Ars Technica: Deep inside the K Desktop Environment 3.2

Ars Technica features an article "Deep inside the K Desktop Environment 3.2" written by Datschge and Henrique Pinto. After introducing KDE and the project's structure the authors present some new applications of KDE 3.2. After that they explain the key KDE technologies KParts, DCOP, KIO, Kiosk and KXMLGUI and give examples for code reusage and an overview of efforts to integrate non-KDE applications. For developers Umbrello, Cervisia and Valgrind with KCachegrind are introduced and of course KDevelop 3.0. An examination of licenses is preceding the positive conclusion.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by Richard Moore (not verified)

I'm imagining a CD player that looks like a computer program:

101011101100111000111111 :-)

Rich.

by Dawnrider (not verified)

Am I the only one who is amused at all of the usability development and critique that is going on, only to find someone promoting what is an exceptionally horrible UI; that of the humble CD/tape player?

I mean, how does '>>' intuitively translate to fast forward? How does '>|' mean next track to most people?

And yet it gets used and people accomodate it... They learn it.

This, of course, doesn't stop truly confusing stereo/radio interfaces with all of their random store/recover buttons. Want to set a radio station to a button? First, press 'Preset', then 'Store', then the button you want, then 'Set' twice, then 'Preset' again. Youwhatnow? Of course, this is buried deep in the 300-page manual, under 'Presets', not 'How to store a radio station'.

Just to place recent usability conversations in context :)

by rinse (not verified)

Am I the only one who is amused at all of the usability development and critique that is going on, only to find someone promoting what is an exceptionally horrible UI; that of the humble CD/tape player?

[quote]I mean, how does '>>' intuitively translate to fast forward? How does '>|' mean next track to most people?[/quote]
If you use a left to right language (and thus a left to right interface), the buttons no longer make sence because they are mirrored (try kcsd --reverse to see the effect.)

Also people who have view problems could have trouble recognizing the buttons.

by anonymous (not verified)

i just found out you can set a script-hook for the phonenumber in kAddressBook. So when you click on a phonenumber of a contact, a script is started with the number being passed as an argument. Great!

Now, after finally getting the ltmodem to work in 2.6, how the hell can I cause the modem to dial, but not beep, and then hang up shortly thereafter (or at the press of a button)? I haven't found anything on freshmeat or kde-apps that would do the trick...

by jay buckley (not verified)

I used to read Ars Technica, until it became apparent that Ken Fisher is a bit of a racist. He typically comes off like your typical smug armchair intellectual, but once he gets fired up, he's got quite a mouth on him. I've seen him get pretty worked up and go off on people on IRC over basically nothing.

It's too bad, too, since the other guys on the site like Hannibal are actually pretty smart.