KDE 3.4 Beta 1 Screenshots

KDE 3.4 Beta 1, christened Krokodile, was released not too long ago. For those of you who have not yet taken the plunge, Eudpytula Minor has announced some Krokodile screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

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Comments

by anon (not verified)

agreed...

by Corbin (not verified)

The icons after the "Download Manager" icon (blue down arrow, opens KGet), is actually another toolbar (I don't believe on by default), its called Document Relations.

Maybe the icons after 'Stop' on the main toolbar should be split into their own toolbar, which would be easier to disable or something?

by Asdex (not verified)

Konqueror's toolbars are fully adjustable. Just do it.

But you are right, those cut/copy/paste icons are useless (and those are the first ones I remove).

Btw. it would be much better if KDE would tell new users to use the middle mouse button for pasting instead of showing those redundant cut/copy/paste icons on every applicatin's toolbar. Unix is not windows!

Not true. There are features in there, once removed, can't be put back in a feasible manner. Some of the special KHTML buttons or some such, they're context sensitive. You can't shift those around. Smarter defaults are required. Configurability is must, just as much as capturing the gist of the application is. There are many useless buttons considering average tasks done by illiterate users.

Scaling up for power users and having smart defaults for the former makes more sense.

by Christoph Wiesen (not verified)

really has nothing to do with the news, but anyway:
I don't think cut/copy/paste are redundant in anyway.
What your are doing when you "copy" a text is different from just marking the text and using the middle mouse. When using "copy" you can be sure that the text will be in the 'clipboard' until you copy something else.
In KDE there's even a history for that, but that's not the point.
You don't lose the text when you "accidentially" select some other random text. As far as I know you can't cut with the Unix-style and you can't 'overwrite' a selection with something from your clipboard.

All in all the basic unix copy function is clumsy at best, but it is handy at times - for very quick copy here, paste there actions. KDE has the easiest but yet most powerful cut/copy/paste implementation aorund - I don't see anything redundant here.

(Despite the toolbar cut/copy/paste buttons ;))

by Derek Kite (not verified)

It must be nice to be young, and not need glasses. I use the increase/decrease font buttons all the time.

This hasn't been an issue in firefox, so the solution here may be a more reasonable selection of font sizes. That would alleviate the need for toolbar buttons.

Derek

by judith (not verified)

Ohh...So Derek now sounds to be elderly? The Derek Kite I know is relatively young, http://derekkite.com. Is it you?

by Derek Kite (not verified)

Heh. He looks much better than I do.

Derek

by Tip (not verified)

Just use Ctrl+ mouse wheel to ajust fonts. It`s faster & easily (you don`t have to position mouse on the toolbar button).

by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

So many people want to remove icons for usability, but when someone comes along who uses those icons, he's told to use a keyboard shortcut or something instead. Having to remember a bunch of key combos will really do well to attract new users lol.

What new user is going to have a clue that he can make the fonts bigger if he can't quite make them out? He's going to come to the .dot and read your suggestion about ctrl and mousewheel?

by Tip (not verified)

Yes, this is a problem. Today`s solution for it is Konqi`s Tips dialog. KDE 3.4 will include new user`s manual (this is the place for such things).

But I think that better is an 1 hour KDE video (or pseudovideo aka recorded actions?) guide about common ways to work with KDE (Desktops, Kicker configure, KHotKey configure, use of search in the K Control Center,KIO,.desktop files,Konqueror,Alt+F2,Toolbar editor,App menu edit, KDE menu edit,DCOP&KDCOP,...). Just to show how it can be used.

by ninaw (not verified)

I think a KDE Tour for new users would be a nice idea too. For those who are already familiar, then there should be an option to skip it.

by Morty (not verified)

Are you going to send me a mouse with weel then?

by Tip (not verified)

Personally, I don`t know about any PC without mouse with mouse with wheel...
I`m just think that this is not _common_ problem. You can always add buttons if you need it.

by Boudewijn (not verified)

I've got nine pc's about the house, and only one of them has a scroll wheel. The rest are laptops

by testerus (not verified)

Most laptops can scroll using the synaptics driver.
http://qsynaptics.sourceforge.net/
AFAIR there are also solutions for trackpoint equipped notebooks out there.

by phillip vu-tran (not verified)

i have a dell laptop. i want to make the fonts bigger and smaller. i volunteer at a seniors home, and this feature is really handy.

i got the laptop to do this by accident, but for the life of me cannot replicate.

please please help.

cordially, phillip

by cm (not verified)

The quickest way to change font size on demand is using Ctrl + Mousewheel Up and Ctrl + Mousewheel Down.

This works in Konqueror, KMail, KGhostview, KPDF and firefox. Those are the ones I know of, there may be others.

by cm (not verified)

Oops, sorry, I was missing the context of your message. Without a mouse you can still use the keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-"+" and Ctrl-"-").

BTW: The first thing I do when I set up my laptop is plugging in my USB mouse. It's much more comfortable for me that way.

by phillip vu-tran (not verified)

thanks a mil

the only way i can get my dell latitude 110L to do this, is to go into internet explorer, click on to 'view' and change it from there

i was hoping for the 'control' + or -

but these functions wont work on xphome/i. explorer for me

anyhoo, thank you again for posting a reply.

cordially, phillip

by cm (not verified)

Oh! Your question was about Windows and Internet Explorer...

I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place then. This newsboard and this discussion is about KDE, a graphical desktop for Linux and UNIX operating systems.

by cm (not verified)

Eight laptops!? Wow.

The first thing I did when I got mine last year was to plug in an external wheel mouse. :-)

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Three of them are pretty old clunkers I bought second-hand for my daughters :-). One is a Mac. One is my wife's, one is mine. And I do use a scrollwheel mouse when sitting at a desk, but not when I'm on the train. In any case, depending on something like a scroll wheel for important ui functions is a bad idea. And I think that KDE already uses the scroll wheel to much. You can hardly idly scroll the wheel without moving another desktop, another application or something else into or out of focus :-).

by Jonathan (not verified)

I think the zoom in/out should be got rid of too. I normally get very annoyed with website text being too small, so I set my konqueror HTML fonts to 11 for the minimum and medium sizes in the settings. Now I never have to zoom in because they are guaranteed to never be too small. You should try this too. It means you never have to click the toolbar icons or hit the shortcut keys again for zooming in, and if it's a common problem it'll make your surfing that little bit easier.

by Christoph Wiesen (not verified)

I'd agree that the cut/copy/paste and print buttons aren't needed on the toolbar by default. These aren'T usually expected to be there by users and the first three are hardly useable because almost everybody does this via the RMB context menu, the keyboard shortcuts or even the edit menu.

Maybe "print" needs discussion, but I think most people expect and use it under "Location". Though I realize that some folks will be used to having it on the toolbar in KDE by now. Yet in File-Management Mode I can't relly see a reason for it. You can't print a directories content with it so it's use is zero unless you use some kind of embedded viewer.

The in-/decrease symbols icons are needed in file management view imo, because they are necessary to switch between different view modes - to remove them the four icons (increase icons, decrease icons, list-views, tree-views) would need some kind of a merge, so all the functions are more easily accessible with only one or two buttons. Otherwise i'd say those buttons are needed for file-management - yet they could be removed from the web browser part.

But honestly, if the following icons are removed the whole Konqueror looks a lot cleaner already and shouldn't remove too much functionality or resort people to using keyboard shortcuts:
- cut
- copy
- paste
- print

I suppose we're not aiming at having the adress / search bar to the left of the main toolbar like e.g. firefox here, because I think Konqueror is more than that and needs more than just the basic navigational buttons by default.

by Dan (not verified)

I raised a feature request to change the increase/decrease font size buttons to one font size button that pops up a slider. Takes one button off the toolbar at least and without losing any functionality either.

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96663

by Alex (not verified)

I agree. If there is one thing I hate about KDE besides inconsistent UIs, it is the clutter of pointless options (KDE 3.4 will have a feature to enable or disable shading of active row in listview, that is ridculous)and toolbars with everything under the sun on them.

We really need something like Gconf for options taht only 0.1% of userbase cares about and taht just confuse the rest.

by Dan (not verified)

I disagree with the Gconf thing but that probably does not matter since there is so much more obvious stuff that can be tackled first.

Why does Kaboodle have a toolbar button for hiding the menu? Is Kaboodle in some sense unique so it needs it and other apps do not? Surely those sorts of obscure settings that advanced users may want (and I'm not understanding why anybody would want this feature) should not be on the toolbar?

When we have cleaned up obvious UI design errors that KDE is so full of then we can debate other solutions but for now I see no point.

by dwt (not verified)

KDE is a winner! You know why? Because of integration (e.g. the RSS integration, network transparancy) and code reuse (e.g. koffice libs).
I like Gnome as well, but integration is really, really poor at some points (e.g. vfs) compared to KDE.
On the other hand the Gnome UI is very polished thanks to the HIG.
I always think of migrating to Gnome (just to try it out for a while), but always end up missing
important features that only KDE has.
More than three cheers for KDE!

P.S.: does anyone know where to get the journal plugin for kontact?
Thanks a lot!

by Daniel Molkentin (not verified)

>P.S.: does anyone know where to get the journal plugin for kontact?

From a KDE 3.4 release near you :)

Cheers,
Daniel

by Rutger Claes (not verified)

I agree. I also consider switching to Gnome each time I see one of those elegant and simple UI's. I must add that I've always sticked to KDE because of the programs, features and integration...
It would be great if KDE could addopt some UI-knowledge of Gnome.

KDE 3.4 looks great.

by Paul Leopardi (not verified)

At some point, KDE will have enough users that the demand for bug fix releases will be strong enough that bugs will be fixed in previous versions and a bug fix releases will be made on a regular basis. Maybe this has happened in the past.

See "Is there any chance of KDE 3.3.3?"
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-linux&m=110591224012969&w=2

My interest in this is that I have a bug in Kmail which prevents me from properly using IMAP, and I rely on IMAP for my most important email. Many IMAP related bugs have been identified in KDE 3.3.X and fixed in the KDE 3.3 branch of CVS. Some of these bug fixes did not make it into KDE 3.3.2 and are still sitting in CVS. For example, "Bug 88511: message preview panel sometimes does not show message" http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88511

I tried to incorporate the CVS for KDE PIM into my KDE 3.3.2 Level "a" setup on SUSE 9.1 Professional AMD64, but compilation failed:
See "How to integrate bug fix from source into RPM-based"
http://lists.kde.org/?t=110466934400002&r=1&w=2

So I am currently left with waiting for KDE 3.4, hoping that all the new bugs introduced with all the new features are not worse than any bugs that may have been fixed. I only have one PC at home which is a production machine - I use it for all my PhD work - and right now I don't want to make it unstable by making it rely on beta software, KDE or otherwise.

For comparison, note that Linux kernel 2.4.28 was released on 2004-11-17 and 2.4.29 was released on 2005-01-19. Even though the current kernel is 2.6.10, bug fix releases for 2.4 still come out on a regular basis. See http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/

by Anonymous (not verified)

Have you talked to the kde packager of your distro? It's their job to provide updated binaries when security issues or important bugs are fixed in cvs.

by anon (not verified)

The O.P wants "older" bug fixes to be included in current source code. That isn't the distributors' job, that's a development issue.

by Carsten (not verified)

Can't you build kdepim yourself from the latest cvs of KDE_3_3_BRANCH? It is pretty simple. You would need all *devel-RPM SuSE provides you with, cvs and perhaps some other RPM like gcc, autotools. It might even be that you already have all those tools on you machine.

by Robert (not verified)

I see that the konq sidebar widget redesign from http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=17049 isn't present in these shots. Will this get in to 3.4 final?

I've always thought it looks better and is far more intuitive than the present buttons down the side.

by Anonymous (not verified)

> Will this get in to 3.4 final?

How could mockups ever enter source code?

by Robert (not verified)

I posted the wrong link.

There is working code is there, as 'anonymous' above points out.

by Saem (not verified)

IIRC, Andre got an account a fair bit ago and those patches were contributed and accepted. If I'm not mistaken, he's continuing that work and possibly other stuff within KDE.

by teatime (not verified)

I sure hope that sidebar redesign never happens.

The problem with using the toolbox widget for the Konqueror sidebar tabs is that it doesn't scale. In the screenshots of the link you posted there are only four tabs. (See http://www.kde-look.org/content/pre1/16962-1.png) This is probably the pain threshold for the widget. In my current setup, I have eight sidebar buttons. Try imagining eight tabs in this screenshot. A lot of space is wasted.

by Robert (not verified)

Yes, you have a point.

But I've always found the existing buttons down the side to be quite confusing and ambiguous. Which drawer is open? Is one of them open under the others? How do I make this one disappear? Of course, I do actually know, but my first impressions were along these lines.

Maybe someone has a better idea.

by Alex (not verified)

The sidebar he proposes is terrible for usability and real estate.

There isa lso no compact mode, one in which that you just press icons and it appears and man is it a big hack too. There are just so many problems with it.

Linspire even had this as default in pre release versions for Linspire 5 and after Insiders complained, the patch was quickly removed.

Don't make the same mistake.

by Pat (not verified)

I posted here screenshots showing this:
knewtuff that allows you to get new wallpaper from kde-look, kopete and its search function in buddy list and you the ability to easily switch user or start a new session while running another (althought that maybe not new but I'm not sure :))

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=19923

by Mitja (not verified)

Nice screenshots...i also tried to installed and installed
for 30 minutes new beta KDE. It works fine but i lost many
icons from the panel: nemo, klipper, suse hardware tool,
suse watcher and amarok. Amarok doesn't works (1.2 beta 3).
But at all looks very nice and on mine computer works a little faster.

Mitja

by Paulo Dias (not verified)

In the settings screenshot appears a yast2 module.
Is it because you are running a suse based distro, or does yast2 been added to kde cvs? That would have some implications to the kde hardware support settings, which is not a bad thing per si, but i didn`t find anything in the kde cvs digests talking about yast2 integration.

Can you elaborate on that?

Just curiosity.

Best regards

by Anonymous (not verified)

> does yast2 been added to kde cvs?

No.

by Aaron Krill (not verified)

Errrrrrrrrr.... that just means that he has Yast2 installed. Yast2 puts that section in KControl to integrate the Yast2 configuration modules into the KDE Control Center. Its all about integration, man.

by aile (not verified)

http://eminor.antrix.net/gallery/file/kde_3.4_beta1/kpdf.png

the icon order makes no sense to me. why is there first the +, then the -
and what does the third without desription mean?

I think that both, a selection, and this +/- are not perhaps for zooming

I would prefer a horizontal ruler for zoom.

And despite that I do not understand the Icon oder

left +
right -

so it is agaisnt the common direction where left is small and right is high numbers.

by Waldo Bastian (not verified)

The third one is "search", I agree that using almost the same icon for that as "zoom" is a mistake from the icon designers.

As far as + and - go, my first approach for the order of these buttons was "- +" but that felt very unnatural so I reverted it to the current order (they are now like this throughout KDE). I think it has to do with the fact that you tend to use "zoom in" much more than "zoom out" and that "zoom out" is basically undoing the "zoom in". As such it makes sense to have "zoom in" first.

Cheers,
Waldo