In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Continued work on PowerDevil, and the "NetworkManager" and "Weather" Plasmoids. Monochrome action icons in Plasma expand to cover KRunner. A first working version of QEdje script engine, and the import of a "Window Manager" runner. Work on new containments and a mobile internet devices (MID) panel in Plasma. Various improvements in Konsole and the Kvkbd keyboard utility. Support for adding actions implemented by Kross scripts in Lokalize. First version of a MathML presentation markup importer in KAlgebra. Start of work on a Mollweide projection in Marble. More work on integration of Jabber-based network games in KSirK. Continued work towards Amarok 2.0. Better support for LilyPond links in and the "--unique" command-line switch (similar to KDVI) in Okular. A new version of Klotz (previously KLDraw) with database update functionality is imported into playground/graphics. The Paint.net red-eye reduction algorithm is incorporated into Gwenview, using a "iPhoto-inspired" interface bar. Start of a DNG image format converter in KIPI plugins (used in Digikam, etc). Various work on filters in Kst, including Butterworth, and Linear Weighted Fits plugins. Support for auto-saving/restoring opened tabs in Akregator. A "cost breakdown" view in KPlato. The ability to create web shortcuts by right-clicking on the line edit of a search field in KHTML. Support for subscript and superscript in KRichTextWidget. Import of KDE Partition Manager to KDE SVN. Ruby and C# bindings are promoted to the KDE 4.1 release branch. Various Plasma applets move to kdereview for official inclusion in KDE 4.2. Amarok 1.92 and KDE 4.1.2 are tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
The desktop plasmoid probably should be flashy, it has the space to be. As long as it resizes well when put into the panel into a easy-to-use "connect me to the dang network" button like knetworkmanager is currently.
The big lump in the mockup is the popup qgraphicswidget that you get on click. In the panel there will be either a single icon showing merged state like at present or an icon per network interface. The second mode allows a smaller popup for each icon which will suit small displays better. There is some other cleverness in the popup to prevent it exploding all over the screen when you are downtown and in range of 255 wireless networks. (Not an ipod view or tabs this time, I promise)
IMHO, the single merged icon is the better default. In fact, the "one icon per network interface" UI is one of the things we Fedora folks (at least those who tried it) really don't like about the current knetworkmanager-0.7. (It needlessly consumes panel space and it can also be confusing.) The GNOME nm_applet shows one merged icon and that works really well.
But if you're willing to support both, which one is the default isn't that important to us, as we can always override it in Fedora's kde-settings. :-)
I always thought that the previous knetworkmanager iterations was developed something like this... in fact it was (just like Adept, to name some program) the perfect example of how downstream shouldn't develop misusing upstream infrastructure.
I'm really really glad that this now is fixed, kudos to Novell, Opensuse and especially you, Will! Thanks for your great work!
Nothing would make me happier than if upstream had done this one and all I had to do was bash out a specfile for it... are you volunteering to maintain it for me? ;)
Are there any simple image viewers available for KDE4?
o For image galleries there is a wonderful tool named Digikam
o For image viewing/simple editing there is a tool called Gwenview that is aimed to be a simple image viewer.
What bugs me is that Gwenview seems to move towards Digikam in terms of functionality. And what is worse is that Gwenview does it bad, i.e. it is a resource-eater in any sense. More than one window of Gwenview open and I can forget comparing images on my 2GB-RAM-machine! Gwenview has some nice interface concepts though their implementation is far from being optimized (yet). But for me as an end user the question emerges: What can I use if Gwenview looks nice, but doesn't do its job? Is their anything in development? I have heard of Mosfet being back at Pixie...
actually that is most likely a bug on your computer... I have 2GB an 2 or more instances of gwenview don't even slow anything down... the only thing that is a bottleneck here is the Amarok 2 Beta, the SQL-Database probably need some more optimizations.
It is really not only NVIDIA in my case ;)
I wanted to explain it, but added my typical usecase to the wrong reply - see below.
What bugs me is that Gwenview seems to move towards Digikam in terms of functionality.
I would suggest for KDE developers to just keep Gwenview very simple image viewer (slideshows etc very small) and just small image editing (crop, resize and rotation) and forget everything else. Then take digiKam as "official" photo management application what is designed for KDE4 technologies and this way we could get very powerfull photolibrary.
I dont say it is bad thing for Gwenview to support kipi-plugins, but Gwenview and other application developers should work more with digiKam (kipi-plugins) developers to get things done.
I'd argue that there is no problem with making Gwenview (even) more featureful, just do it in a way that allows for simple functionality as a default with more advanced functionality available to those who want / need it.
My only concern would be start up times; as the default image viewer it would be a shame if it started to take too long to fire up after clicking an image in dolphin for example because it was busy pulling in plugins.
For both of you.
I have to add a few more data (yes, bug reports are filed, but the developers believe, memory leaks are no bugs, but features, and postpone optimizations into possible future releases) - I want to clarify some major problems when using Gwenview:
Main situation: A weekend. Take MAANNY fotos, say 500 fotos, around 1.5-2 GB in one folder.
1st task: Open and view
Full screen view takes half a minute to initialize because Gwenview tries to preload 20-30 images to appear in the thumbnail bar. Then the bar appears and slowly disappears (yes - with animation and still thumbnailing in the background eating 100% cpu). That's no fun at all if you simply want to see the single image in fullscreen mode!
2nd task: Rotate (Konqueror4 does not support this handy feature anymore)
I believe, Gwenview first extracts the JPGs into full images and stores those in memory (at least it seems so). Although the 8MPixel images are too large for my small WXGA+ screen resolution it seems to store the original size images (therefore, even a 2 GB RAM full after watching a few fotos). When editing the images, Gwenview stores the original images (to enable the "undo" feature) as well as the new images (off course in full size!). After rotating 20 or 30 images either Gwenview or Xorg crashes. This is the reason why Gwenview asks you since 4.1.1 to save the edited images after 20 or 30.
3rd task: Thumbnailing. It has improved since KDE3 - but still: It 'feels' slower than Windows Explorer - even if the thumbnails already exist in memory (see Dolphin)
I appreciate that most of you feel the same about the need of a simple viewer. I also appreciate the work going into Gwenview - it has some nice GUI concepts. The current disadvantages of those are listed above...
> (Konqueror4 does not support this handy feature anymore)
servicemenus are still supported, so if you aren't seeing this either the kde4 version installed is too old (i don't believe 4.0's dolphinview had servicemenus) or the image servicemenus were not part of the packages installed.
"Main situation: A weekend. Take MAANNY fotos, say 500 fotos, around 1.5-2 GB in one folder."
For me it seems that Gwenview is not designed at all for over 30+ photos.
Thats why I use digiKam what is more powerfull for such weekends when photos has got more than just a few in a day. Gwenview should be just a viewer what does not try to be photo management tool. Because then it tries to be everything and fails badly on every aspect.
If i would be you, i would just forget the whole gwenview and use it for photo viewer for photos what has downloaded from internet and not from camera. So gwenview is actually good for image viewer, not for photo viewer (two different things are images and photos!).
> If i would be you, i would just forget the whole gwenview and use it for photo viewer for photos
> what has downloaded from internet and not from camera.
The thing is, this does not match Gwenview target users at all. I believe most people do not browse images downloaded from internet. They just view them with a web browser. Most people however have a photo folder which they want to browse. Some of them need advanced cataloging and image manipulation. They should use digiKam. Gwenview is designed for the other users, who only need to:
- Browse images and videos organized in folders
- Import images and videos from a digital camera
- Perform basic manipulations
- View images in fullscreen and start a slideshow
- Print one or several images at a time
Plus
- Do it fast (as application)
- Do it fast (as user, i.e. not too many clicks, keys, mouse gestures...)
I reinstalled Kuickshow from KDE 3
As Gwenview developer, I guess I should answer this one (thanks to Gilles for bringing this post to my attention through the kde-imaging list)
> What bugs me is that Gwenview seems to move towards Digikam in
> terms of functionality.
I am adding features which I believe fits in Gwenview User Research Profile [1]. I am afraid people won't like Nepomuk integration which will hopefully be usable for KDE 4.2. They will probably don't like it either when/if a simple digital camera importer gets added.
I have no plan to add support for raw images, support 16 bits per channel or advanced photo manipulation. This is definitely Digikam field. Nevertheless, both applications work on similar documents, so they are bound to overlap in some areas.
> I would suggest for KDE developers to just keep Gwenview very simple
> image viewer (slideshows etc very small) and just small image editing
> (crop, resize and rotation) and forget everything else. Then take
> digiKam as "official" photo management application what is designed
> for KDE4 technologies and this way we could get very powerfull
> photolibrary.
Would be a good idea, IMO.
> I dont say it is bad thing for Gwenview to support kipi-plugins, but
> Gwenview and other application developers should work more with
> digiKam (kipi-plugins) developers to get things done.
It's true that I have been quite inactive on kipi-plugins front lately. Since my plate is quite full, I tend to focus on tasks which are only in my plate, giving "shared" tasks a lower priority. Give me more time to contribute to KDE and you can be sure to see me more active on kipi-plugins.
Interestingly, we (kde-imaging people) will be meeting on the first days
of November for a code sprint.
[1]: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Gwenview/User_Research_Profile
hi & thanks for commenting :)
in case you'll see this, i could point out what image viewer i am looking for :
1. as fast to open as possible;
2. using as little memory as possible;
3. as fast as possible to change viewed photos;
4. fast & using little memory when zooming into images;
5. ability to use exif tags for image rotation (i guess supported in gwenview ;) );
6. ability to invoke external editor on the viewed image with right mouse click context menu & keyboard shortcut;
7. a pony. ok, not really - maybe it could brew beer :)
on kde3 i am using kuickshow, but it seems to use quite a lot of memory and a LOT of memory when zooming in more.
so quickshow kinda fails on points 2., 3., 4., 7.
i understand that for some operations fast and low memory usage are exclusive, but if gwenview could be better in those areas... that would be awesome :)
thanks for developing it.
Kuickshow also depends on the obsolete imlib 1 which in turn depends on GTK+ 1 (!?!). If something like Kuickshow is really still needed, it has to be essentially rewritten (at least the imlib parts). The efficiency problems are probably also due to imlib.
There's two versions of Imlib1, one using plain Xlib and one using GDK. KuickShow uses the plain Xlib one.
Also, you cannot really say that Imlib1 is deprecated, as Imlib2 is by no means a replacement for Imlib1. It's a completely different thing (and does not provide all features of Imlib1, which KuickShow uses.
And finally, Imlib1 is/was the fastest image loading/rendering library. That's one of the reasons, I used it for KuickShow. Qt's image io is slower, even Imlib2 is slower.
try gqview, its a good picture viewer. :)
Well as kde-imaging developer and (a bit) gwenview contributor i believe
gwenview started moving to kde4 first and now is into kde-graphics.
To get what you ask for, digikam should be in kde-graphics as well imo.
Moreover i don't see why gwenview should not have some features inside,
kipi-plugins were included in kde3 as well....
kipi-plugins need more help and that is true, digikam has more developers.
Anyway it's easy to ask for features and ask for changes, harder is to
find people who implement them.
From my point of view i like using digikam for my photo collection and to
download images from my camera, while gwenview to browse images using,
of course, kipi-plugins into both :)
As said by Aurelien, we're going to meet by the end of this month to
improve kde4 kipi-plugins...
I tend to agree over the fact that all our image applications are more like image management oriented, sometimes user just wants to quickly view a photo or a set of photo and exit the application we don't work very well on that scenario. I haven't used gwenview till now so my opinion is very generic not feature requests or complaints against gwenview.
Often I like to browse a whole set of photos downloaded in a folder and selectively deleted some of them quickly before organizing them using digikam. This needs a simple image viewer application with simple thumbnail functionality to quickly browse though photos.
At present the closest application I found for this is display command from image-magic, yes I have to revert to command line for being able to browse photos quickly. Display sucks too but since it takes command line argument I can very fast tell it which set of photos I want to spent time looking at. Also rotation of image is pretty much a very important feature. In KDE 3 I use the kuickshow application and showimg command line which worked pretty well, I miss them at times.
You should probably give Gwenview a try. It is easy to achieve what you want to do with it.
What about Kuickshow? In KDE 3 it is indeed a simple image viewer, loading images very fast and allowing to have a look to an entire directory just pushing Av Page.
As far as I know is still in KDE 4, but in Extragear.
Thanks. I didn't know that - it simply disappeared from my distribution...
or the previewer plasmoid. It was designed for that very purpose. Dunno If your distro has it included or whether you'd have to get it from svn...
It probably disappeared for the reasons described in my reply to "Git". But if your distribution accepts package contributions from the community, you can always package it if you really want it (even if I doubt its usefulness).
Be warned that:
* there are no releases of Kuickshow for KDE 4, it's only in SVN,
* it doesn't look very actively maintained,
* it requires an obsolete image loading library, see:
http://dot.kde.org/1224100877/1224149076/1224163469/1224196666/122425380...
* some distributions already didn't include it by default in KDE 3 (Fedora shipped it in a kdegraphics-extras subpackage which wasn't installed by default),
* it has only actually compiled for KDE 4 since July 19, 2008 (which explains why it isn't widely packaged),
* it won't help with Gwenview performance problems, its performance is even worse and
* Gwenview essentially subsumes all its functionality.
I use it now again (KDE3). The features Kuickshow offers are sufficient and still faster than the according implementation of Gwenview
-> opens in a view showing no controls, but the window only.
-> resizes properly to the maximum size and keeps aspect ratio while zooming (then I can view 2 or more images next to each other using two kuickshow processes)
-> simple manipulations (eg. rotation) using simple keys, eg. '9' for 90° right
-> simple rezooms/resets of view, eg. 'm' for maximum watchable image resolution or 'o' for 100% zoom.
-> simple navigation through a folder with simple file actions (delete, move to trash, save)
Is there any of these features where there is some application doing it better/faster? Gwenview offers a nice GUI for these actions, but it
(1) requires more user interaction (eg. not enough keyboard shortcuts, just toolbuttons, file actions only available when enabling additional space filling panels, manual window resizing by mouse required etc.)
(2) is slower in doing so due to the overhead (background thumbnailing, animations, bad optimizations etc.)
I used Kuickshow to browse images; I mean, click on a image file and see the image in fullscreen. Other programs load a GUI (as Gwenview) but I just wanted a fast viewer. I've found ShowImg, it opens fast in fullscreen mode and allows to browse current directory, and has a shortcut to exit: in one word, it's agile.
Showfoto is part of digikam and one of my favorite KDE apps.
It seems sometimes so hard to imagine just how fast KDE 4 has developed and grown since it's first public outing. Thanks to everyone that brings this great piece of candy to our computers, from the developers to the people filing bug reports to everyone that works on it, thanks. And Thanks Danny for plotting how it is progressing through the commit Digests
There was a mention of a panel aimed at "Mobile internet devices". Are there any additional details available about that?
other than "we're still working on it .. progress is being made"? =) when there's something more fun and intereting than that, i'll be sure to blog about it again.
niiice, I appreciate the feature !
now the dialog could be less cryptics... I mean :
Search Provider Name:_______
URIs shortcuts:______
wtf ?
I know web shortcuts from the kde 3 usage but this I do not understand.
how about an help item in this dialog to explain what these are and how they can be used ?
I typed "something:" in the URIs instead of "something" and it did not work... it should say wrong syntax no ?
thanks !