Stephan Kulow (KDE 3.2 release coordinator) and Ralf Nolden announced a preliminary KDE 3.2 release schedule and asked everyone to check with the personal schedule. Every planned feature should be entered into the KDE 3.2 feature plan before September 1st, 2003 and has to be implemented before September 29th, 2003. An Alpha 1 release is expected for release after the KDE developer conference 2003 in Nove Hrady on September 1st, 2003. Provided that only one Beta release on October 6th, 2003 is necessary, the final KDE 3.2 release is planned on December 8th, 2003.
Dot Categories:
Comments
> Heck, we don't need a major UI haul. I'd be happy with some tweeks and polish:
> 1) Reducing toolbar and menu clutter. The OS X KOffice screenshots show this clearly. Far too much crap in the default setup, looks especially garish on the otherwise elegant OS X setup. Let's just say this: more apps should look like Quanta and fewer should like like Kivio.
Look at that! I've done something that is being pointed to as a good example. I'm tickled. I hope some of my former school teachers who thought I didn't take my studies seriously are reading this. ;-)
The amazing thing is that an admitted gadget freak could do clean UI work. Seriously though, not to knock any other programs, I've always thought Quanta's UI benefits have been in use more than appearance.
> In fact, I use maybe 3 non-KDE apps regularly
which 3?
I bet it's Gimp, Evolution, Gnucash. ;-)
i'm betting that he'll say gimp, xchat, and xmms.
i can't shake off xmms personally because i've ALWAYS used winamp. when there's a good winamp-type media player for kde that doesn't use arts, i'll drop xmms like a piece of hot butter :^)
xmms, xemacs and mozilla?
That's about what I'm using beside KDE. And it allways hurts:-(
But xemacs just has the most advanced editing methods, I'm used to xmms and Mozilla is just a fallback for pages not working with konqui
VMWare, Mathematica, and LyX (which is a Qt app, but not a KDE one :)
Thats the problem, KDE is too busy trying to copy, why not improve on, make KDE the BEST and most unique?
KDE does need more polish but it also needs to be made modern, SVG Icons, SVG widgets, SVG should replace bitmaps, why do we need to use bitmaps and pixels when we can use SVG?
I really hope KDE doesnt fall into the trap Gnome fell into, the one thing which seperates KDE from Gnome is polish, I dont use Gnome because while Gnome may have a more advanced core, it lacks polish.
When I see all the KDE developers talking about how to improve the core of KDE and working on Apps that we dont really need, I see KDE falling into the same trap as Gnome.
KDE needs more polish, while it beats Gnome it doesnt beat OSX or Longhorn.
The goal should be to innovate and not just copy or compare to OSX and Longhorn, but BEAT them both, KDE must be the BEST and EASIEST to use interface, with the most unique features.
Its really that simple, anything less than this and Microsoft wont even be challenged by Linux.
So, have you been using Longhorn for long then?
I kind of disagreee but still agree. KDE should atempt to copy longhorn, and then even improve on it. I'd prove that linux can to anything windows can and more (not that WE need to prove that) and it would go right in M$s Face!
If you have ugly fonts it is probably because you are scaling bit mapped fonts.
If you will provide me with an e-mail address, I will send you a copy of the current draft of my HOWTO (some of which is now obsolete but still has some useful information).
You probably need to install more scalable fonts since XFree86 doesn't come with many. I recommend the URW clones of the 35 standard PS fonts:
http://www.gimp.org/urw-fonts.tar.gz
and the MicroSoft TrueType fonts:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34153&release_id=1...
And the fonts that come with Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 (get the Windows version -- and see my HOWTO).
And learn how to setup XF86Config so that it won't scale bitmapped fonts.
--
JRT
I bet its pan, OpenOffice.org and galeon/mozilla
BTW: I remember that there is a Konqueror mozilla binding. What does this really mean? Can i use the Mozilla 1.4 RC2 enging instead of Konqueror's to display web pages in konqueror with?
nah, its dia,, abiword 2, and sodipodi
it has to be sketch, guppi and Mrproject/Anjuta
I think all of the former KDE dia users (myself) went back to Kivio once it started coming with dia stencils..
Abiword is very comparable to kword-- not sure why any KDE users would use it.
It has to be OO.org.. it's interface sucks ass, even Ximian's copy, but it's MS-doc compatability is nice.
As for sodipod vs. karbon14 vs. killustrator (yes, I'll use the real name), I'd have to go with none of them. Adobe Illustrator on wine is a much better solution.
What are you talking about. OO.org 1.1's interface absolutely rocks, probably the ebst interface for any word processor with so many features. It is also quite customizable in almost everything, includign the abiltiy to have menus/context menus etc. only show options that can be used or just show all of them but make indication for the ones not able to be used.
Seriously, 1.1 ROCKS! The best office suite for linux next to the SO 1.1 betas which have a few extra goodies.
They both have fantastic documentation, in their help files and if taht wasn't enough there are a lot of great and through books on using this office suite.
ttp://tinyurl.com/eqqf
StarOffice 6 Companion 1056 pages
http://tinyurl.com/eqqi
Special Edition Using StarOffice 6.0 1176 pages
and there are even clue sheets which can be handy:
Basics: http://tinyurl.com/eqql
Writer: http://tinyurl.com/eqqp
Draw: http://tinyurl.com/eqqr
Impress: http://tinyurl.com/eqqt
Calc: http://tinyurl.com/eqqu
and in addition to the great documentation available and familiar interface fo MS uers there is also great support for it in the community. All distros shi with it and some companies like Ximian have worked a little on improving it too by replacing all the icons with GNOME ones, and in general improving integration with GNOME.
OO.org's problems are mostly in its stability, integration with OS, and launch speed (fixed with quickstarter) its also a little buggy as any program and may crash though not often. Its only missinga few features which i want also, and that's saying a lot.
> Seriously, 1.1 ROCKS!
Are you __really__ being serious here? Wow! I found OOo 1.1b1's interface certainly better than 1.0 (which is in turn, was much better than StarOffice 5), but it simply doesn't compare to Microsoft Office, koffice, or gnome-office (Abiword, Gnumeric, ...)
OOo's strength in comparison to koffice or gnome-office is it's very strong feature-set. This is where OOo really shines at. However, even if it a lot more features, OOo 1.1 is still a massive nightmare to use compared to MS Office, which has even more features.
This is why for right now, I use kword for general word processing, gnumeric for spreedsheet stuff, and OOo only for opening Word and Excel files and converting them to rtf.
Ximian's work on OOo is decent, but it still feels like an alien environment has landed on the earth and taken over your computer. I think MS office users will be more attracted to koffice or gnome-office. I tried to get a friend of mine to use OpenOffice 1.1 in windows a few weeks ago, because she reinstalled Windows and didn't have a copy of MS-Office anymore. She didn't like it much at all. I next installed a copy of Abiword, and she liked and picked it up pretty quick. Eventually, she needed more than a wordprocesser so she ended up downloading Office from kazaa. There goes the whole alternative software thing; many times the product with 97% market share often really does work better.
> BTW: I remember that there is a Konqueror mozilla binding. What does this really mean? Can i use the Mozilla 1.4 RC2 enging instead of Konqueror's to display web pages in konqueror with?
It means that Konqueror would use Gecko instead of khtml to render webpages.
However, when it was current, very few people actually used it, so it's become unmaintained and doesn't work with anything past Moz 1.2 afaik. It was cool and all, but it always felt weird using a KDE app with gecko :)
Perhaps if one day the Qt port of Mozilla (which gradually became unmaintained years ago once khtml started becoming better, and for a time, had eclipsed gecko until about Mozilla 0.8-0.9 or so) was revived and added back into the main development trunk.
I think taht's cool, a great way to enjoy full comaptibility with the web while KHTML becomes just as good! I've not found a single webpage that would not render correctly with Mozilla 1.4 RC 2 and now it renders very fast too.
I hope that this project will be maintained again. Though, I do have one big concern, will this mean Konqueorr will have the same start up time as Mozilla?
We need better font rendering, we need KDE to switch to SVG rendered interface, SVG icons, etc.
The most important thing KDE needs right now is polish, I dont know if we need more apps.
> I dont know if we need more apps.
Funny, two comments before you were sure that all apps are there.
I agree, KDE needs to adopt a HIG which every KDE application that will be included in the default KDE distribution needs to follow.
Perhaps taking the best parts of these freely available and well known UI
guidelines and creating one for KDE.
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuidelines/i...
http://developer.apple.com/ue/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/default.asp?conte...
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/
At the very least combine the 2 KDE higs. I also think KDE needs to have a banenr or something on its website encouraging documentation writters =)
Why not use the GNOME HIG? A good deal of the systems that have KDE apps installed also have GNOME apps, and it would be nice if they both had a consistent UI.
> Why not use the GNOME HIG?
Because there is a good degree of disagreement about about some parts of the Gnome HIG. There are certain sections of it that will probably never be followed by KDE, and wouldn't generally be good for KDE apps either.
> and it would be nice if they both had a consistent UI.
Yes, of course. Whoever is interested enough in this can draft up a set of guidelines that combines common elements of the GNOME HIG and what KDE follows. There would then still be some differences, but consistancy would be improved.
I reference lit's excellent post from the previous CVS Digest:
http://dot.kde.org/1055539007/1055544932/1055545303/1055546879/105559378...
Sorry to reply to your post and link to this lit, but I think your work deserves to be given good deal of publicity. I want to see something come of it, or at the least, people to learn from it.
I'm writting a small KDE app currently, but after I've finished the majority of the feature set that I want to do some major work with KDE's usability as I feel I have some talent and experience in the area. Hopefully some of my patches will be submitted * crosses fingers * I don't feel that KDE's usability is bad, but things can certainly be improved. It is important that new users can look at applications like Konqi and instantly understand how to use it and what most of the buttons/menus/widgets do. Afterall, experienced users already know how to use the application, it's only new users who have to learn the app, and if the interface is complex they might not ever turn into experienced users and then we have lost another newcomer back to Windows/MacOSX.
> I agree, KDE needs to adopt a HIG which every KDE application that will be included in the default KDE distribution needs to follow.
Of course, before KDE were to adopt such a thing, it would have to be created first :)
I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to help write such a beast (myself included), but very few people would be willing to spearhead it.
> I also think KDE needs to have a banenr or something on its website encouraging documentation writters =)
I think what could be helpful is either the start of a user contributed-Wiki or user-annotated (like http://www.andamooka.org/ or php.org Docs)
) documentation (even for developers) website. Then, anybody who would otherwise not contributed to writing docs, could add their comments and what not.
Another useful approach would be adding something like "Rate the quality of this document" with live results (like Microsoft's msdn). This would be helpful in letting documentation writers know what docs must be updated or be focused on. It's easier than reporting bugs.
With this two approroaches, comments and contributions from users could be merged in by doc writers to form the static docs that are shipped with KDE releases. A plug for the website from khelpcenter would of course be nice too :-)
Anyways, it's just an idea. It takes someone to actually create it. The second approach could be extended to anything in KDE btw-- you could have "Rate this dialog" or whatever. /me imagines a "AmIHotOrNot"-type of thing :-)
HIGS sounds like "Hide inherent gnome shortcomings - behind a potemkin village of virtual actions (like inventing and praising rules don't need)". In kde, the OO-based approach and the strong framework leads to good code reusuability and rapid prototyping. So KDE hasn't the problem that gnome has - the difference in the UI of programs resulting from the reinvention of existing code which can't be adopted.
That's the advantage of a good framework - it makes additional actions for getting similar UI's redundant. So please, add your advices to the Gnome lists - THEY may need it.
I agree that KDE is uniform. Uniformly messy that is. KDE is extremely cluttered. With my setup, the problems become acute: I'm using 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD. I can immediatly spot clutter --- its when 16x16 icons are jammed so close together that I can't tell what they're for anymore. The sidebars in Kate and Konqueror are examples of these. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of KDE, and as I've said before, its the only desktop environment on my 100% Linux machine. However, even I have to admit that GNOME is a whole lot more streamlined. Its not about making KDE less powerful or taking out options --- its about presenting all that power in a way in which the interface is clean and accessible at any given time. Until we get totally automated GUIs (which which the programmer only specifies content, and all layout is done by the toolkit) it will be impossible to get a clean UI without some sort of HIG. Heck, even if we had such an automated GUI interface, we'd still need an HIG, its just that it would automatically be enforced by the layout engine, rather than by the programmer.
Will it be any faster, especially going backwards in Konqueror?
Darren
...Or when moving or copying 5000 files...
... or will KDE improve the framerate in counter strike?
i installed cvs one, maybe 2 months ago. you wouldnt believe speed improvement..
and the latest cvs-checkout is even faster!
thx, kde-devel. you rock!
Maybe we can run kde very fast on a 486 in the future :D
I was wondering about the following ...
If you had the cash to pay for -Accelerated-X Summit Series v2.2- from xig.com, would it make a difference to the perceived speed when using KDE?
Would apps run/start faster, OpenGL or non OpenGL?
What is the dot's opinion on this please.
Thank you.
If the driver of your GXF card is the problem, then it would be faster. But this is extremely unlikely...
Apps wouldnt run faster, but maybe a screen update needs only 1 ms instead of 2 ms. If you are lucky and your Xfree driver is extremely bad. I doubt that you can see the difference, unless you are using CAD apps or other things that are very demanding.
hey
I hope that one thing leaves with kde 3.2, the flickerr..
- the selection line, u know. the line with wich you select desktop icons.. it flickers when moved.
- text in kate/kwrite. when i type the whole text flickers..
its annoying
but this are just details of course. i think kde is good for the rest
i use kde 3.1.1
> - text in kate/kwrite. when i type the whole text flickers..
already fixed in cvs
> the selection line, u know. the line with wich you select desktop icons.. it flickers when moved.
what do you exactly mean? are you talking about how when you select a icon on the desktop and move it around or what?
I set KDE not to show the contents ofa window when resizing or moving.
The thing is that the line which is shown instead flickers like mad, instead of being a nice thick black line it jsut changes colors all voer the place and flashes, is this fixed iN CVS?
> is this fixed iN CVS?
No. It sometimes happens that problems that are not reported at the proper place simply don't get fixed.
what do you exactly mean? are you talking about how when you select a icon on the desktop and move it around or what?
GEM called it rubber band.. the rectangle that you use to select icons on the desktop.
The thing what tim sais is what i mean. The line itself flickers.
I know it isnt a disaster as long as you can select the icons.
But still... details count
And the thing that alex is saying is also true here.nice to hear the text flickering is fixed:)
i would rather see a small solid BlACk line to move windows non-opaque then a fake flickering translutant one.. same for the select line
I saw the link to this in the article summary. Is this website ever going to be updated again? AFAIK, it said, "gone for the summer", back about two years in 2001, ago, and hasn't come back since.
Oh where oh where is tink with her interviews? I miss reading em every week on the dot =(
It seems the .dot has a bit of a problem with its news feeds. The "recnt software" and the "latest looks" section are not so recent after all, they're a few days old. I hope the script hasn't been coded wrong.
Well, I like the planned features for KDE 3.2, and I am definetely looking forward to it.
But, since a while ago I said I thought that GNOME development is progressing faster (http://dot.kde.org/1052493117/) and you all said that GNOME wasn't even clsoe to being as fast as KDE development, yet I just looked at the weekly summary for KDE and GNOME right here:
KDE: http://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summary.cgi
GNOME: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/weekly-bug-summary.html
And it seems that the GNOME developers have resolved 250 more bugs than KDE developers, so stop thinking your so far ahead and like I said before, look at the competition.
And provide THE BEST tools making KDE a no brainer platform, umbrello, Qt Designer, Qt Assistant, Qt Linguist, Qt Script, Kommander, Kdevelop 3, DCOP etc. are just a few of the technologies that make KDE stand out and that's great, keep it up we need to convince people to develop for KDE instead of GNOME IMO. More powerful easy to use tools is what KDE needs IMO and by easy to use I mean tools that are actually documented. its been shown everywhere taht if something is simple and yet powerful with wide appeal it becomes very sucessful quickly, just like web design did.
Just wanted to bring that to your attention.
Mario, I don't understand your obsession with bug counts. That's NOT a good indicator of how much work is being done - for example, if Gnome2 is more recent and has more trivial bugs to fix, of course they'll be quicker. That doesn't mean KDE is stagnating or anything, just that hard bugs take longer.
Of course it might mean something completely different, the point I'm making is that throwing meaningless statistics around and saying "work harder!" (to people who code as a hobby) is pointless
> And it seems that the GNOME developers have resolved 250 more bugs than KDE developers, so stop thinking your so far ahead
Still trolling? You should learn to read statistics, they are not comparable: GNOME's statistic explicitly states that it includes enhancement requests while KDE's doesn't. Then look at the total number of bugs+wishes: KDE's count is lower. Look at the count of opened reports in the last week, GNOME's number is more than double so high. GNOME's report wizard is very bad at preventing duplicate report submitting, so no wonder they have to close so many reports. Look at the fluctuation: KDE's total count shrank during the last week, GNOME's grew. Let's not even consider the different products on both side (GNOME has no html rendering widget or Abisource but Gtk in Bugzilla, Evolution bugs are kept somewhere else). In short, not comparable.
> And provide THE BEST tools making KDE a no brainer platform, Qt Designer, Qt Assistant, Qt Linguist, Qt Script
As their names say, those are not provided by KDE but Trolltech.
Ed, don't pretend to quote me, I never said it meant either group worked harder in the original post. I just said that KDE's development isn't so much faster based entirely on the statistics which show that GNOME devs have resolved 250 more bugs than KDE devs in a week. I don't know if maybe half of those resolved bugs were duplicates, I doubt it but who knows. All I wanted to say was that there is no clear winner and we should stop saying oh GNOME is so far behind because they are ahead in some areas just as we are in some, there is no need for this arrogance.
> we should stop saying oh GNOME is so far behind
o.k. stopped. I'll never do it again
Who's _we_? Jes' I've never said that Gnome is 'far behind' Well I doubt the developers walk around and have nothin to do but to tell everybody that Gnome is oh so far behind... In fact I get the impression that the KDE folks are aware of competition (in a positive manner...) And if somebody says that gnome may be behind in tis or that area, that's okay for a K-developer as you _have_ to be at least a bit proud of your work...
Or at least innovation has slowed.
Since KDE 3.0 I havent really seen any new features. Wheres the SVG Icons? What about adding some unique features to Konquerer to make it better than MOzilla? How about improving the existing Apps? I see tons of new Apps popping up and then theres a million unfinished Apps that seem to have been abandoned.
> Since KDE 3.0 I havent really seen any new features.
Maybe you should install KDE 3.1? Really, what was exciting new in KDE 3.0?
Crystal SVG is already in KDE 3.1.
Who gives a damn if it's SVG though? It's still an icon.