In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Taskbar and KMenu functionality from KDE 3.5 returns to the Plasma panel, and work on clocks in Plasma, with the move of the binary-clock Plasmoid to kdereview. Improvements in annotation handling in Okular (which has been officially capitalised). Essential support for viewing bug contents in the rewrite of KBugBuster. More data export options (CSV, HTML, etc) in Kalzium. The CVS implementation in KDevelop moves to the Model/View framework. The start of JavaScript functionality in Kst plugins. Usability refinements in Konsole. Mailody begins to be ported to the Akonadi service. A "mirror search" plugin for KGet. IPv6 work in KTorrent. Colour docker improvements across KOffice. Optimisations in KDevelop and NEPOMUK. Various work in KJS and KHTML. Support for the MPRIS multimedia player interaction specification in Dragon Player, with Dragon Player moving from playground/multimedia into kdemultimedia for KDE 4.1. The Kopete Bonjour protocol moves to kdereview. The copy of Qt within KDE SVN is updated to be GPL version 3 compatible. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
Dragon player is one of the best/simple video players, but are they going to keep that name? Come one, Dragon Player, thats more childish then something that starts with K.
No Dot story without someone having a different opinion about some name. :~)
Is there an easy way to switch the audio track or turn subtitles on and off? Is there a way to record whatever internet stream it is playing? Without those features I would respectfully have to stick with Kaffeine.
It would then be a case of "90 percent of people only use 10 percent of the features, therefore we can cut the other 90 percent of the features and still keep 90 percent of the people happy" backfiring, since the set of features people uses differs from person to person.
I really do miss the days when KDE was about enabling, and giving features, and allowing users the opportunity to ignore them, but at least they *are there* for those who do use them. If my software is going to ascribe to gnome philosophies, I might as well use Gnome.
You know, there's a reason it's so common to hear of application "extensions" or "plug-ins" these days.
You can switch audio tracks and subtitles. I do plan on adding any feature that's that's make or break in being able to watch a movie. Having subtitles for a foreign film would be one of those. :)
Recording streams is actually a (somewhat hidden) feature Codeine had, so who knows I might add it back sometime in the future.
But really, no one is taking away your Kaffeine. How does having a simple video player mean that omgbbq KDE hates features. Kaffeine is alive and well in KDE extragear and I expect it to be back ready to serve their current users and new users who just expect more features out of their video player.
I haven't been able to test Dragon, but I really like Codeine for playing movies from DVD. The no-frills interface makes it nearly perfect for this.
To be *really* useful for playing compressed movies, it has to be able to change sound sync on the fly, though.
I also think you have to be able to skip forward-backwards and a few other things like that.
But as I said, I haven't tried Dragon - maye those things are already in in.
You can use the slider to skip forward and backward, just use the slider. True for Codeine and Dragon Player. If you mean in DVD chapters, that is a feature that I plan on adding in the future.
I don't get the point about changing sound sync though... I've never had this problem.
> You can use the slider to skip forward and backward, just use the slider.
Yes, of course, but it's much more precise to use the arrow keys to jump a few seconds backwards and forwards. Especially when you don't use a regular mouse, but a small trackball :)
> I don't get the point about changing sound sync though...
It's a rather common problem with .avi files. I don't know what causes it, though.
I'm quite glad that Dragon Player is in kdemultimedia, but the value of being in a KDE module is often overstated. For instance in KDE3, I guess under your theory Kaboodle was the official KDE video player. The reality is that most KDE-distros shipped Kaffeine as their default player. The KDE modules do serve as a way of raising awareness of KDE apps, especially within the project. But its mostly a form of release management.
Anyways don't knock Dragon Player until you've tried it. It has a simple user-interface, that's a lot different then being ultra-basic.
The name sounds really bad.
name sounds bad? im happy to see a move away from Kthis and Kthat with KDE4. plasma, dolphin, amarok, phonon, dragon player, etc. etc. all show a move in naming, and its great. The Kapplications is not only ugly, also its inconvenient in menus to look through.
Agreed that it's an improvement to drop the Kthis, Kthat, but "Dragon player" sounds like a game not a media application. Just "Dragon" would be fine though. Given there is some talk of applications being listed with descriptions in the menu listings, the extra descriptiveness isn't needed: it is "just a name" after all..
If the menus go that way, we'll have: "Dragon Player (Movie Player)" ...which is a bit redundant...
Kopete Chatter (IM Client)
Konqueror Browser (Web Browser)
Kmail Emailer (Email Client)
See what I mean?
Looks good, name aside.
I think 'Dragon' itself is a good name, however the name is not that much of a problem. It is that Dragon by itself does not necessarily mean anything in terms of what the application can do, but I do not think a name should do that anyways. Consider how people of a given profession were addressed ever so long ago, a person could be "titled" John (Black)smith and while his name would 'John' his profession would be a blacksmith. The same could be applied here; the name is Dragon and the profession-if you will-is a media player so it could be titled Dragon media-player. That way people know what it does while giving it a unique name. Also for instances like the 'Kmenu' only the name would have to be displayed resulting in something like Dragon (Media Player) so no redundancy. :)
Because it's really obvious what Okteta is for. KHexEdit was just too obscure.
Why K*appname* gets slammed when G*appname, i*appname* and Win*appname* get a relatively free pass is beyond me. I appreciate a name that tells me at a glance what it does, and for which OS/environment it is created.
I think the move away from such names it the latest mass hysteria to strike KDE, in the same vein as the widespread love at the time for Keramik. Given time, perhaps this move will be seen as something other than a bright idea, the same way Keramik was tossed into the junk heap.
+1
in freshmeat, if an app name is unknown to me, then
if its name starts with a k I give alook at it as it is highly probable that it'll be a kde app that takes benefit of the integrated desktop.
else I skip as if it's a graphical app, it won't take benefit of the tight integration, thus: useless.
I disagree. "gerd" sounds really silly though.
KDE has always been about choice. You seem to suggest that the current state of KDE represents KDE's final goal, which is a falacy. KDE 4.0 didn't have a video player at all, so you're suggesting officially KDE abandoned video players, and by having 1 video player in KDE 4.1 the official stance is to only have one official player.
Basically, don't read too much into the fact that not all the KDE 3 apps have been ported over. In a volunteer world, people opt to port over what they opt to do so. I'm sure most of the KDE 3 apps will get ported over in time.
What happened to K3B? Does it get ported to QT4 and get a sexy new oxygen look or is there something different?
I think there is a very nice work going on it because everytime i update extragear/multimedia, i see that many files are updated from K3B.
and probably a refactoring to use solid for hardware abstraction...?
There is a blog entry on k3b.org from the 24. January about it:
http://k3b.plainblack.com/k3b-news/blog
@Danny or @Troy, little suggestion: Could you interview Sebastian Trueg about state of K3b-kde4 and post it in another digest or similar? A lot of people would be interested
Don't forget also that k3b is one of the most rock-solid apps in all KDE world.
So we should not expect a quick-bugged-rushed version soon, they probally won't do the same as KDE team did for 4.0 ;)
Aaron and the rest of the team bleeds from the little almost unnoticeable hit.
But so true.
Pardon my observation but I keep seeing this MVC embrace and have to rant:
I just love how the C++ world and Java world has "embraced" this Smalltalk/ObjC/Cocoa MVC world.
You abhorred it when NeXTStep/Openstep had it as the center of it's entire development paradigm.
Suddenly we see this grand renaissance as if it never happened but within the Java/C++ world.
end of rant.
the point is not in 'who was first' (or 'who's to blame' / 'what to do next'), the point is in the fact that idea exists and in bringing it into life (realization).
The devil is in the details
On KDE 4 I was having problems with kopete last night, it wouldn't connect to msn. So I updated KDE then went to bed, this morning Kopete wont even open. shows up on the task manager for about 10 seconds then closes. How do I find what is happening so that I can report it?
I would open it from konsole in order to see some terminal output...
Yeah, thats what I want to do, but i've barely used konsole so don't know what to type in Konsole to open it. I'm on opensuse 10.3, if anyone needs to know that.
Just type 'kopete' (minus the quotes), then enter.
hi, yeah I have done that, that's why i thought something else had to be written because when I type it nothing happens. I've tried reinstalling kopete and everything.
Finally, mirror search functionality. But will it also:
- automatically split downloads into multiple parts
- download several parts simultaneously from different mirrors
- measure mirror response time and dynamically adjust which mirrors
it uses?
What's going on here? First I read this I was quite shocked, but as the dust is settling, I wonder what are the positive effects?
I thought the same, WTF!
A positive aspect is that Nokia will apply to become a Patron of KDE. It is announced in an open letter addressed to KDE :-) and the opensource community: http://trolltech.com/28012008/28012008-letter
This is very good news to have support from such a firm. Nokia will probably rely on Qt for its products, which is very positive for Qt, and therefore for KDE in the end.
there are no positive effects.
in the short they will pretend to support opensource.
but in the long term KDE will have to switch to something like openqt.
I don't see this as a positive thing..
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Well Nokia isn't that evil. They will just stop bothing with open source updates, or helping the KDE community beyond what's necessary to support mobile phones.
This is a sad day for open source.
Ouch, I really don't like this. Trolltech will now be part of a slow-moving, corrupt, pro-software-patent company that is against open standards like ogg.
What currently bothers me most (and I haven't even seen anyone asking) is that probably QTopia is going to die. Because I don't see Nokia switching to an opensourced phone architecture. And why would a company that openly rips subsidies and fires people making a plus invest in a second phone framework?
IMO, Nokia sucks both morally and technologically, and it's sad to see Trolltech going there.
I couldn't agree more
In other news, Nokia, a pro-software patent company releases millions of lines of code under both the GPL v2 and the GPL v3 license.
Now that Nokia 'owns' KDE, their actions with regard to Trolltech will make their stance on Free Software very clear.
This is a very interesting development, potentially harmful, but also potentially very positive for KDE and Free Software in general.
Let's hope that Nokia will not cut resources on the many useful technological developments.
Just curious, but what GPL code has Nokia released?
A lot, both kernel code and GTK stuff. They also work on WebKit.
> They also work on WebKit.
no, they don't. They just forked webkit years ago to
tailor it to a tablet product and that's it.
Pure opportunism. No commitment.
This is a sad day for open source..
Qt will die beyond what's necessary for phones...
What, google wasn't available to buy trolltech? C'mon.
Google at least has a policy of "don't be evil!"
I was so exited that google jumped on the KDE bandwagon, then this...
What is this the dot-opensource? Now it seems that all these old companies are buying up open source projects. What will come of this?
First, SuSE, then mysql, then Trolltech, what's next?
Qt we will miss you. You had so much going for you in the Qt 4.x version..
-Richard
The biggest problem I see with this takeover by Nokia is that it will marginalize whatever neutrality TrollTech offerred when dealing with other massive mobile and desktop players. For instance, when KDE4 applications show up on winmac systems the end users would have seen them as almost generic "open source" additions to their desktop, now it will tilt more towards "hey, check out this Nokia stuff running on my winmac desktop". Same with Qtopia, it was just another open source option available to run on whatever hardware could support it but now it's "that Nokia stuff" that may start to find itself actively inhibited in non-Nokia aligned hardware. I can't imagine Steve Jobs ever being happy about Nokia based software running on any Apple based products whereas before it would have been more of a "we don't care about marginal stuff from TrollTech". This will be bad for KDE if KDE is seen as an extension, a subsidiary, of Nokia (from other corporate players point of view), or, it could be okay if KDE is forced to establish more of it's own identity divorced from Nokia.
i doubt that risk is real, kde isnt viewed as a extension of trolltech right now