In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Image support in Parley, and support for formulas in the note feature of the Step physics simulation package. blinKen changes capitalisation to Blinken for the KDE 4.0 release. Theme work across kdegames, with better collision detection in Kolf. More XMP integration work in Digikam. Work on KConfig merged back into trunk/. Colour conversion system becomes fully operational in Krita. Continued work on the port of the Kickoff menu to KDE 4, initial work on a centred-button menu in Raptor. KIOFuse, the KIOSlave filesystem bridge, starts to be ported to KDE 4. An uncertain future for the Klipper applet in KDE 4.0, compared to its KDE 3.x form.
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I'm not sure if it is purely because of also having QT3 installed and running the KDE4 rc in paralell to KDE3.5, but my yakuake is working in KDE4 rc1 with compositing on. Albeit using QT3 styles and all, and having one or two graphical glitches ( such as the tab bar and no transparency ), at least you know that even in the case that an official port isn't done anytime soon, you can still use ( i mean using a wm without yakuake for me has become very tedious, and i was reall stoked when i saw it work :P ).
If i wasn't too busy with work atm, i might have attempted a port, but alas, it is teh life.
:DG
Luboš Luňák: "This gets rid of the Klipper icon in the topleft corner ... and since I don't see any system tray anywhere, it kind of gets rid of Klipper completely. And I suppose it doesn't help much that Klipper itself seems broken, so no history keeping or Ctrl+Alt+V. Oh well."
I'm getting nervous about KDE4. Not just 4.0, but KDE4. Why did porting to Qt4 and adding some neat technologies break just about everything, all over the place? :-(
But everything will be fine, will it not? :-)
It will be... what it will be :)
KDE 4 is a complete refactoring, and I think that is a VERY good thing, even if it means the initial quality will be lower than the 3.5.8 release. When you break such things, you get to examine how to rewrite it from a new perspective.
I agree
its important to get new ideas into it, when breaking with old paradigms
you can break with legacy that is not as good as it *should be*
I totally disagree -- but perhaps when I see KDE-4.2.1 I will change my mind.
I think that we are making the "Vista mistake".
I would suggest that we port 3.5 to Qt-4 but there are bugs to be fixed first.
it didn't break just about everything all over the place. it did break a number of things, particular things with lack luster maintenance which have coasted by over the last years when we didn't budge much underneath the sheets (from 2.x through to 3.x). many of those things have been fixed; some are being fixed; others are yet to be fixed. this particular case looks like regressions in klipper that should be completely fixable ... when someone arrives to fix it. it's a question of 'when' not 'if'.
as for no system tray, there is one partially done it just isn't in kdebase/ atm.
it is fun when one answers issue A ("4.0 will be...") people just move on to issue A+1 ("ok, what about the rest of kde4?") without looking back or, for that matter, forward ... this semiblind wandering from concern to concern makes for an unrewarding game, doesn't it?
Relax. I couldn't help the somewhat sarcastic tone of the commit message, since the combination of systray not working, Klippers shortcut not working and Klipper's clipboard tracking not working really in practice makes Klipper not to be there, but that will be fixed. Nothing is perfect and things break from time to time, especially if bigger changes are made. That's reality.
Drat. Why did Dot change characters in my name to entities while previewing :( ?
I'm sure it's just having fun with your name ;-)
I take it you weren't around for the KDE 2.0 and KDE 3.0 releases? Yes, they were very bugy....but they were ground breaking for Linux and maybe computing in general (in some areas). Those releases were much more stable at their 2.1 and 3.1 versions. The feature set also grew dramatically since the "Dot Oh" releases.
If you prefer your software in *great* condition, I think anyone would recommend you wait till KDE 4.1.
...or use both. Some distros are set up now to let you choose a KDE3 session or a KDE4 session. That's what I plan to do. I'll continue to use KDE3 for production, while testing the limits of KDE4 whenever possible.
That's what I'm doing now. I'm using 3.5.7 and 4.0-svn from SuSE 10.3 repos. Unfortunately, "/usr/bin" (KDE 4) is before "/opt/kde3/bin" in my $PATH. Therefore, I have a little sed script which modifies my PATH variable to put /opt/kde3/bin before /usr/bin. Combines with a little bash script at /usr/local/bin/4, I invoke Konqueror 3 with "konqueror" and Konqueror 4 with "4 konqueror".
I think these two programs are two gems in KDE's crown... and I really hope they could appear in the 4.0 timeframe, at least Klipper which should fit almost perfectly as a Plasma applet: if in a panel, just an icon as the current klipper applet, with a menu appearing when clicking on it, just as now, And if on the desktop, then a little window with all the clipper contents shown.
Yeah, the state of both Klipper and Kprinter freaked me out a bit also, but:
- klipper ain't that bad (see Lubos' comment above)
- Kprinter isn't what most think it is. The config tool can probably be ported, and there now is a patch on Qt which allows for custom print dialogs or at leas extensions of it. And as far as I can tell from the (rather huge) discussion, it seems to me we won't loose that much functionality - Qprinter isn't that bad in Qt4. Besides, it looks like TT is also comitted to improving it further - so in the future, we might be able to rely on TT for our printing infrastructure.
Is printing really important anymore? Maybe that infamous paperless office have finally arrived?
I bought a new Canon printer with built-in scanner not long ago, I have used the scanner part but the printer hardly at all.
I also have a hefty HP printer I don't use much.
In commercial/ workplace/ educational settings, yes. For home use, I also no longer use a printer.
Yes, it is. Here where I work there are 7 printers, and I'm sure there are corps where this number is exponentially higher. And for example it was a huge merit of kdeprint/cups if with our newest Kyocera laser printer, that supports double-side printing, all I have to do to print a 90+ pages manual in double-side mode was to simply select a radio button in the "printer preferences" dialog in KPDF.
I hope this level of "just-works" won't disappear with KDE 4.0
Can someone please think of the trees!
It's a shame that the design of the e-book readers are so screwed up,
but it's just a matter of time until they get it right.
How much energy and resources do you think *those* take to make? Trees are a renewable resource, many of the components in an ebook reader are not.
Still: I want one! :-)
How much energy and resources do you think it takes to make paper
and transport it? And plant new trees?
Here is some new stuff: http://www.gizmag.com/go/8152/
Personally I just want B/W with perfect font rendering, kerning, ligatures
and such.
I forgot: How much energy and resources does it take to make and transport fertilizer
to compensate for the trees you take out of the soil producing cycle?
A lot, is my guess.
No, get on with the e-readers. Think thin iTouch in various sizes from credit card to A5.
There are still documents that, at least where I live, you have to have in printed form to be legally valid. Anyway, talking about myself, I only print manuals and only when it's a new technology I have to learn from scratch, cause reading it online makes me sick. I do care about trees, I can assure you, and I'm not one of those printing a 10 pages utterly quoted Outlook mail because there are 10 lines I need to read in a meeting :)
This is the most made mistake on the subject; all the commits talk about KPrinter, which is a class that is a KDE version of QPrinter.
Then there is an application that is basically a print dialog with lots of neat features that is called kprinter.
The first will go away, people just use QPrinter and actually get more features like that.
The application that end users see will not go away, or even need a whole lot of work. You will still be able to do all those neat things in KDE4 like you are used to.
Ah, so what you're saying is that there are 2 parts to KPrinter, a front end and a back end. The front end is the print dialogue that a user sees when they select "Print" from a document, and this part will remain. The difference is that instead of using the back end of KPrinter, it will use QPrinter as a back end.
If this is the case, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Yes, that is what I was saying. :)
Thanks for the clearer language.
Ok, thanks for the clarification. One more question: has the "printers manager" UI got a revamp? I think it was one of the most cluttered UI in all KDE 3.x softwares...
Is it just me, or is Kickoff and Raptor concurrent work? What will become the default for KDE 4? I mean, with two months left, I sure hope that kicker on the screenshot isn't the final design...
"Is it just me, or is Kickoff and Raptor concurrent work?"
That is correct.
"What will become the default for KDE 4?"
Unknown at this time, but Kickoff looks like it has the best chance of being the default for 4.0.
"I mean, with two months left, I sure hope that kicker on the screenshot isn't the final design..."
It is not the final design: check out Nuno's mockups here:
http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/
especially e.g. http://www.nuno-icons.com/images/estilo/image2274.png. Whether the "final" result will look exactly like these mockups is still unknown, but I'm betting it at least won't look like it does at present, with the purple bar etc, although it is possible that this current purple bar will still look as it does for 4.0, depending on the amount of time the oxygen and plasma guys have to spend on aesthetics. But in the medium-to-long term, it will hopefully look more like Nuno's mockups.
So, what actually happened is this: The release date is set to mid-december, but it is almost certain that plasma/desktop and the oxygen team won't be able to deliver as mocked up. Sorry, maybe it's me, but it sounds to me that the release-date has to be rescheduled to march or something.
Why should a 4.0 release be delayed just because its aesthetics don't match the mockup?
I'm not sure if there is any Raptor code at all yet, so I'm guessing Kickoff will be the default in 4.0
Raptor has been in development for many months but, last time I looked, it did not have the features, structure or functionality of those mockups, although it is recognisable as an early step towards them.
Actually, it look almost like that, but do nothing at all and slowdown plasma. But it is a start, it "exist", it just don't work yet. I am not (yet) a developer, but i dont think it will be hard to take some code from lancelot and add it to raptor to get the textbox and apps definition working. For the menu, all it need is an editable structure and some polishing. no?
Sounds good. I'm eager to try it.
2 hours before deadline, Mart while port TastyMenu to Qt4/KDE4, and it will become the default, just because it's superior in every use case (looking through, just clicking through, lightning fast searching speed, favourite pinning, etc.)
So say we all,
martin
(http://www.notmart.org/tastymenu/ and no, you can adjust the size, and is it like you actually look at anything else when you have the menu open?)
A few commit-digest back there was a post about a content aware image sizing algorithm which deletes unimportant parts of an image and resize it without to distort it.
http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/imret.pdf (~20MB)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns
Now there's a GPL library which implemented that algorithm.
http://seam-carver.sourceforge.net/
Would be nice to see it in Digikam sometime in future.
I would love to see this in Digikam in the 4.1 release cycle.
Has coordinator of digiKam project, i don't know 4.1 release cycle (:=))). Are you talking about a digiKam release for KDE4.1 ?
Gilles Caulier
Yes, that is what I meant.
I have take a look into source code of this shared lib.
Implementation is horible to read, but it's possible to backport algorithm into digiKam core (i won't to add another one shared lib depency, especially for that)
But it's currently the priority. digiKam KDE4 port (0.10.0 release) must be finalized before.
Gilles Caulier
Made a wish in KDE bug traking system. Just that idea did'nt get lost
it's already there (bug 149485). just wanted to point to the lib, because I thought it would make it easier to implement this feature
I hope the Desktop Toolbox will be changed until the release. It is hardly discoverable for newbies and is also uncomfortable. (E. g. I always move the mouse pointer out of it accidentally and then it disappears.)
AFAIK it will be replaced by the Plasma Applet Browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QDZkB3PoAk
More reading :D
http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/2007/09/29/applet-browser-in-libplasma/
One of my favorite features in kde is the web shortcuts feature. I always find myself hitting alt-f2 and using wp: and gg: to quickly look something up.
And in the past, I've associated a 6 digit regex with klipper to pull up bug reports on various bug systems.
I wonder if a combination of the two is possible somehow though, maybe by holding down a ctl-shift combination of some sort I could click on any bit of text on my display and do a wp:, gg: or bug url equivalent?
Maybe this is already possible with kipper...
What about extenders on plasmoids? Will they be ready for KDE 4.0?
sigh, another release and still nothing of interest being done to kopete. Might have to change to gaim soon, kopete is getting a bit old and tired, and all they are doing is porting this to kde4, no new release. Come on. communicating between the different msn yahoo network doesn't work on kopete, gaim just seems to offer more than kopete now.
You have probably seen this, but just in case...
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/kopete-roadmap-rediscovered/