how much time he invested into this project or if he even has the necessary theoritical background. Zack claimed that Sonnet will be ready for 4.0 but how many of original planned features will be realized remains to be seen.
> Sometimes KDE developers seem to neglect the existence of their
> own bugzilla, so I'm posting this wish here:
Which totally gives you the right to nag them everywhere you want.
This is Free Software, people (those that are actually informed) work on what they deem important, or for people that pay them (or are generally nice).
Shouting that they're ignoring you (while, with a bit of research, you would've found that Sonnet does just that) and demanding your right for a feature is the best way to be ignored in the future. And rightfully so.
You either have to send a patch, or be patient and nice. That's the game.
> Shouting that they're ignoring you (while, with a bit of research, you would've found that Sonnet does just that) and demanding your right for a feature is the best way to be ignored in the future. And rightfully so.
> You either have to send a patch, or be patient and nice. That's the game.
So, you forbid us, mere mortals, to post bug reports and wishes via your bugzilla? ;-)
Do I get you right?
this isn't bugzilla. it was perfectly clear what was meant.
If users aren't allowed to express feedback or give opinions on the dot, then disable commenting. When you allow commenting, you are expressly implying that people have a right to do so.
The Commit-Digest rss feed is broken for me, since last week already.
The address being http://www.commit-digest.org/updates.rdf
Don't put Buttons, Lists or any other Widgets like that into menus!!!
NO NO NO!
It confuses people it is horrible usability wise. It should be possible to use a Menu by keeping LeftMouseButton pressed and releasing on the menuItem that you wish to select.
ALL the menus I have seen for KDE4 suck big-time, really. And I don't want to flame. I really like KDE and I think that new aproaches like Katapult are great, BUT don't mix the stuff, just push a totally keyboard-controlled App-starter and keep the old KMenu as alternative for people wo want a menu.
Dont windowsify all the stuff, don't add widgets to places they don't belong. Dont add Mouse-over operations to the UI. JUST KEEP IT SIMPLE.
At least thats what I think!
But of course you can include anything in KDE if you think the people like it, as long as I can deactivate it ;)
(which I will always be able to do since its free, I know...)
Took me a while, but you're talking about Kickoff, aren't you? Yeah, sorry about that. Nobody ported the current K-menu to KDE 4, and this piece of junk, written by Novell after extensive usability research, kindly contributed to KDE, is all we have. Poor users, how could that thing ever be usable.
(sorry for the sarcasm, but I've heard enough complaints about Kickoff. If anyone sends a patch, fine, it will most likely be included. Otherwise, please either help us (eg TEST beta 4) or leave us.)
/me hands Jos a KDE-flavoured chill-pill :)
I really like KDE, like I said, and am using it for quite some time now.
I also do some Qt/KDE-coding so I actually thought about making a menu myself, but prosponed the idea because of lack of time (and I really only use katapult and the quickstarter applet nowadays).
I am looking forward to KDE4 and a lot of the new stuff, but I think there have not been many discussions about the KMenu. It looks like everybody was unhappy with the old one and just took what ever someone else brought up.
Since Windows Vista has something similar it appears KDE wants to have a new one, too, although from my experience with both skilled and unskilled users these "big menus" are not received very well.
I just hope someone comes up with a plan, because just offering three different menus that are similar in style, but unusable to most users isnt good.
My simple thought about Application starting is:
* Make something like Katapult that is only invoked and controlled by the Keyboard.
* Make something like the Original KMenu that is fully controlled by the mouse.
and let the user choose.
The later could be more "flashy" than the old KMenu (bigger Icons, descriptions, whatever...) but should not contain non-Menu Widgets (NO Buttons, NO Scrollbars, NO filter Boxes) and should have a CLEAR and SIMPLE structure.
AND No Menu-Items that change (e.g. no Favorites). Especially for unskilled users it is important to always find something in the same place.
just my 2¢.
Keep up the good work!
Looking forward to KDE4 :)
P.S.: I might look into actually developing sth. like that if noone else does, but I won't start before KDE4.0-Release, since I have no time right now, especially not to make KDE4-betas run on FreeBSD ;)
The feedback that we got from users, especially non-geek users, was that they found deep hierarchical (old KMenu) menus hard to navigate and discover. They just don't maintain the mental model that you call a 'clear and simple structure'. So we designed Kickoff as a multi mode system with quick, linear access to a set of favourites, broad search, and the existing hierarchy. Adding a hover to change modes makes it possible to use all the modes with the same number of clicks as the old KMenu.
Lots of people bashing the kickoff menu. I'm perhaps not the most sophisticated user, but nor am I "your grandma," and I really dig the kickoff menu. There are only two things about it that I find annoying, and I hope they are fixed.
First, I wish the activate-on-hover feature was configurable. I have the menu in the upper left corner of my screen and I sometimes hit it when I'm trying to close another window or something.
Second, the focus when searching is a bit messed up. While you can just pull up the menu and type a search term in, when you move your mouse to select the menu item that your search has returned, I often end up getting myself into another part of the menu (ie, my results disappear). I have to then point the mouse at the search field and move it vertically up to get to the search results. I think the behvior should be as follows: when you start typing, automatically move the mouse pointer so it hovers on the first result of your search.
Anyway, I consider these issues to be fairly minor. I use the menu to launch most programs I use: they generally reside in the favorites section, but I sometimes do use the "all programs" tab to browse to certain programs, such as openoffice, kile, kbib, tork, konversation, and other less-used programs. I dig the kickoff menu, and I'm glad it will be included in KDE4. Thanks for the good hard work.
Ok. Goodbye.
Somebody seems to work on it: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150883
I agree that Kickoff is terrible, but accusing it of "windowsify"-ing KDE comes across as trolling.
yeah, the correct accusation would be of "macosifying" KDE ;-)
Is there somewhere a .kdesvn-buildrc around that is recommended for building KDE4 trunk?
Flo
just use the example (kdesvn-buildrc-sample) supplied along with the kdesvn-build. from http://kdesvn-build.kde.org/
its basically modifying the modules listed here:
# This subroutine assigns the appropriate options to %package_opts and the
# update and build lists to build a default set of modules.
sub setup_default_modules()
{
@update_list = qw(qt-copy kdesupport kdelibs kdepimlibs kdebase kdeartwork
kdemultimedia kdepim kdeutils kdegraphics kdenetwork
kdeutils playground extragear);
delete the list of kde modules from above i.e., the ones you dont want to compile :)
hth