The Road to KDE 4: Updates and Addenda

Well, so far I've published a dozen articles about KDE 4 over the last 12 weeks. A lot of content has been covered, but there is rapid progress still being made on those topics. So, in no particular order, this week's issue deals with addenda and updates to the last 12 articles, so that you can see some of the rapid progress happening as KDE races forward. Read on for details.

First, when I demonstrated KRunner back on January 2nd, it was barely useful, contained temporary artwork (it still does), and looked pretty basic. Since then, it's seen a lot of work. It is now installed by default, sounding the final death of many of the elements that previously belonged to KDesktop, one of KDE's oldest components. It (mostly) works, pops up when you press F2 (see note ¹), handles CTRL-ESC to pop up the task manager, handles CTRL-ALT-DEL to pop up the logout dialog, loads the screensaver and screen locking routines as expected, and behaves in a very useful and beautiful fashion. Below is a shot of the new KRunner in action:

There's also this short movie (a week or two old) showing off how KRunner works when searching for commands to run. The interface is not yet final, but it's getting closer to completion. When it is further along, you will certainly get more updates.

Speaking of artwork, during the Oxygen article, I showed off KDE's new logout screen. At the time that was using temporary artwork that was a proof-of-concept placeholder. It's been updated somewhat, and now looks like this:

That's not the only screenshot that needs updating. After the Dolphin article, there were many requests for a tree view in Dolphin. Well, Peter Penz, the lead developer of Dolphin listens to feedback, and within hours, there was a preliminary tree view checked in to KDE SVN. After a few weeks of development, here's what the work-in-progress tree view looks like in Dolphin (this is also a good opportunity to show off some Oxygen icon artwork improvements as well):

And one more shot: back in January, I wrote about some of the work being done on KDE's Job Progress improvements. This section has seen much work since the very initial code I showed off back then, with much of the user feedback to that article helping shape its development. It now has support for pausing downloads, storing a list of finished tasks, searching for keywords among the active tasks (useful if you have 30 tasks on the go), has a simple configuration dialog, and more. The backend that powers this whole system has seen a lot of work, with more discussion with the GNOME folks on standardizing the mechanism so that applications using this progress reporting will run seamlessly on either desktop. Here's a shot of the job monitor and its configuration dialog (see note ²):

okular has received preliminary support for PDF forms, thanks to improvements to the Poppler backend. okular is the first Poppler-based viewer to add support for forms, but more are expected to follow. The implementation isn't particularly useful at the moment, and looks too ugly for screenshots, but the initial support is there. There has been a lot of development happening in okular - which, alongside other KDE developments, you can read about in the weekly KDE Commit-Digest - including support for additional formats, reworked text searching, and more.

Work on Kalzium powers forward: artwork for a student-friendly view is being developed; a better use of the empty space in the center of the table is in place; and work on libavogadro-based 3D molecule viewer is making steady progress.

The rendering in KOffice with regards to text and shape rotation has improved. Part of the problems with the screenshots in my original article is that I was using a bad default font that was shipped by my distribution. Here is a shot of a similar document, but you can see what a difference 2 months can make. In this shot, you'll see a number of new things, including a new 'default text' feature. Where you see the famous 'Lorem ipsum' text, clicking onto the text clears the widget of text, leaving your cursor on a blank text shape. Also shown is content generated automatically using the Kross scripting features, and several Flake shapes also inserted using Kross plugins. The user interface also has seen a lot of improvements, however there is still work to be done: missing icons, font and widgets sizes, and so on.

There were many more changes made to KDE since these articles have gone live, and unfortunately I've only had a change to cover a small handful of them. Of course, for a real look at all the work that's being done, you would need to build the sources yourself on a regular basis. In the meantime, I'll return with more new articles so you don't have to build the sources (though I certainly won't discourage you from doing so!).

¹Bug Alert: There is currently a nasty, unsolved bug where KRunner stops responding to ALT-F2 after a period. Fear not, this sort of bug will not be present by the time KDE 4.0 hits the streets, as it would be considered 'show stopper' bug. If, however, you need an excuse to get into KDE 4 development, here's a point of entry that will quickly get you accustomed to KDE and Qt programming.

²Power User Tip: This uiserver screen is usually hidden by default when nothing is happening. If you are running KDE 4, you can make it visible at any time by calling the following command:

qdbus org.kde.uiserver /kuiserver/MainWindow_1 com.trolltech.Qt.QWidget.show