In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Trolltech-sponsored development continues on Phonon backends. Support for saving to remote URL's in Gwenview. A "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the train clock returns in Plasma. "Switch Tabs on Hover" can now be disabled, and other refinements in Kickoff for KDE 4.0. Work on a debugger (with a SpeedCrunch-inspired interface) for KHTML. Work to support the most recent release of the Flash (version 9) multimedia plugin in Konqueror. SOCKS support in KTorrent. Device handling fixes in KPilot. More work on music services in Amarok 2.0. Further work on the KChart Flake shape in KOffice. More panorama work, amongst other developments in KOffice. Support for the Bonjour protocol in Kopete. Initial import and development of a MS Cabinet format archive reader. The temporarily-named Video Player, formerly-known-as-Codeine, has been finally renamed to Dragon Player. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
you are not alone, i asked in irc, and it seems that in germany( and the western world in general) are on holidays.
Well, Its Christmas and soon new year so you should expect most people on holliday until wensday next week.
I had posted this ask in the last commit, but i'd like to ask it again.. When will be desktop icons ready?
today I upgraded to a recent snapshot.
The actual state is that you get the content of ~/Desktop on your desktop, you can resize these applets, remove them.
I didn't try to add an icon on the desktop yet thought, would have to be tested.
Oh, and plasma unfortunately recreate them at every startup it seems, in an silly big hype. Well, the detailed commit digest says the feature to layout things got added this week after the snapshot I use. I imagine it's not that much work to add a check to see if a ~/Desktop entry is already in plasma, and it will be just working.
Still the same as last week.
A drag to the desktop of a file or URL results in an error.
Files in the Desktop directory are shown on the desktop but the size is unstable and doesn't change on my system unless I log out and restart my KDE session.
The "Desktop" Font Setting still doesn't work.
Improvements over yesterday:
Dragging a file to the desktop seems to work.
Dragging a URL (kde.org) to the desktop no longer gives the error message, but the link doesn't work.
Hey, nice work on oxigen since the RC2 release.
This week, mandriva upgraded it's coocker KDE4 snapshot from RC2, and Oxingen now looks sharp and smooth at the same time.
The menus looks freakingly nice when they don't draw with glitches at theyre rounded corners, but with this little vertical gradient, roud corners, sweet separation bar, and a relief blue selection, so sweet !
Thanks a lot. I'm begining to love oxygen (even if I already loved Icons ).
On the other side, plasma still lag behind kdesktop and kicker, and I think I will turn it of and replace with kde3 counterparts for the firsts KDE4.0.x releases... But it is improving so fast, I would give it 6 more mounths to overcome KDE3 desktop/pannel.
Keep it up, and thanks Danny for your work, wich is hightly apreciated.
PS : hey, this week, france get dark green again on the map, it had been a few weeks light green, I was woried my country was parting from KDE, now I'm relived ^^
six? pfft, I give it three, at most. ;) I mean, sure, kicker and kdesktop had a bajillion features and represented years of work, but plasma's fucking insane, and code is still changing constantly during christmas fucking holidays. :)
Damn right, plasma is indeed insane! Look how long it took to bring Kicker and Kdesktop to where they are compared to Plasma. Plasma is being developed at an amazing speed. It will be the Dragon Slayer (like somebody here used the name) among the desktops. I will give it another 6 months to start kicking some real hard butts whether their names are Aero of Aqua it doesn't matter :)
I would only advise the KDE Team to be a bit quiet on a few things because the mighty M$ and the Big Apple are watching closely and before you know it those features will be called "their" innovation possible with patents.
yap, and we all thank Aaron, the man with the plan :)
chani, come on, take it easy, and thanks for the remove applet code.
As I already pointed out in a posting below, I want to make a suggestion for the naming of former Codeine: Drak.
Drak is the czech word for Dragon, and imho it sounds much better than "Dragon Player". It has even got a K in the name, and I think it fits perfectly into the naming of other KDE apps, especially Amarok.
So please consider Drak as name for "Dragon player"
As I already pointed out I've been open to a name for about 8 months. And now all the ideas come out of the woodwork once I decided. Sorry, too late.
but maybe this the way of the future? think of a cool name first, *then* come up with the application. Maybe a firewall program for winblows or something..
You didn't do any pointing here on the dot.
Too late for what? You're not selling a product, are you?
Kde-commits picked it up (and thus the dot did, I'm pretty sure it was part of the kde-commits summary), then I blogged about on PlanetKDE back in May when I started working on Codeine 2.0. At that point I named it Video Player and noted I wasn't very happy with its ungooglability.
I'm very sorry, but I did NOT know *anything* about this. I even barely noticed the application before this commit digest.
I think all the others who are complaining about the name now also just didn't know about Codeine/Dragon Player. If nearly nobody knows you are searching a name for that app, there won't be much ideas for the naming.
Hi Ian,
Sorry if this seems to late to raise the issue. You're doing great work with Codeine/DP, and I give you all due respect for that.
That being said, I have to point out that it's a little disingenuous to say that you've been "open to a name for 8 months. And now all the ideas..". This is the first I've heard of the name change decision, like others above pointed out. I do recall something about codeine being a temporary name, now that it's been mentioned, but that was way back when the app was first announced, and I naturally assumed that you'd either come up with a name on your own once you got to a stable version, or you'd somehow ask the community for help.
If you chose the name on your own, or among codeine developers, then that's cool. Just don't expect outsiders to agree with that relatively closed decision.
On the other hand, if you asked the community at large for help... where did you ask? If there's some site I should watch for such things, I'd like to know about it.
I didn't ask for name advice now and I got it. I did say on planetkde that I wasn't very happy with the name "Video Player" back in May.
There is no Codeine team, its just me, or at least it was just me until about a week ago.
I've been reading the Dot regularly for months, and I don't think I ever heard of a new name for the video player being sought. I don't think you should look away from good suggestions just because they came in late, what really matters should be the name of the final release. if you change the name before making the final release it will be just a normal part of the development process. anyway, these names might be used for a different video app. after all at least some people feel the need to have an Amarok for video.
Why do every programs get renamed with english names? English dominates the IT industry far too much. KDE had a time when it made a difference.
English is the official language of the Linux kernel, and much of Linux development. I might imagine for many KDE devs English is a second language, and yet it seems historically it has always been the common language that most FOSS is developed in.
Time to make a difference.
No. It is not time to make a difference in using another language inside the KDE project. That would be stupid.
In case of names it might make sense to use names which can be pronounced in several languages (like Euro). KDE does that with several libraries: Phonon, Plasma, Decibel. Also, most of the KDE release names are related to some German events, names or words. That's ok, and a way to go.
But there is no sense in using another language in the way of using words which can only be pronounced in some specific language besides English. And forcing another language into the KDE project as the language of communication is just stupid: English is the common language most people do understand. Every other language is spoken by less people on the Internet. Since you have to use one single main language, English is the natural choice.
Additionally: compared to other languages and grammars English so plain easy it can even be learned by members of totally different language cultures (at least to a certain degree) - try to teach languages like Finnish or German and you know what I mean. While English might not be one of the beautiful languages of the world it is definitely one of the easier ones.
Several other languages require another "alphabet", think of Chinese or Russian here.
So, in short: just because you don't like the sound of the English language or the politics of some of the big countries which have English as their main language doesn't mean that there is a need to switch the - in several regards - obvious choice to something else.
But before I continue: just say what you would prefer - and why it would make sense.
I think one can use words from other languages. This is already the case outside KDE, e.g. with Ubuntu or Kino. In addition, many names do not belong to any language (or are not meant to), e.g. (maybe) Kooka... And it happens that Kooka is fairly easy to remember, even if I do not associate it with any word (maybe I should, but I don't...).
What about Amarok? It's definetly no english name (I forgot in which language it's the word for wolf), so don't bother about if the name is english or not. If the name's cool, it's okay I think.
>> Additionally: compared to other languages and grammars English so plain easy it can even be learned by members of totally different language cultures...
... or even by complete retards /:-) - seriously, i dropped it years ago in 9th grade or so, and while my latin is totally gone and my french no more than a stub, english never was a problem. And i kinda like it, too.
English is our lingua franca ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca ), just to accept it.
how about Kolnoa? it's the Hebrew word for video, and it's got the K.
OK I've been sitting on this idea for ages and it had to come out sometime. All the discussion here about Codeine being renamed to Dragon Player has got me going, so here goes.
Now that KDE is entering a new phase, How about a new name? Actually its more of a modification of the existing name.
AND HERE IT IS
Komodo.
Here is my reasoning:
*As 'K' in KDE doesn't mean anything, lets give it meaning.
*It can still be called KDE (or Komodo Desktop or simply Komodo)
*The symbol of Komodo is a Dragon! A big fearsome looking thing that sits on top of the foodchain in its environment. An ideal mascot - sorry konqui...
Thoughts? (Be kind)
Why choose a name that is already taken?
http://www.google.com/search?q=Komodo
KDE was originally "Kool Desktop Environment".
Kool?
I always thought it was the "Kalle Dalheimer Experience"
Nah, it WAS kool desktop environment. Keep in mind that when this started out it was kind of copying CDE (HP's work, that went into Sys V standard) which was commmon desktop environment. Of course, that was a LONG time ago (more than a decade ago). I know that now we say it does not stand for anything, but that is now. Besides, this desktop has expanded a LONG ways past the CDE. It went to looking like WIndows/Apple for a time, and now is finally moving beyond that . I tend to think that we are borrowing from E.
Acronyms in open source projects rarely keep their original meaning (KDE, GNOME and Xfce are all guilty of this), or else are recursive acronyms that make no sense, but can be humorous.
Although there are several obstacles, I think your idea is great. KDE is a three-letter acronym with no meaning, and unlike Gnome you can't pronounce it as a word but must spell out each letter (saying KDE as a word sounds more like someone sneezing than anything else). We could have Komodo Office too! And Konqi could seamlessly morph into Konqi the komodo - why not?
The problems are these: Komodo is already the name of an integrated developers' environment for Windows/OSX (http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/) as well as a content management system (www.komodocms.com/) This could be where we might run into difficulties with trademarks etc.
Although it would be nice to have a less random name, the fact remains that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet".
Ah. Windows. That was a clone of the Macintosh UI, right? While Windows may be an obscure computer environment to most people today, I was actually using it extensively a decade ago. But then my winning streak in Freecell got so long that I didn't dare play again (and risk breaking it). So I never used Windows again.
Still, it's a bit excessive to avoid the name "Komodo" just because there is some program written for "Windows" that is allegedly using it, IMHO.
I'd rather not loose the name familiarity people have of this product called KDE :)
Marketing leans very much on name familiarity and positive connotations that people attach with known products. Changing the name means loosing all your previous marketing push. Not useful.
For this same reason KOffice and KWord should not be renamed, even though they are boring etc.