In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The beginnings of a network management applet in Plasma, work on containments, and improvements in the "RSS" data engine and "Devices" applet. Initial support for saving changes to documents in Okular. A Kross-based scripting plungin in KLinkStatus. "Tip-of-the-day" and "Qt methods to avoid" checkers for the Krazy code quality reporting system. First steps towards a C++ parser in Umbrello. Work on projection independence in Marble. More maintenance and bux fixing in Kooka. Continued work in KHTML. Expanded support for subtitles and audio channel selection in Phonon (prompted by the requirements of Dragon Player). A rewritten "Todo" view in KOrganizer. Further work towards Amarok 2.0. "HTTP webseeding" in KTorrent. Kross-based scripting in KPlato, with support for "find in multiple documents" in KOffice. Caching support extended to all KDE card games. Improvements in KTurtle, KNetwalk, and Kubrick. Initial imports and work on the "Killbots" and "Astrododge" games. Import of "RSSNOW", an alternate RSS feed reader Plasmoid. The Step physics package moves from playground/edu to kdereview so that it can move to the kdeedu module for KDE 4.1. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
"And the worst thing is that he uses a name similar to yours, only with a small "a". Can't you kick his ass?"
If only it were that simple :(
everyone should stop replying to these idiots...they're just trolling
Don't understand all that you wrote as my maths isn't that good :D But I too would like to commend the dream KDE team for the remarkable job that they are doing up there, down there - wherever.
I just did a Suse update (KDE 4.0.66) and I can tell you, I got a pleasant surprise! Improvements, bugs squashing and polish all over the place, from Amarok 2 which I am now using to listen my mp3 collection as I type (I never had luck before) to Dolphin (preview now works like it does in Konqueror), Kickoff, which is starting to even look visually attractive ;), Oxygen, which is starting to feel like it's name implies and Plasma. Yes the Plasma quys would make Asafa Powell look like a tortoise at the speed they are going these days :) I like the slim-glow theme btw.
There is also quite a bit of improvement in speed, the present devel-version that i am using feels a lot faster, smoother and more stable that the stable 4.0.2.
I am just wondering what it will be like by 4.1? In any case I am sure it will be a hit!
First of all, congratulations for the good job done with KDE. KDE4 has a huge potential, as we can see with every release and every commit-digest!
On the other hand... Does anyone know anything about Linux MCE integrated into KDE? The last news I can find about it are from at least 6 months ago, and they tell us that Linux MCE will be integrated into KDE4.
Thanks in advance for your reply and thanks for this great desktop!
Poldark
Ask on their mailinglist or read it http://www.charonmedia.org/mailman/listinfo
yeah.. i'm wondering about this fact too. I've also found nothing neither in the linuxmce forum nor on any mailing list I'm subscribed (and those are many ^^)
In commit log we can see:
"RAW image loader : backport 8 bits color depth auto-gamma and auto-white balance adjustements from dcraw with 16 bits color depth.
These auto adjustments are performed only if Color Management is not used with image editor.
The color rendering in 16 bits is exactly the same than in 8 bits.
This is want mean than you can process speedly your RAW exactly as JPEG. Just set your usual settings in RAW dedoding and open your RAW pictures as well in editor.
This is the same way used by LightZone pro software to process RAW file without color management!
This way simplify the task in Raw workflow... and will be suitable in 90% of case. Color Management must be used in others cases..."
Anybody has tried this feature? There is a comparison somewhere between LightZone and digikam about raw files import ? Sound like a major improvement because current raw file import always give a black image with 16 bits color depth.
Here:
http://digikam3rdparty.free.fr/Screenshots/RAW16bitsAutogamma
... there are few screenshots. All are divided in 3 parts:
- on the left: RAW converted to PNG using dcraw with 8 bits color depth.
- on the midle: RAW loaded in digiKam Image editor with 16 bits color depth.
- on the right: RAW loaded in LightZone.
Like you can see, it's not exactly the same between digiKam and LightZone, but digiKam auto-gamma is not too bad and give a fast way to handle a suitable image with the best color quality.
Gilles Caulier
So Plasmoids can kill the whole window system, at least from the user's perspective. Is this a step forward in desktop computing ? I mean the beauty of X applications and the X desktop was that applications were isolated and the window manager was king. And very very stable.
So we have more eye candy, but how functional is this. Is it even necessary. For instance I can launch knotes application or a note plasmoid, very little difference in how they look. Granted I can rotate the plasmoid, but what value is that. Who really even cares about eye candy. I mean Vista and Mac have their own plasmoids but who ever uses them, except for maybe a clock placed on the corner of the screen.
Please somebody explain the value of Plasmoids. Maybe they are easier to write via a scripting language.
I know KDE has spent a lot of resources on doing usability studies, and it has paid off as things are are more consistent and better laid out. Has there been a need's study for Plasma, if not maybe there should be one. And if found to be important it stays in as is, if not the KDE Window manager gets redesigned and Plasma gets taken out. Sounds like heresy I know,as a lot of hard work went into it. but what is best for KDE, and the KDE users
How about putting a simple poll on the KDE website. One question "How do you value the use of Plasma (1 no vaule, 10, grat value)
I give it a 3
Plasma is not only the Desktop Widgets. Plasma is about the Display and Behaviour of your whole Desktop. This for example includes the Desktop surface itself and the Bar that was formerly Kicker and is now more generally called the Panel, including its typical features like the taskbar and the start menu.
I see it like this: The developers noticed that there is a lot of shared properties in the different parts of our desktop, and they need to cooperate so tightly, that it makes sense to integrate them. So they designed an architecture which generalizes some of the common capabilities, which are now shared between these parts through libplasma.
Formerly, there was code to display icons in kdesktop, code to display desktop widgets in superkaramba and code to display icons in kicker. Now this is all done with (nearly) the same code in plasma.
This alone makes perfect sense to me and justifies the use of Plasma. And there is a lot of additional value, like the option to write Plasmoids in Scripting Languages and share data sources across all Plasmoids.
> And if found to be important it stays in as is, if not the KDE Window manager
> gets redesigned and Plasma gets taken out
Plasma is not implemented in the Window Manager, and neither was the desktop in KDE 3. It was also a dedicated process.
first, no, vista and mac do not have their own plasmoids. they have widgets. there are some pretty fundamental design differences between how these things are done.
and yes, if you pick the right use cases (e.g. notes vs knotes) and ignore everything else you can construct an argument for your case, just don't expect me or anyone else with any insight into the matter to take it seriously.
you're concentrating on widgets in isolation and completely ignoring the componentization, cooperation, grouping and portability of them.
now, to get to your opening:
> Plasmoids can kill the whole window system
no they can't, no more than any other window in your session can. your rant here starts out on a completely incorrect assumption. way to go.
> if not the KDE Window manager gets redesigned and Plasma gets taken out.
the window manager has nothing to do with plasma. this sentence is just .. well .. nonsense =)
> I give it a 3
then don't use it. it's that simple. whoe needs launchers, a pager, a system tray or a taskbar, right?
My take:
- from the user perspective, until now plasma is just a fancy superkaramba that kills your desktop when one plasmoid crashes (duh, very nice one!)
- from developers it's heaven to code and shall lead to better to faster/easier development of the whole desktop
Now if we could get rid of *ALL* plasmoid written in C++, the plasmoid crashing and taking away the whole desktop won't happen, but I don't see much script plasmoids so far, only C++ ones :-P
It is just me or the exiting news in KDE4 are diminishing?
I would love to see news about k3b, panel (lots and lots of missing features there), kmail, kopete, etc. To me, this looks actually like a good thing, probally things are starting to get more mature in kde4 code.
Anyway, in this edition I found good news about amarok, ktorrent, phonon supporting subtitles and multiple audio/text/video tracks is very good, I hope they do support font rendering options (font face, size and color).
Meanwhile until KDE 4.1 arrives I wait for 4.0.3 that will come with fixes for my most hated bugs (gray desktop instead of wallpaper and no double click).
Boring?
"David Faure committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/apps/konqueror/settings/konqhtml:
GUI: checkbox for the "Middle click on a tab closes it" option (which has existed for a long time, but didn't have a GUI)."
!!!!!!!!!! :DDDDD