KDE-CVS-Digest for June 13, 2003

In the latest issue of KDE-CVS-Digest, read about new Kontact plugins for summary, notes and the newsticker,
KOffice gains improved import and export filters plus template loading from the command line, we also see an improvement in speed for Konqueror file and image viewing, and Dr Konqi gets hooked into KDevelop for debugging. Also, improvements to KDE Print,
KGhostview, user interface cleanups, and numerous bug fixes.

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Comments

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

i'll echo Derek on this one say that yes, such efforts are VERY much welcome. there are some who are doing such things, such as Malcom Hunter and Frauke, and their work is generally well received. the more the merrier!

by claes (not verified)

A related comment: is not this "what's this" feature kind of broken in design? The problem I see is that there is no way to know if there actually is any help text to be found without clicking.

I would think it would be better if some help symbol ( a question mark?) was shown next to all things that had help text attached to them. Or some other kind of visual indicator...

by Mike (not verified)

I disagree, the current way is unintrusive and so if you know how to use a feature already it will not bother you or make any special symbols. Usually users just need to look up 1 or 2 things on the itnerface not the whole interface so its not needed to have something like a symbol next to it. If they need to look up the whole interface they need to check the manual.

WHAT I DO THINK IS NECESSARY: The what's this symbol should change appearance when over items that have no "what's this" help. For example when I'm borwsing over a slider with no help, the ? would be in a circle with a line over it and when over something with a help item in it it would look normal like it does now.

This would save a lot of trouble.

by Alex (not verified)

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59859

Please vote for it if you agree.

by 0x303Jeff (not verified)

It was at http://www.fruitsalad.org/people/lauri/hig/all/... good start, but hasn't seen activity since march.. is there any updated copy?

by Jan (not verified)

LOL! KWeather always shows a sandstorm in Sydney.
That's definitely the coolest bug description I've read in a long time.

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

Ironicly this bug had been in KWeather since mid 1998... now how does a bug live for that long without being detected or fixed? Because it never gets reported. Now, I never had a situation that aggrivated it here, so I never noticed it.

The moral of the story is: REPORT YOUR BUGS!

The only reason this was fixed was because I was given a bug report and a simple patch. OSS in action :)

Cheers
-ian reinhart geiser

by Chakie (not verified)

Often knowing what to report is very, very hard. I have a few bugs in Konqueror-the-web-browser that I know are bugs, but damn if I know how to describe them so that a developer that knows the codebase has a real chance of tracking them down. Reporting "Konqueror crashed while I surfed" doesn't really help anyone.

by AC (not verified)

Or, how usable does that make KDE in general?

This actually is very sad if you ask me.

What are you going to tell the users? "LOL that's definitely the coolest bug description I've read in a long time"

..poor users

by Datschge (not verified)

User who think they can't change anything for sure aren't changing anything. But poor users using KDE can click "Help" and then "Report Bug...". This way they can make many developers happy and eventually themselves happy as well.

by AC (not verified)

Yes, but it does not make it more *usefull* when such lame bugs are there in the first place.

by Derek Kite (not verified)

And all code should be bug free.

I take it you have gone through all the KWeather sites to check whether the data and display is valid, checked against local conditions, etc.?

If you haven't, then get to it. That is the only way to get all the 'lame' bugs out of it.

Derek

by Hein (not verified)

Would it be possible to include a Blogger-Client and Server in the Kontact project? There is still no Free software blog, although LiveJorunals is open source, so we just have to set up a server...

by Tim Jansen (not verified)

Advogato(.org)

by Mike (not verified)

Are you saying Scoop,

http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/

Postnuke,

http://www.postnuke.com/

and Slashcode,

http://slashcode.com/

aren't free software. Or are you saying they're not blogs?

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

I read it that he wanted a blog client.
-ian reinhart geiser

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

I have this started:
http://geiseri.myip.org/~geiseri/pictures/computers/kblog-4.png
http://geiseri.myip.org/~geiseri/pictures/computers/kblog-3.png
http://geiseri.myip.org/~geiseri/pictures/computers/kblog-2.png
http://geiseri.myip.org/~geiseri/pictures/computers/kblog-1.png

Its got a few rough edges but works with any Blogger API server. I have tested it only with drupal though. Ideally it could be expanded to work with other blog apis that use XMLRPC. The UI still needs some work, but really the big goal was to just see how hard it would be. FYI using KTextEditInterface, KHTML and KIO it took all of 8hours of coding.

Maby KDE 3.3, or 3.2 if someone is REALLY interested. It currently is limited to only a few HTML tags, but it has spell checking, and html preview abilities.

Since I use ktexteditinterface, you can also use KVim, QEditor or Kate as the markup editor. Tag autocompletion sorta works, but is limited to the hardcoded tags. Building this into a Kontact plugin should take all of 5 minutes, so if there is interest I can try.

I wrote it for my wife to use with a blog she likes and so far no complaints.

Cheers
-ian reinhart geiser

by Datschge (not verified)

Having this as a part of Kontact sounds great to me. Considering the popularity of "blogging" I'm sure it would be very useful and easily accepted among employees within corporate intranets. =)

by John Doe (not verified)

Me to!

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

I admit I'd like that, I didn't find any good KDE clients for blogger...

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

The hardest part was the XMLRPC interface, but since Frerich Raabe and I found a solution arround that, the client becomes trivial.

Like I said, if I get enough email interest, (like 30 emails or so) ill commit it, but otherwise I have other more pressing projects that need to get done before 3.2.

Also I have had a few people interested in helping maintain it, that also would help get it into CVS faster. The only real missing parts are handlers for different BLOG apis. Since I have a generic C++ <-> XMLRPC mapper, its just a matter of writeing the handlers.

Cheers
-ian reinhart geiser

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

> Since I use ktexteditinterface, you can also use KVim, QEditor or Kate as the markup editor. Tag autocompletion sorta works, but is limited to the hardcoded tags.

What about Quanta? It has complete support for tagging all the dialects of HTML and XHTML as well as the ability to quickly add XML dialects. Besides that it has a WYSIWYG part in development in CVS. ;-)

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

Well becase quanta is WAAAAAY overkill. That and I could duplicate most of what i need in about 50 lines of code. That and wysiwyg is slow and buggy. That and quanta is not something we can have projects depend on since its a 3rd party app. Throw in the 30second startuptime on my 800Mhz athlon and its a no go. Not to diss quanta, but its much easier to use the standard KDE components and roll my own then to dig into that mess...

Quanta is okay for some HTML development, but this is a very limited subset. Im not sure if you have ever blogged before, but most sites only allow about 5 different tags. A step above rich text, but a step below a full HTML editor. Hence the hardcoded tags. I played with my hacked KHTML based editor for a while, but modifying the DOM is just to slow, even from JS. The hard part is that when you update the DOM, especially with tables the cursor can get screwed up. Now I have yet to test this with the latest KJS, but Im really not sold on it. Really the best way is to use QTextEditor and use a special defined stylesheet. Note this is impossible because its not possible to insert custom tags into QTextEditor after its been set into richtext mode.

Maby someday when QTextEdit allows access to the internal paragraph, I can go that route but for now KTextEdit is just fine.

I can click it arround, but since the only web stuff I do these days is PHP, ive never used quanta. (yes i know quata makes an attempt, but KDevelop just blows it so far away its not funny).

Now if you can provide me with a full WYSIWYG editor as a kpart i might take is seriously. Until then I can implement what I need in less than 100 lines of code with KTextEditorInterface and KHTML part.

Cheers
-ian reinhart geiser

by VL User (not verified)

Ouch ..

That has to be the worst remark about Quanta I have ever read.

Ian?

by Datschge (not verified)

I guess Ian just missed Eric's smilie when writing his speech. *shrugs

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

Ummm? What?

It was just an objective statement of why it was not an option. I looked at it first, and then discounted it. Quanta has a ton of baggage that it has accumulated over the years that is beyond the scope of what I need. Whats wrong with saying something is not the correct fit?

Now if I said Quata blows goats because it doesnt do VBScript, then that would be a troll... But I think everything I have stated above is all fact, maby you dont like it. If not Im sorry to hurt your feelings.

Cheers
-ian reinhart geiser

by VL User (not verified)

This is what did it for me ...

> I can click it arround, but since the only web stuff I do these days is PHP, ive never used quanta. (yes i know quata makes an attempt, but KDevelop just blows it so far away its not funny).

The rest of your comment was fair regarding using Quanta for blogging, but then you added this gem in there.

Anyways, I'm not the one developing Quanta, so my feelings are not the ones to be concerned with :)

VL User

by Alex (not verified)

Yes, I know this isn't the place to get unbiased answers, but such places are only imaginary. Anyway, I have started to learn C++ not too long ago and I don't know which toolkit to choose. They both look very attractive and have about a decade of evolution behind them.

WxWindows http://www.wxwindows.org

or

Qt http://www.trolltech.com

When you explain to me why one is better than another please do not mention anything about price, philosophy, or licenses, I only wanta feature comparrison about the PRODUCT itself not the community or anything like that.

Also make your comparrisons between the latest stable versions.

I asjed the same question on Osnews, but I hav received only one answer at the end http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=3794 so i can't really make a decision.

Also, of course I will try both, but I still want opinions.

by Alex (not verified)

Also, is there some kind of "bugs.kde.org" for trolltech's Qt. KDE's bugzilla is wonderful it really helps developers a lot and gives users an easy way to submit bugs or wishes.

by Anonymous (not verified)

On OSnews it was an off topic comment too? Better read the real stories about it:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/21/2036250&mode=thread