KDE 3.0Alpha1 Developer's Release Ships

The KDE Project has just announced the release of KDE 3.0Alpha1,
the inaugural release of the
KDE 3 series. This release is targeted at developers, though experimental
users might want to check it out (be sure to read the
instructions for
installing KDE 3 alongside your KDE 2 desktop). The principal changes from the
recently-released KDE 2.2.1 stem
from the switch to Qt 3. However, that switch does bring with it an impressive
array of feature enhancements, including new database classes, new data-aware
widgets, improved RAD development with a much-enhanced Qt Designer, a new
powerful regular expression class (with full Unicode support),
improved internationalization support (including the ability to mix different
character sets in the same text), bi-directional language support (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew),
multi-monitor (Xinerama and multi-screen) support, better integration of pure
Qt applications into KDE, and hardware-accelerated alpha blending. With
the Qt port out of the way, the KDE developers can now focus on the
planned
KDE improvements. Read the full announcement
here, or go straight to the
source
(alternative
link
).

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Comments

GNOME icons are too serious for me. If you want some good icons, talk to this guy, I just love the icons he's making here (especially the hardware ones):

http://users.skynet.be/bk369046/icon.htm

Roey wrote:

> I've found this *very* neat screenshot of Gnome (rather nautilus) supporting
> SVG icons: http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/e-sync.jpeg.
> These are really nice. Maybe it's the cartoony style of the icons, I don't
> know... but I really like them over the current KDE icons.

The Gnome icons are indeed quite nice. Icons in KDE as nice as in Gnome would be a cool feature for KDE3. But I have no idea about creating icons, and I admire everybody who has. Someone out there should create some nice looking icons for KDE...

Heiner

P.S. I have to revise this a bit: Some of the icons of kde are quite nifty. For instance the K of the KMenu and the icons of konsole and konqi.
But konqi's stop button isn't as nice...

We need a well-structured way of contributing icons. Someting a-la sourceforge that lets kde users vote on what gets included in the next version.

A single icon (for instance, a replacement for the K icon) is too small to distribute as a thing in and of itself, but needs to be packaged together w/other people's icons.....

Also, we need a good resource for finding where certain icons are stored or how we can tell kde to use a png or xpm other than the default. I have been trying to replace the K icon and cant figure out how to do it, despite looking at other themes out there that do it, and adding these lines to my liquid.themesrc (in /usr/share/apps/kstyle/themes):

[Icons]
PanelGo=liquid/k.png:liquid/mini-k.png

(this is something i copied from an iMac theme floating around the web, alas themes.org is down!!!!)

attached, find the K icon that i wan to use instead of the default.

> We need a well-structured way of contributing icons.

If you want to submit icons feel free to send them to [email protected].
If you're an experienced artist you might also want to discuss/contribute stuff on [email protected] or #kde-artist on IRC.

For more information on icons in KDE you might want to read artist.kde.org

> Also, we need a good resource for finding where certain icons are stored
> or how we can tell kde to use a png or xpm other than the default.

ftp://ftp.derkarl.org/pub/incoming/icnthm-doc.tar.gz

might save your day :-)

Greetings,
Tackat

Thanks!

by Pablo (not verified)

attaching?

by Carbon (not verified)

Is it just me, or is that a 70's era K button? :-D

http://users.skynet.be/bk369046/icon.htm

Did you see this icons ? Jimmac or Tigert icons arent better than this ones.

I set those icons up for my parents and my friends, as well as myself, and we all love em. Some need work (especially 32x32 icons on my 1600x1600 resolution), but all-in-all they are beautiful.

The hardware ones by far surpass those included with KDE...

I have to disappoint you :( These icons are icons form Microsoft Windows XP.

Not based on the screenshots of Windows XP, but then again I've not seen any for a while. Can you point out a screenshot that shows that these icons are a copy of the Windows XP ones?

--

A more general point: I think Nautilus had the right idea in having icons as overlaid collections. We already have a general 'page' for a document... so why not make that a file on it's own, and overlay the 'file type' indicator on top? Then you have the overlays for 'link', for 'read only', and so in. Particularly nice is that way that you can 'annotate' the icons with indicators of your own. It's one area that Nautilus does really well in (for 3 million dollars you'd hope that it did well :). Given a bit of work, Nautilus and KDE could have a common icon collection format, which would mean people would be able to create icons for both KDE and Gnome really easily...

The first 3 releases of Kicons featured a lot of XP icons. The successor of the third release, called 'iKons 0.4' doesn't contain these XP icons. Some people argued that some of my icons looked to much like the WinXP icons. In order to avoid any legal problems, I decided to remove these icons or replace them by other icons. 'iKons' 0.4 is a first step in this direction: I redid most of the icons and added some new icons.
By 'iKons 0.5', there won't be any XP icon left. At this time, I'm replacing the folder icon with the two people on it, the pda icon and the scanner icon.

CD mastering is already handled very well with KreateCD. It's a very nice app. I don't see particuarly any advantage in doing it in Konqi, other then the niftiness factor ("Hey, i can view websites, manage files, rip and burn CDs, and preview Koffice documents all from the same app")

BIDI support is built-in to QT3, so I think it will probably be supported in the next KOffice release.
I don't think that there will be true transparency, I'm not sure its even possible with X.
Those SVG icons do look cool, but unless you have a Cray or two, wouldn't they be unbearably slow?

>Integrating CD mastering into Konqueror
I think integrated CD mastering in Konqueror would be nice, but I think support for RW CD's is more important. That means using of RW CD's just like a disk as it is possible under windows. But I think this is not a problem of KDE, this is a problem of Linux, because no writeable UFS filesystem is available.

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

The legal status of SGV is VERY dubious.
In fact, it is pretty much in the same shape GIF is, except that with SVG the patent is held by apple.

IMHO, before someone spents a month doing SVG icons, this needs to be investigated.

After all, it is not like much has to be changed on KDE to make it have SVG icons, once there is free code out there that reads it.

by Josh (not verified)

Huh? SVG is a W3C standard.

by Alain (not verified)

I see in the KDE 3.0 Planned Features that Eric Laffoon is working on Quanta. Is it a new version of Quanta + ?

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

Jeez... now my name is floating before my eyes while I read about KDE... what did I do? Oh yeah... Quanta ;)

As I have mentioned in talkbacks and in private emails my partners, the brilliant and witty Dmitry and Alex, decided to do a proprietary version with theKompany. While I have been supportive of theKompany and remain friends with Dima and Alex I strongly opposed this move. I don't want to get into all my reasons or any politics, but my opinion is that Quanta should remain a viable GPL'd program.

While I have decades of experience in computer service and programming I am just a newbie at C++ but I'm getting better. I have had inquiries from a number of people interested in getting into a new development effort. I'm also in the process of putting together a new web development company and just about to close a very sweet deal. This will put me in a position shortly to be able to allocate a large portion of my time to coding and overseeing development of Quanta. I have a long list of things I want to do and I am adamant about this development not being half hearted or lagging. I did spec a lot of what went into Quanta although Dima and Alex are also very sharp and had a lot of good ideas.

I won't go into a long list right now but I will mention this. Very shortly I will be branching Quanta in KDE CVS for the KDE 2 branch and the head branch will be KDE 3. I'm just working on my development environment now. Here are two very obvious things that will change with KDE 3.
1) WYSIWYG - at least to a degree for basic HTML or XML with style sheets. Since there are plans to link to DTDs this will mean a lot of work enabling a visual design mode that honors the author's tagging intentions. There will be modes for text edit, visual edit and preview.
2) Data access - because this is made easier in QT 3 it seems logical to incorporate data management for web work into your web design tool.

I would like to state that I am a professional web developer so I approach Quanta from the standpoint that I need the most productive tool for my business and the best tool at any cost. I remain committed that cost shall stay free because I want web teams to be able to grow around Quanta. My vision is that it will be the best editor for web work. I am going to leave it at that and post the details after we assemble the team as soon as we can.

Anyone interested in getting involved with development, documentation, support or other areas of help should feel free to contact me. If you have requests or questions please hold them until we have our on-line facilities up to manage them.

Thanks to all the people who have made Quanta the most popular web development tool on KDE!

Eric Laffoon
Member of the Quanta team

by Alain (not verified)

Very good news ! I hope a good success for all your wishes !

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

I wish you very good luck.
I use Quanta at my job, and it rocks (but I still think it should be faster, use less resources).
All my work in php is made easier thanks to quanta, so I have to thank you and everbody that helps quanta being the best HTML editor for Linux (with some effort soon it can be the best editor for all systems beating homesite).

I only wish someone develops a easy-to-use-as-quanta image editor for KDE. Krayon simply is pre-alpha and seems to not being developed, and gimp misses the point on easy to use, simply dosen't have some features (as line, elipse, etc and a good interface) that makes it hard to use.
Maybe next year I can start learning C++ so I can help quanta and other projects.

by gunnar (not verified)

i wish u good luck,too!
a few weeked ago, i was teaching php/mysql in an 18 student class. most of them were using quanta+ for coding (myself too: with beamer and the very candy aqua theming ;-) )

some bugs are frustrating but its the best tool under linux! thanx.

btw: isnt there a initiative to make kdevelop be an very handy php coding tool?
i have read an short note on this...

-gunnar

by asasd (not verified)

yeah, kdevelop HEAD aka 3.0 aka Gideon, will have support for all languages through plugins

it won't be released with kde 3.0 probably tho, it isn't ready :/
maybe kde 3.0.1 or kde 3.0.2 or kde 3.1

by Robert Charbonneau (not verified)

As a web developer, I would have to say that Quanta+ has been a most useful tool. I was originally an Emacs user, then I went to Nedit because I wanted more RAM. After realizing that 30+ NEdit windows is out of the question (and that I needed project management) I went searching and found Quanta+. Despite the number of times I might complain to my wife about it crashing on me I think it's the best tool I've ever used for web development. (It doesn't crash that often at all really, but every now and then... :) ). I would like to thank Eric for keeping it GPLed. The only thing in my wish list for Quanta+ at this point is CVS integrated into the project interface.

Other than that it's a great app, and all those web developers out there who are fond of PHP, this is the app for you. :)

by gunnar (not verified)

i have disabled the projectmanagment - it was (is) too slow.
the webpage which i maintain has arrount 2000 files. when adding a new file, it took about 25 sec (400k2, amd) to work again.
starting quanta took araouns 1,5 minutes.

probably its because the xml data.

-> so quanta cant handle big projects this way.

but its very nice and still my default programming enviroment fpr php-
-gunnar

by gunnar (not verified)

i have disabled the projectmanagment - it was (is) too slow.
the webpage which i maintain has arrount 2000 files. when adding a new file, it took about 25 sec (400k2, amd) to work again.
starting quanta took araouns 1,5 minutes.

probably its because the xml data.

-> so quanta cant handle big projects this way.

but its very nice and still my default programming enviroment for php.
-gunnar

by Somebody (not verified)

Would it be possible to have a sort of 'theme server'? I dont know a great deal about KDE's internals, however if you start up an app as yourself, and then start an app as root, root will usually just have the default theme seeing as most sane people dont use KDE as root, which looks quite jarring. Couldnt one of the KDE session management daemons export some theme info (heck, why not just have an environment variable that points to a KDE theming directory, which all programs automatically load or or something?) so that after you start a session on a given X server, any Qt/KDE apps that attach to that X server will use your theme settings.

Also, one small thing that I notice a lot is that under KHTML 2.1, vBulletins (which I use a lot) display fine and yet in KHTML 2.2 all of a sudden the tables get mangled (that and a lot of textarea input fields with lots of HTML stuff in them by default have stopped working all of a sudden). Is it a problem with vB or KHTML?

by Marko Samastur (not verified)

I'm not sure if I understood you. Do you want this theme server to "export" settings so if you logged in as a different user (for example root), they'd have the same look?

This is IMHO a bad idea. Different people have different taste and wishes and this way one would only force others on multiuser systems.

I'm not sure I understand your comment about X server and sessions either (you do know that X server is machine that DISPLAYS text and X client is the one where application runs on), but the way X works, you'll get widget look that application uses on machine it runs and windows will look how they are set on machine where application user interface is displayed. I don't think there's much you can do about that.

by not me (not verified)

What he wants is a way to make all apps running under the same X server look the same. So if he logs in as "Joe" and does "su root" and then starts Konqeror as root, he wants it to look the same as all the other Konqueror windows on his desktop. This would not affect the way Konqueror would look when he was actually logged in as root. Other people using other X servers would not be affected.

Personally, I _like_ the fact that all my root windows look different. It helps me tell them apart. In fact, I want a yellow/black "Caution" theme that I can put on all my root windows :-)

by Kevin Puetz (not verified)

The simplest way I see to do this (and I would like to see it done as well, as I often run KDE apps via remote-X and would like to force a leaner theme when doing so) would be to have an environment variable ($KDESTYLE?) that, if set, overrides the user's theme choices. startkde could then set this var to match the user's pref on startup, so that all kde apps started by this user would get their theme, and I could set it in my .login for remote access.

Maybe this even already exists :-)

by yves (not verified)

Is there a chance to get some binaries of 3alpha1?

by Jon (not verified)

Basically, if you're not happy to be compiling this release, you probably shouldn't be using it. It's targeted toward people that want to check that they can port their code to KDE 3 easily, plus the bleeding edge adopters that don't mind if 90% of the desktop doesn't work :)

by not me (not verified)

Plus there aren't really any new features worth getting yet.

by Michael Häckel (not verified)

There are quite some new features. It just seems that nobody wrote a detailed changelog yet.

by Macolu (not verified)

Will KOffice be released with KDE 3.0 or separetely like kde 2.2 ?

by Chris Howells (not verified)

No. KOffice will always be released independently of KDE.

by Bibel Biber (not verified)

Will there be a version for Mac OS X?
I love my system and I´d love to have KDE on it.

by Jason Zimdars (not verified)

KDE on OS X would be great.

by NoPCZone (not verified)
by Anonymous (not verified)

Until t.o is up again: www.kde-look.org has a number of native KDE themes + gtk themes, icewm styles and noatun skins.

by not me (not verified)

Neat! I like it much more than I ever liked themes.org (who thought up that old interface? Deranged monkeys?)

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

Heh - an hour or so ago, I just submitted an article to the dot about the site - nice place.

--
Evan

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

Thanks for informing about KDE-look.org, I have uploaded my Win2k icon theme.

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

Here are the weird things KDE 2.x has:

1. Theme Manager: Everything is scattered, It would have been nice to see all KDEGLOBALS can be used in kthememgr. Like fonts, widget styles, icons, sounds, mouse cursors, kicker size, number of kicker applets, etc., menu appearance, konqueror profiles, KWord profiles etc (to emulate corel wordperfect, msword, staroffice, etc). So Integrate everything themeable into the theme manager, much like KDE 1.1.2's.

2. Help: KDE 2.x is the most helpless system I have ever thought of ;). KDE 1.1.2 was the most helpful. Most applications (even basic) do not have updated help. The "What's this" has no use/importance in KDE 2.2's many base applications :(

3. System & network configuration: Even though SuSE has many nice System and Network configuration modules integrated with KControl but I wonder, why KDE can't have them or not try to get them in KDE? why can't KDE behave as it is the integrated part of the Linux/Unix OS and not just an optional component? I just can't set my host name using the KControl :( (what to say about Sound, X, and other configuration) and KDE touts as the best DE of Unix/Linux! Be responsible and control every aspect of the OS, and be in power KDE!!! Stop saying "it's not my job, it's the distro's"!

4. Speed: I remember how I was proud of KDE 1.1.2 when it surpasses Windows 9x speed for applications etc., I used to see applications appear as soon as I release the mouse button after clicking on the icon/link. But now I can go make a coffee, drink it and come back to see that the application is still loading ;)

5. Customizing: I just don't want/use 40% of KDE apps. I am forced to download many unwanted packages/apps since it is tightly integrated into KDE's _HUGE_ packages :( if it tries to break those huge package into individual apps then upgrading and installing customized KDE packages will be great. Have a look at http://dot.kde.org/1001216773/1001253025.

I don't like to criticize KDE but... how about constructive criticism? I believe that KDE 3.x will be much better than I could imagine and/or suggest.

God bless KDE and America :)

About the packaging...

One of the reasons KDE is easier to install than Gnome is because of the monolithic packages... it's certainly one of the things I like about how the KDE source is structured. That said, there is no reason someone can't come along and break the packages up and distribute them themselves.

About system configuration...

KDE is a *Unix* desktop, not a *Linux* desktop. Anything in the main source needs to be designed for more than just Linux on i386. I'd love to see a generic system configuration area, but again this is something that specific distributers can work on.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

KDE is a *Unix* desktop, not a *Linux* desktop. Anything in the main source needs to be designed for more than just Linux on i386. I'd love to see a generic system configuration area, but again this is something that specific distributers can work on.

Yes, but why not KDE team? I mean, it dosen't need to be those developers that are working on KDE base, but new ones.
See ximian-tools. It's going to be *nix based and will work both on command line and gnome, this can be ported to KDE (I think someone is already doing it).
This would be great. Interfaces should integrate this kind of tools to making *nix expercience similar on various system types.
IMHO

by Carlos Rodrigues (not verified)

"One of the reasons KDE is easier to install than Gnome is because of the monolithic packages... it's certainly one of the things I like about how the KDE source is structured. That said, there is no reason someone can't come along and break the packages up and distribute them themselves."

I definitely second that, gnome has way too may packages. It seems that every .so and tiny app gets its own package, and it looks really daunting.
Having bigger packages is also useful for developers because they can get a general idea of what parts of KDE the user has installed (because related libs are in the same package) and avoid forcing him to a dependencies rollercoaster when installing some app. This gives for a better use of the available KDE API resources... which favours everybody.

Now packagers already break the binary packages into smaller bits but they manage not to destroy what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, which is nice.

by Moritz Moeller-... (not verified)

[...]

> 2. Help: KDE 2.x is the most helpless system I have ever thought of ;). KDE
> 1.1.2 was the most helpful. Most applications (even basic) do not have
> updated help. The "What's this" has no use/importance in KDE 2.2's many base
> applications :(

[...]

I agree completely. I think there are several reasons:

1. The used DTD-XML is unknown to everyone, there is no usable editor for it.
XML is for programmers not for writers. Adopting it was a mistake. HTML was better.

2. Also the template for the documentation sucked for a long time. Installation as the first entry (It must have changed now...). No newbie could install the program and gett to see the xml documentation.

3. Many apps are so simple that writing newbie documentation is impossible for an intelligent person. You just can't dumb yourself down enough.

Please:

If someone can write a tutorial or explain with an example how to add "what's this" information to a C++ file (or wherever) and if it does not require any advanced programming skills, I would be willing to add a lot of the missing "what's this" things. TZhey are more helpful than the complete documentation which is most often outdated anyways....

by aleXXX (not verified)

...not really a tutorial:

http://doc.trolltech.com/3.0/qwhatsthis.html

seems to be mainly:

//create some widget
QPushButton *pb=new QPushButton(i18n("click me"),parent);
//add the what's this help
QWhatsThis::add(pb,i18n("this is a whatsthis help "));

that's more or less all ,correct me if I'm wrong

Bye
Alex

by Heiner (not verified)

IMO, at least the KStdActions should predefine the what's this texts.
And if a programmer don't need them, he or she can redefine them using
KAction::setWhatsThis(text). If someone wrote all this messages, most of the available actions (i.e. Toolbar buttons and menubar entries) would have a nice description.