In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Replacement of the "toolbox", and a new KRunner in Plasma, with many applets moving from playground into extragear in KDE SVN. SuperKaramba is now fully integrated into Plasma. A move away from KDEPrint facilities, towards more basic functionality for KDE 4.0. More work on restoring the functionality of the Klipper applet. Basic sound support in Parley. General work on KHTML, with more specific work on image loading and testcases. More work on KDE colour scheme handling. A rethink of device handling for Amarok 2.0. Generic style saving work in KOffice. Various optimisation work across KDE. Kaider moves to extragear-sdk. Kicker is removed from KDE SVN. KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 Beta 3 (with Kickoff included as the menu option) have been tagged for release.
Comments
He was a true patriot! :salute:
ok i take it that many people like it, so here is my stance on this
DIE kicker DIE!
But anyway, I will salute to him too. Bye little fellow! :)
Following up on last week's Dot discussion, Luboš Luňák tells us:
"I officially declare Klipper to be kind of working now."
This should allow Luboš to devote all of his time to a more important pursuit: getting the Dot to handle all the characters in his name. Expected to join him is struggle is Hoàng Đức Hiếu, while Anders Lund has declared that he does not see the urgency, despite living in a country full of funny characters.
Moonspeak? I think some of that post got lost in translation :)
"Expected to join him is struggle is Hoàng Đức Hiếu, while Anders Lund..."
No, that's exactly the purpose, and the funny thing ;-)
ROTFL
Last night I dist-upgraded my sidux-installation via the smxi-script when I noticed that 3.5.8 was entering sid. Thanks for this release! The desktop feels snappier than before - I love it! Keep up the great work! And don't let the haters get you down!
Someone is making it very interesting peek through the detailed lists.. :-p
> Aaron J. Seigo committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/plasma:
> bye bye old control box. how we loved you in our time of debugging, yet despised
> your flicker and general lack of beauty.
> Aaron J. Seigo committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace:
> Now the kicker lay down to sleep,
> I pray svn its code to keep;
> And if it crashes ere I wake,
> I pray a backtrace you do take.
>
> "s-i-i-lent night ... h-o-o-ly night ... doo doo doo, doo doo doooo.."
:-)
Kickoff looks so bad. Can't you guys, make it optional?
I think it looks bad too, but we should not forget, this is our personal toughts.everything in the world will be disliked by many people...so please stop trolling.
and there will be other launchers like Rapor too.
Well Kickoff will be the default for 4.0, Raptor is meant to be ready for 4.1. Still, Kickoff may become an acquired taste, just like coffee once was for me. You hate it at first, but after you use it several times you realise how great it really is :)
mmmmhhhh.... coffee!
kickoff offers nothing more than standard menu it just offers more complexity and less usability. Did suses gnome team do the usability survey for this.
Nice trolling. Go home, now.
well, I've wondered if somebody starts it again :-)
if you dislike Kickoff and want something else, please put your vote here: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150883
note - that bugreport (enhancement request) is not intended to harm Kickoff in any way, please do not express your feelings like "Kickoff is ugly" etc., just use the voting feature and (optinally) tell what would suit you better (make comparison explaining your usage)
Such a bugreport is rather useless - the choice right now is Kickoff or no menu. As Kickoff is infinitely better than no menu at all, Kickoff it is.
If someone writes a better/other menu (like Raptor) it might make it for 4.1.
> Such a bugreport is rather useless - the choice right now is
> Kickoff or no menu.
there is still some time left to change the choice ... but it won't be done if there is no interest, so this is a way to express the interest
and, as mentioned in the comments, even if it is too late for 4.0, it may show that it may be worth at least for 4.1, instead of leaving it out completely
"change the choice" means that someone would have to step up and implement a new KMenu in record time so it gets at least *some* user testing before release. Plus, I have a hard time imagining Robert Knight dropping all the Kickoff code he has written in the last few weeks to start anew. Better have one (more or less) finished and polished implementation of a menu for 4.0 than several half-assed.
If you read the comments, you will notice that a simple menu WAS implementer and in kdeextragear. The hope is that it becomes a configurable option (Kickoff OR QMenu).
sure! but i think a not-so-good kickoff is much better then no menu at all for kde 4.0 :P.
Couldn't we replace kicker with kittens? Everyone loves kittens.
I'm allergic to kittens.
No, you can't be. That's just impossible. Kittens are too cute to cause allergic reactions. It MUST be something else.
it's probably Raymond disguised as kittens, everyboy hates Raymond
The real question is whom to fire 'cause Raptor was not delivered. Development by obscurity does not work.
You must be a really good project manager.
If he were, he'd have to fire himself I guess...
> The real question is whom to fire 'cause Raptor was not delivered.
This alone shows you don't know how KDE is developped. Fire a volunteer?
Raptor development is open, and fireing lead developer of a project is a bad idea. Especially since they nicely explained why things are late, and doing the best they can to deliver a good plasma for KDE 4.0 and 4.1.
Rock, remember: your teenage years are the _best_ time to learn to program. You can always work on project management when you're older. KDE can use your help now!
I wonder how many of you did actually use the KDE4.0 version of Kickoff or at least the KDE3 one?
I really like it and I think you should give it a try first.
Speaking as someone who also likes kickoff...
It seems there are two reactions to kickoff. Either you love it and it changes how you use the menu, or you hate it and want it out of your life.
I have the old kicker on a machine and I have grown to profoundly dislike it.
Maybe we could find a psychology test therein.
Knowing myself, those who like kickoff are halfway to stark raving mad.
Derek
I tried Kickoff on KDE3. And I *almost* like it, but reverted to standard kmenu. My biggest problem is that I didn't found a convenient way to navigate in Kickoff with the keyboard, and while I love to use my mouse, I hate touchpad, so on a laptop (you can't allways plug a mouse) I need to be able to use a lot the keyboard (and alt+f2 is not allways convenient if you don't know the exact name of the application you want to launch).
afaik, keyboard use is an important target for Kickoff in 4.0 ;-)
First of all, I like the looks of kickoff, but there is something thats not quite right when using it. Something with the behavior of the buttons. Is it possible to optionally use the old menu?
Second of all; The desktop toolbox...why is it needed? Shouldn't it be hidden and only brought forward when needed? I would imagine that configuring the desktop would be something you did at rare occasions, but the rest of the time didn't use.
No offense to the authors of this code of course...
Plasma aims to (eventually) make the development of taskbars, menus etc fairly trivial - in fact, they will be programmable in at least Javascript[*], and likely Python and Ruby, making them as easy to write *and* deploy & install as Firefox extensions, so you can (hopefully!) expect a wide-range of alternatives to be released by the community as time goes on.
Again, though, this will likely be post-4.0.
[*] - before anyone screams "but Javascript is insecure!": most Javascript vulnerabilities are really browser-specific, and are unlikely to apply to a desktop. Also, Javascript is flexible, has a fast and lightweight parser in kdelibs already and, most importantly for security, is well sandboxed by default (unlike Ruby and Python, currently).
what about the behaviour of the buttons? could be a bug - it's not like we've got any shortage of those :)
the toolbox... er... it is hidden, mostly. there's just a little picture in the corner that swooshes out when you put your mouse there. I'm not sure what it'll look like when plasma's not under such heavy development.
plus, it's good to have *some* kind of visible thingy for the newbies. if it was totally hidden, we'd get tons of complaints from people that didn't have enough curiosity left in them to find it.
What about the classical context menu? Rightclick on the desktop->configure or something like that? It works and the users only see it when needed.
I do not think that it's a good solution.
For the first it's kinda ol' school, and KDE4 have to be new an innovative. For the second, if we put too many options in such a configure-list it would be messy - I think :)
I think the best solution would be a good-looking toolbox which appear when you drag your mouse up to the right corner - kind off the way MS Win-Vista do it, just better ;)
Hmmm...I don't think Vista is doing that... except maybe the sidebar or something.
won't konqueror 4.x have a "search box", like 3.5 series?
Look at this picture (right part):
http://files.fredemmott.co.uk/ss-20071014.jpg
I use it a lot: google, imdb, dictionary... :-(
I cannot find it in Beta2 (packages by kubuntu)
but maybe
its there but not compiled (commented out, etc)
its there but not as default
its not there (not ported)
losing functionalities may happen for 4.0, dont worry, hopefully even its lost atm, it will be back in time (post 4.0)
Also, you can search for anything from the address bar. For example:
"gg: blah" searches google for blah
"wp: blah" searches wikipedia for blah
etc. Have a look at web shortcuts in the konq settings for a full list. I find a lot of people don't know about these.
That is handy but currently it pollutes the address history with non-address entries and not being able to easily remove individual entries makes that an annoyance. ;)
The search box itself could use some love too, the various implementations just don't feel right sometimes. If it was something that is there when you need it but goes away when it's not doing anything. So instead of clicking in the search field you could just have a button or clickable area that expands and is ready for your typing input and not taking up 120 pixels or so of toolbar space all the time.
It's a plugin, not part of core functionality, so you probably just need to install it from kdeaddons... Woops, extragear. And as was stated, it's easier to just use url shortcuts like gg:
Yeah, maybe it's easier, but for the newcomer it's just another thing he/she have to learn - and I think the google-searchbox is more newcomer-friendly.
So, make the searchbox as a opportunity :)
The search box is a plugin at kdeaddons module probably not installed in the screenshot... try to remove kdeaddons in your KDE3 instalation when you'll see what I said.
Thanks all! That screeshot isn't mine.
It looks great, but why isn't my favourite feature included (please vote for my bug report). It crashes somestimes as well. KDE 4 won't be as good as KDE 3 unless it can suspend and restore properly. I like Oxygen, but why is it all white with no contrast? The alt-f2 thingy is black. Why isn't it white? I did something and it didn't work - can someone tell me why? How do I fix it? The programmers need to work harder. The usability people need to usabil harder. I like the flashy graphics, my friends will want to use KDE. Why are you all working on the graphics though, we need more features. Why does Aaron look like Tom Green? He needs to stop looking like Tom Green and work harder on Plasma. And Lubos would be far more productive if he didn't mess around with silly character sets all the time.
I think that just about covers it; well played! :)
Tom Green needs to stop looking like Aaron.