KDE-CVS-Digest for September 19, 2003

In this week's CVS digest:
The KWin rewrite has been merged into mainline KDE. Optimizations in KABC, the address book framework, and the
Konqueror listview.
QtRuby gains support for KDE classes. KJSEmbed, a JavaScript implementation for KDE,
now has SQL database bindings. Plus a large number of bugfixes.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by Steffen (not verified)

Go to "Appearance & Themes" -> "Launch Feedback" in the Control Center and select "Bouncing Cursor" in the dropdown menu. Discovered this today and love it. Unfortunately the apps loads so fast in KDE 3.2. ;-)

by anon (not verified)

Hehehe, that's a good one!

by Mumumba (not verified)

hey, that sounds really cool ;-)
would it be possible to make a screenshots and post it on kdelook.org ?
many of kde3.2-hungrey KDE-Fans would enjoy previews like that :)
thanks

by Anonymous (not verified)

>would it be possible to make a screenshots

Yay! Captain Illiterate strikes again.
Now how do you want to make _static sceenshots_ of _juming_ cursors?

by KDE User (not verified)

No one except you said static screenshots. GIF or MNG would work, as would any number of other animation formats.

by Shift (not verified)

Fill a wish to bugs.kde.org to ask "Animatited screenshots for ksnapshot" ;)

by Olaf Jan Schmidt (not verified)

No chance for KDE 3.2, as we already had feature freeze, but maybe for KDE 4.0 - it should not be too difficult to implement something like this in KMag.

by rjw (not verified)

you could use KDE desktop sharing (x0rfb), and then use that vnc2swf recorder prog to make an evil flash file.

Eh?

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

I've been using that for awhile now. Its cool :) Now, I'm going to have to figure out a way to make the icon larger --- 16x16 is really just too small.

by norman (not verified)

Well it is a bit fun it can be annoying after a while. I'm still waiting for the Gnome style way of doing it, Display "Starting Program" in the task bar.

by Thomas (not verified)

The kicker taskbar is capable of that too. ... I get a small rotating sandglass in the taskbar indicating a starting program...Though I've deactivated the cursor symbol, the (small) taskbar indication is discreet and does not bother me (like e.g. the cursor symbol does).

by Chris Howells (not verified)

KDE has been able to do this since KDE 2.0 or so. The icon on the mouse cursor came after.

by none (not verified)

great read as always.

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

Does Kwin III support any special synchronization between window frame and window contents? Supposedly, Metacity uses the SYNC extension to make sure that the window frame and window contents are updated syncronously, to minimize rubber-banding.

Hmm, I'm recompiling CVS right now. I guess I'll find out one way or another :)

by poephoofd (not verified)

>> rubber-banding

Are you sure you know what you're talking about?

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

Of course. Why would you ask that? A description of the feature can be found here:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2002-December/msg00023.html

The feature is actually implemented in the newest versions of Metacity, though I don't know if the GTK patch is integrated yet.

by poephoofd (not verified)

>> Of course. Why would you ask that?

Because rubber banding is something very different.

Anyway, I totally agree, it would be great if KWin would support that as well.
(it even made Metacity fast when I tried back in those days)

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

I use rubber-banding to refer to the inability of the contents of the window to keep up with the window frame. What definition are you using?

PS> Ugh, in the latest CVS, Konq resizes *much* worse than it used to. The canvas can't even keep up with the resizing of simple pages like dot.kde.org, much less complex ones like Slashdot. I wonder if this is just random fluctations in Konq (that happens sometimes) or if its a problem with the new kwin.

by Joeri Sebrechts (not verified)

I've always considered rubber banding to be drawing a dashed line or rectangle to indicate where and how an object which is being resized will be drawn. Google seems to consider that the authorative meaning of rubber-banding.

Ofcourse, if you're not using opaque resize, then there will be rubber-banding, because the window will be reduced to a rubber band.

by somebody (not verified)

>
> It's great to plan future of KSpread when there are
> such obvious, long-standing and easy to fix bugs.
>

Well, I think it makes sense to plan the future of KSpread if you have the chance to meet?! Especially if is about redesigning (which involves bug fixes here: performance bug,...). (See dot news about that)

Fix the bugs if they are easy to fix - if you have the time -> some people don't seem to have it right now...

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

I do not think that Luká? has meant it in the first degree. He is KOffice's release manager after all.

Have a nice day!

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

Grr.. the ? was supposed to be a s caron. Sorry, Lukas.

by Mario (not verified)

The KWin rewrite sounds great and a lot easier for developers, maybe I'll even make a style ;)

I'm also glad to ssee a lot of bugs being fixed. From the "weekly summmary" :
http://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summary.cgi

424 bugs fixed and 144 wishes complete. by the time you read this, the number will probably be higher! This ought to be a far less buggy release than 3.1.

However, I really hope it will be delayed about a month so that it can be in a new year and people will think it's even more modern, and also it will be more polished. In addition, few people would actually get 3.2 if it's released in December, most will wait 3-4 months for the distros, so even if it's rleased earlier than February it won't make a difference for most people. 80% of users just get KDE from their distributions.

Also, I'm wondering, with all these bugs fixed so fast will KDE be able to accomplish it's release goals http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-3.2-features.html most items seem to be in the to-do and in progress section so what's goign on here? Are many items actually done but just not reported?

Anyway, thanks KDE contributors!

by Derek Kite (not verified)

Years ago I worked for a fellow in construction. We did concrete work. We would get to the jobsite, figure out what needed doing, he would disappear for a few minutes, then announce that the concrete was ordered, and would arrive at 2 PM.

We got the forms done, just in time usually.

So coolo has decided that a finished release will happen on Dec 8.

Derek

by Mohasr (not verified)

I don't know what is 3.2 default kwin decoration , but I think it shouldn't be keramik as in 3.1 , because it confuses new users as its buttons aren't the regular _ square X , I'd like to see knifty or the one with plastic style is the default 3.2 kwin decoration , what do you think?

by Daniel Molkentin (not verified)

One thing that confuses users most is constantly changing default themes. As we are talking about the type of user that never change their settings (do we?) those are best served with as few theme changes as possible. While I became a real fan of plastik (looks slicker than Keramik), I think it's not a good idea to force the user to yet another widgetstyle change. Maybe for 4.0, but not within the 3.x series.

Cheers,
Daniel

by jukabazooka (not verified)

When a change is for the better, I am all for it. Still, even if it wasn't made the default theme, Plastik could be in kde3.2.

by Chris Howells (not verified)

Plastik is going to be in KDE 3.2. It's on the feature schedule. Can't remember if it's already been imported.

by Anonymous (not verified)

It has already been imported into kdeartwork.

by poephoofd (not verified)

Then at least make the buttons nicer/better/more usable.

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

I'm beginning to consider Keramik a liability. KDE looks 10x prettier on my desktop than it does in any of the screenshots, mainly because Keramik looks really strange, and the defaut colors aren't that great either. The man problem is the gradient in the toolbars and menubar. It makes it look like the toolbar is curving out. The icons are still flat, so how are they sitting on that toolbar? Are they lying tangent to the edge of the curve? If so, how come there is no shadow underneath? You also get a weird effect with buttons that can be pushed in --- you'd expect the sunken portion to be deeper at the middle of the gradient, but it isn't. Also, Keramik highlights a redraw problem in KDE Styles. Styles with gradient toolbars cannot redraw fast enough to keep up with the window border, so you can see the toolbar creep across the screen as you resize it. With Keramik this is especially bad, because the gradient is so heavy and the toolbar looks so deep. You get a very visible "cliff" of the edge of the toolbar lagging behind the window frame. Styles that paint their background via Qt (use the PaletteBackground mode) or can redraw fast enough (like ThinKeramik and a few others) don't suffer from this problem.

by Mohasr (not verified)

hey ! as for style , keramik was and *still* my favorite style ,
BUT I'm talking about keramik Window Decoration that I think should be changed

Window decoration NOT widget style

by Wurzelgeist (not verified)

Oh? I thought Plastik will be the default in 3.2?

by no (not verified)

nope, there won't even be any consideration for it as the default style until KDE 4.0. We can't have three different default styles for three different >minor< (3.X) releases.

After KDE 3.2 is released, I'm sure there will be some discussion about this issue, especially if KDE 3.3 is dropped in favor of 4.0. The prime candidates are Plastik and ThinKeramik.

by Steffen (not verified)

Try using Keramik style + window decoration with the Plastik color scheme, I think this rocks! :-)

by Lubos Lunak (not verified)

Hmm. That shows how "useful" CVS statistics are. But anyway, that must be a record ;).

by Derek Kite (not verified)

Well, if you save up a year's work, commit it all at once to HEAD, this is what happens :)

I think coolo had a week way up there, due to regenerating all the .po files.

Derek

by Burrhus (not verified)

Does anyone else notice this page is wider than the browser window? I'm using KDE 3.1.4, and this page is wider than my browser window. The window has to be 965 pixels before the problem goes away (with the font size set at -4, the window only has to be 860 pixels wide). I have to shrink the page to less than 700 pixels before Mozilla draws a horizontal scroll bar. Interesingly, if you save the page and look at the preview in the open file dialog, it looks fine there.

Bug fix 61730 [1] was supposed to resolve this issue, and it did resolve the issue on some sites, but apparently Konqueror still exhibits the problem right here on the dot.

[1] http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61730

by rinse (not verified)

Yep, happens here as wel.
I use kde 3.1.4, and no matter how large I make the Konqueror window, the width of the page is larger then the Konqueror view, so a horizontal scroll bar is visible.

Same with kopete, no matter how large its chat window is, there is always a horizontal scroll bar.

Rinse

by alice (not verified)

Same here. 3.1.4 was supposed to fix this?? well it didn't! :)

Just wondered if this in any is in CVS and if not WHY? As far as i see it, it's a pretty important feature, i mean if im chatting in kopete and just change to konq with teh caht window minimised i'd like to be notified by Kicker as to whether i recieve a message (app changes state?). Would this involve the new Kwin and Kicker or something else?

BTW this isn't a feature request, just asking whether it is there, if not feature request will go up.

Well, I think what you want is already possible, because I have seen new-message notification in Netscape Mail (4.xx). It would change the application icon in the taskbar. So, really, you should ask the kopete guys to implement something like this for you.

Paul.

I implemented KWindowInfo which offers this sort of thing in KDE 3.1. It lets you put messages in the titlebar and provide temporary overrides of the WM icon.

Rich.

Why not just a flashing or pulsing taskbar button?

I really don't see it (quickly) if only an icon or text changes..

by Richard Moore (not verified)

It can do that too, you just make the overlay have the appropriate appearance.

Rich.

I've seen apps flash in the application panel in CVS as of the latest rebuild (this past weekend). For example, if I start Konqueror and then go back to kmail when konq finally starts, it's taskbar item flashes blue (I don't have any startup notification things enabled)

I have yet to test to see how well the flashing corresponds to application notification (ksirc, etc) but I think it's a great idea.

by Andrey V. Panov (not verified)

1. Per site loading policy for images and flashes (like for javascript and cookies).

2. Downloading of files by external program (like galeon does).

3. Possibility to save loaded into konqueror window by kparts .pdf,.dvi,.ps files.
Ability to download these files by (external) download tool instead of loading by kdvi etc.

4. Change in zooming policy, instead per page to per site or per tab (like in galeon).

5. Blocking popups.

I think it is not hard to implement these features.

by Debian User (not verified)

> I think it is not hard to implement these features.

Great, when do you start to?

Yours, Kay

by Tukla Ratte (not verified)

> I think it is not hard to implement these features.

Heh. Spoken like a true IT manager.