Tales of a Clock

Every now and then, someone points out something embarrassing in KDE that just needs to be fixed, and fixed quickly. So, less than 24 hours after Nat Friedman's interview on OSNews, the main valid issue he pointed out -- that KDE's clock configuration dialog was messy and bloated -- was already being fixed. There's even a bug in our database filed for it, and if it made enough of an impression on a fairly well-known GNOME hacker that he had to comment on it publically, I figured it deserved fixing. So moments after the comment, we began hammering out the UI for a newly revamped Clock Configuration page. Expect to enjoy the fix in CVS soon!

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Comments

by Tar (not verified)

PITE (eye) for former Win32 lovers http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56654 - about no borders in maximized window mode.

by Rakko (not verified)

This actually should be fixed for usability reasons, not just for Windows migrants. As the bug says, it would greatly improve usability to have things such as scrollbars (my pet peeve) right at the edge of the screen.

In fact, I've been thinking recently that it should be possible simply to snap windows to the edge of the screen (as can be done now), but with the innovation that the actual *border* of the window would go offscreen in the process. Thus, any window positioned right against a screen edge would have no annoying border to hamper interaction.

by Paul Koshevoy (not verified)

Let me see whether I understood the problem correctly - you don't want to see the window border of the maximized window. As far as I know you can have this behaviour. In the KDE Control Center->Window Behaviour->Moving make sure to disable the "Allow moving and resizing of maximized windows" option. I believe this will give you the desired maximized window appearance. But i must admit, the name on this config option is not descriptive enough.

Hope this helps,
Paul.

by Peter Kasting (not verified)

Sorry, doesn't seem to fix it for me (KDE 3.1, Keramik theme). This bug has long annoyed me.

by Paul Koshevoy (not verified)

I just tried this on SuSE 8.2 and it worked. Maybe the reason it did not work for you lays in the fact that you are using Keramik? Try the same test with KDE2 window decoration (combined with dotNET widget Style, it looks great).

Paul.

by James Duncan (not verified)

Works on Keramic for me

by James Duncan (not verified)

Works on Keramic for me on 3.1, are you sure you have the correct option?

Though I also didn't know about this option, thanks for that!

by Shift (not verified)

I want to thank Gnome and Ximian team to make react KDE team to fix a bug.
Continue guys !!! If you talk about each KDE bug, KDE will be more and more better .

Moreover, is it possible for the Mozilla team to talk about Konqueror and to say that "Konqueror support less CSS specifications than Mozilla" ? :)

Long life to KDE and GNOME \o/

by imr (not verified)

By the way, do anyone at kde know when the gnome filemanager will get improved?

by reflux (not verified)

probably between now and GNOME 2.8.

by Mario (not verified)

in the development branch it flies, its as fast as konqueror and in a few cases faster, such as direcories with lots of files such as images. it also has a few great features which konqueror does not and i would like to see such as emblems and zoom as well as a slick look with shadows behind previews for screenshots, text files etc., this make sit look infinitely better.

In fact there is a topic on this: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58944

by clee (not verified)

Considering that SadEagle's been at work on QIconView in our CVS, I seriously doubt that Nautilus will be faster (if it even is) for long, wrt huge directories.

Competition is great, isn't it? :)

-clee

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

Not in our CVS ATM -- e-mailed the Trolls, no response back yet though. Once they merge in the QIconView fix, there are less significant but still noticable changes that can be made to KFileIVI/KIconViewItem, Still. (Although they are tricky due to excessive inlining in KIconViewItem constructor -- see kde-optimize archives).

by KDE Fanatic (not verified)

... globbing ... i.e. the total lack of it. In konqueror's location dialog:

~/*jpg works (konqueror is borken too for things like *.[jpg|png] etc. but this will be fixed)

Nautilus has no drop down history in the location bar either ... pure dumbness.

But really ... the lack of GLOBBING is silly and is proof of the clumsiness of the Gnome framework. Not even the experienced Gnome hackers can implement it without massive code rewrites.

Konqueror also has things like Ctrl-T to "start terminal here" etc. (plus drag and drop of directories into terminal windows! ...Nice!!

Nautilus may look better and be faster but it lackds very basic features and Gnome cannot implement them ...

> But really ... the lack of GLOBBING is silly and is proof of the clumsiness of the Gnome framework. Not even the experienced Gnome hackers can implement it without massive code rewrites.

Actually, Nautilus in gnome 1.4 had globbing. It was removed (sigh) in gnome 2.0. Not sure if it's back in gnome 2.2. Probably not though. It has nothing to do with the clumsiness of the gnome framework (which parts of are not very well intregrated compared to KDE, but this might be an advantage to some too.), or the coding experience of gnome hackers. It has everything to do with gnome taken over by Havoc (sigh) and people who share a Havocian school (sigh) of thought.

It was all of these kind of small deletion of features that made me switch from gnome 1.4 to kde 3.1-- I was massively underwhelmed by gnome 2.0's features. Too bad havoc ruined what was a decent desktop.

I, unfortunately, had the same problem. The Havocian takeover of GNOME finally gave a large, user-apparent difference between GNOME and KDE. I liked GNOME 1.4 much better than KDE. In fact, I learned GTK and GNOME 2, and compiled gnome 2 from cvs when it first became remotely usable. At that point I disliked KDE. But then, when so many features were dropped, GNOME 2 became much more difficult to use. I was a supporter of viewports and edge-flipping, which quickly alienated me from the Havocian school of thought. Nautilus 2 is much better than Nautilus 1 in speed and looks, but in usability, it lacks essential features for advanced users, like so many other elements of GNOME 2.

And thus, I am now a KDE user. Havoc has done a good job, it seems, of angering the advanced users in GNOME's user base.

by Richard Moore (not verified)

You could just type ~/*.jpg *.png in konq for your example above IIRC.

Rich.

by David Faure (not verified)

Indeed! Wow. I would have never thought this worked.
(And yes, I'm the one who coded that feature, long ago :))

A little late, but the syntax is not *.[jpg|png] but *.{jpg,png} which should work if Konq uses the standard glob.

by imr (not verified)

I was just trying to joke with the person above and of course made a fool of myself.
I was talking of the infamous file dialog. The one I've been bothered by for many years in gimp and mozilla.
I hope they finally found someone interrested in updating that old piece of crap. I have nothing against the gnome project, but to have to scan through directory with that old thing is a pita.

by Benjamin Meyer (not verified)

With plenty of free time I spent yesterday's afternoon and this morning coding up the changes. Now, using less code, memory, starting faster and having a better configure dialog I have commited my changes. http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/clock.png here is a screenshot of the new configure dialog.

by good changes... (not verified)

wow that dramatically reduces a lot of the unecessary, good work. I love how kde responds criticism, not by getting into an ego match with gnome by comparing its others features, but by simple fixing what was criticized. excellent work, however, why is the horizontal bar so long especially without being necessary, at least without the list expanded.

by anonymous (not verified)

what sucks about this is that KDE seems to only be responding to criticism. This should
of been fixed years ago.

by trill (not verified)

sometimes it just works this way-- most developers are working in their free time, and want to develop on things that they are interested in- for most, this means features.

if you're interested in something like usability in KDE, I suggest you join the team! anybody is free and open to.

by cylab (not verified)

Have you ever filed a bug ?
Have you ever voted for a bug ?
Is any high rated bug being ignored for years ?

by em (not verified)

Works for me in KDE 3.1.1

by Datschge (not verified)

Nobody can look at 8500+ reports at bugs.kde.org and listen to all the additional complaints and flames all at once, and while this particular bug is embarassing and ideal food for others to show how "crowded and cluttered" KDE is in their opinion, it never really had been a serious itch needed to be scartched for anyone. Just look at the numbers of votes #58775 got (currently only 40, from four people), there are a whopping 133 reports which have more votes than this and are such more likely to get attention.

Did *you* vote for #58775 before complaining here?

by rinse (not verified)

I agree, i use this option at least 6 times a day, and this really is slowing down my work time

OK, to be serious, it's nice that this gui has been fixed, but to say that it had to be done years ago?

Rinse

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

perhaps you only notice when there is a response to criticism because someone has made a public bruhaha about it bringing it to your attention. and then we post it on theDot, only to raise the awareness even more. truth is that lots of such issues get fixed quietly and effectively without any public criticism beyond users asking for things in bugs.kde.org, mailing lists or IRC. often it's common sense. it just takes time. when something gets openly and blatantly criticized in a cheap shot remark, that thing tends to get reprioritized on various developer's TODO lists so that the same criticism can't be repeated over and over ad nauseam. that gets tiring.

if you REALLY want to see things get fixed faster, sponser a developer or strap on your coding shoes and go spelunking in the code.

by Ross Baker (not verified)

Looks great. I suggest the heading City might be better as Location

by Richard Moore (not verified)

Please make the clock faces plugins while you're at it. :-)

Rich.

by Shift (not verified)

What are you talking about ?

by anon (not verified)

I think http://c133.org/files/newclockprefs.png is much better. There's no reason you need to cram everything in one dialog like that. The timezones rightly have their own panel.

by Frank (not verified)

FULLY agreed!

by cloose (not verified)

Full ACK!!

Although not perfect, this one looks much better. Having everything on one
page plus a separate dialog for the clock type (I guess that's what the 'configure type' button is for) is too much of "simplification".

Besides I change the clock type more often than the timezone. So this should be really separate tabs.

Christian

by trill (not verified)

I know sometime back, there was talk about merging the GNOME and KDE higs, (as in finding common elements, and put that stuff in a seperate document on freedesktop.org..) Anyone know what happened to that effort?

An article about that is at http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2730

by lit (not verified)

I think a better idea would be to unify the "KDE User Interface Guidelines", and the "KDE User Interface Guidelines". (Yes, they both have the same title..)

They are located at : http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/index....
and at :
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/

After these have been merged, update the first to KDE 3 levels.. the standards guide has lots of screenshots and code from KDE1. Much of which is currently irrelevent. Just browing some of the code in the guide shows classes like KCommand and KColorDrag.. I don't think those have been used since KDE 1. This guide also needs to cover more controls that KDE apps currently use. Things like listviews aren't even currently covered in the guide.

The second guide is pretty good-- covers lots of Human User Interface Interaction theory-- sticking it at the beginning of the guide would be good. There has been a lot more info since then, so that could be put there as well.

I'm currently very busy-- any takers in doing this? I've been wanting to for a while. You don't even need to be a programmer-- just have KDE cvs access (anybody with cvs access can modify http://developer.kde.org/).. I'm sure coolo or dfaure would be happy to create a cvs account for anyone willing to update the interface guide.

by Datschge (not verified)

Your good suggestion has been noted in my to-do list. ;)

activity seems to be kicking up, once again.. at certain period of it's history, this list has even been more busy than kde-devel.. for most of this year, it wasn't though.

For KDE 3.2, I hope the this get finished :

replacing the window deco, colors, styles with a themes control panel (which has features same from all of them...)
http://www.avenheim.online.fr/kthemes2-2.png

by Braden MacDonald (not verified)

Wow!! I really hope that that makes it to KDE 3.2! That looks amazing!

by Braden MacDonald (not verified)

Wow!! I really hope that that makes it to KDE 3.2! That looks amazing!

Sorry, but your design isn't perfectly.

The list(redmond, keramik, ...) available on the left, ans the listbox "style" are the same ? if not, why one in a listbox, and the other in a plain list?

Why do you have a listbox "colours", a grey button ton configure, and a onglet "custom colours"

And the part "Description" shouldn't be an onglet.

Sorry, but your design isn't perfectly.
Personally, I don't it's at least way better than the way it is done right now. It provides easy all-in-one-place theming.

The list(redmond, keramik, ...) available on the left, ans the listbox "style" are the same ? if not, why one in a listbox, and the other in a plain list?
The first one is the entire theme, while the listbox is just the style (which only covers the shape of widgets and so).

Why do you have a listbox "colours", a grey button ton configure, and a onglet "custom colours"
Here I have to agree with you. It would be more logical to remove that tab and put its contents into a dialog that's shown when the configure button is clicked.

And the part "Description" shouldn't be an onglet.
Why not?

The only complaint I have is that this module covers icon and window dec. selection, but does not show a preview of the icons or the windec.

For the rest, yes I would really like to see this in KDE 3.2 ;)

by micahel (not verified)

Thanksa lot for fixing that, i couldn't stand the old panel, I'm glad KDE developers are focusing more on usability than just features.

I am sure they want the most usable desktop, even more so than GNOME and don't want to bloat it with rarely used features. I really hope losts of the dialogs and uis are getting cleaned up like the clock one.

by till (not verified)

> I am sure they want the most usable desktop, even more so than GNOME and don't want to bloat it with rarely used features. I really hope losts of the dialogs and uis are getting cleaned up like the clock one.

Yup.. and the good thing is that as more and more dialogs are being created in Qt Designer, anybody can modify or create new ones. I've noticed that you seem to really care about KDE usability. If you want to help, load a copy of Qt-Designer, redesign a control panel or dialog, and post it either here (if you want immediate feedback, or are replying to a thread), the kde-usability mailing list, or bugs.kde.org.

KDE is all about community involvement after all-- even more so than GNOME, where companies like Ximian and Sun set policies.

by Michael (not verified)

I don't know how Qt works, I can make a mockup design, but I can't connect the signal and slots correctly yet. I am jsut starting to learn C++ now =)

Anyway, do kde applications share a common dialog framework or is it unique for all apps?

by till (not verified)

> I don't know how Qt works, I can make a mockup design, but I can't connect the signal and slots correctly yet. I am jsut starting to learn C++ now =)

That's quite fine-- even submitting a non-slot connected ui file helps. It gives people ideas that otherwise they wouldn't have. It's much easier, and concrete to visualize something based on a Designer ui file than saying visualize a bug report that simply says "oh the layout of this and this suxx, and is too cluttered and could be done a lot better", which unfortunatly, is how a lot of people "constructively" complain, but doesn't end up being constructive at all. =)

by roie_m (not verified)

I'm wondering... Is there a website/mailing list where people can request and submit UI mockups? I'd like to do one or two (if I can find some free time...) but I don't know what needs work and I don't know how to find out. If there were some global list of what UI needs work, that might help people in my position. (I tried searching bugzilla, but I don't know what to look for.)

by anon (not verified)

try www.kdelook.org. not really an official thing for developers, but a good place to get input from other people.