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It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes 130,000 stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids.

You're right. That patch wasn't even included, so gestures came much later (unless you count the clunky May 2001 kgestures program which used gestures to trigger DCOP calls.)

I believe Opera had them first as I remember around 2002-2003 hearing discussions about adding universal gestures to KDE, then subsequently using the shiny new gestures. I don't recall gestures making it into KDE 2.x, but they were included early in the 3.x series. (It looks like a quick kgesture program was available the month after Opera's gestures, but was not maintained for long.) [1] Okay, there is evidence that the universal gestures (via khotkeys) were properly introduced in CVS in 2003. [2] The framework allowed (and still allows) one to save, load, and distribute gestures so that one could download the Mozilla gestures or Opera gestures.

The reason, IIRC, gestures took so long to include after the first patches (for Opera gesture, then for the Firefox/Phoenix gesture mimicking) was that KDE wanted to be able to have all applications use gestures. On the Mac, I miss using gestures in the non-Cocoa programs (which include Finder and iTunes) because it was great to use them for web browsing and file browsing.

[1] http://dot.kde.org/990672846/
[2] http://dot.kde.org/1066450520/

You're right. That patch wasn't even included, so gestures came much later (unless you count the clunky May 2001 kgestures program which used gestures to trigger DCOP calls.)

I believe Opera had them first as I remember around 2002-2003 hearing discussions about adding universal gestures to KDE, then subsequently using the shiny new gestures. I don't recall gestures making it into KDE 2.x, but they were included early in the 3.x series. (It looks like a quick kgesture program was available the month after Opera's gestures, but was not maintained for long.) [1] Okay, there is evidence that the universal gestures (via khotkeys) were properly introduced in CVS in 2003. [2] The framework allowed (and still allows) one to save, load, and distribute gestures so that one could download the Mozilla gestures or Opera gestures.

The reason, IIRC, gestures took so long to include after the first patches (for Opera gesture, then for the Firefox/Phoenix gesture mimicking) was that KDE wanted to be able to have all applications use gestures. On the Mac, I miss using gestures in the non-Cocoa programs (which include Finder and iTunes) because it was great to use them for web browsing and file browsing.

[1] http://dot.kde.org/990672846/
[2] http://dot.kde.org/1066450520/

If he doesn't like the deal he's getting these days, perhaps he should start patenting stuff or quit the software business [...]

QT4 is supposed to bring speed increases all over the place, help with parallel processing, it brings SVG rendering, and lessens the memory footprint all at the same time. That is pretty much a reality today even with the beta.

If KDE4 is showing speed improvements, this is in spite of Qt4, not because of it. Consider the following program, which compiles with both Qt3 and Qt4 via different Makefiles:

http://dot.kde.org/1118312471/1187282309/qtprog.ta r.bz2

All this program does is make two rectangles bounce around the screen on a black background, attempting to acheive 49 frames per second via a timer (provided by Qt's API). The qt3-demo program achieves this frame rate easily, but the qt4-demo program can only do it if you keep the window small enough. (I saw it drop to 33 FPS when I sized the window to 850x630. It dropped more when I grew the window more.)

It appears that the more pixels Qt has to draw, the slower it runs. This will affect every single widget in the library, and Qt 4 passes its new performance flaws on to KDE.

Then tell me what is not correct about that code.

Here you go.

Well, I believe I have learned C++, which took about 6 months of medium intensity.

So, you claim you know all the rules and definition in ISO/ANSI C++? You can tell exactly which constructs are implementation defined and undefined? You know the entire STL API, complexities, etc.? You know the entire C99 subset, and its rules and definitions? I really doubt it.

What you probably mean is that, after 6 months of studying, you can produce useful code in C++ that seems to work on your desktop machine. That's nice, but it's just enough to get you into trouble.

It's being worked on.

There is GOOD support out there for groupware systems other than Exchange, and some of those (I think) can interoperate with Outlook. But there's not complete Exchange interaction.

Still, I think it's included on the Kubuntu LiveCD -- or if not that, I can probably find a LiveCD that has it -- so you could try it out for a day, see how well it works? Then again, it probably takes a bit of tech savvy to get it working right, especially on a LiveCD...

http://dot.kde.org/1185753836/1185821309/118584231 4/ - keep in mind it's beta though. Which in KDE speak doesn't mean "finished except buggy", but rather "something kinda stabilized for devs to work with, also we worked on the UI some. oh and our jewels (plasma) are starting to look like something".

My other usability pet peeve with KDE is its heavy reliance on toolbars with dozens of nondescript blue icons. Even for experienced users, it's a bit daunting.

Aside from the fact that I've never been "daunted" by a KDE app even when I was a newbie, you may like the way KDE4 is actually dealing with the issue. If you look for example at this screeshot of Okular, you will notice that now icons will be presented by default with text. This means a much bigger overall icon area, which makes the icon much easier to hit and forces the developer to separate wheat from chaff when creating toolbars.

• Visual Guide to 4.0 alpha-1
• KDE 4.0 alpha-2 announcement
• KDE 4.0 beta-1 announcement

• Visual Guide to 4.0 alpha-1
• KDE 4.0 alpha-2 announcement
• KDE 4.0 beta-1 announcement

• Visual Guide to 4.0 alpha-1
• KDE 4.0 alpha-2 announcement
• KDE 4.0 beta-1 announcement

The last time it was updated was 2005?

http://www.kde.org/history/awards.php

I would think that would be embarrassing if you had a 2 year award drought.

For those who dont want to install and test, here is an OpenSuse based KDE Live CD

This thread tree has caused me to take another closer look at d-bus.
I sponsored the inclusion of d-bus into AROS http://www.aros.org/ some time ago.
Point being is that I have know about d-bus for quiet some time.

Closer look: specifically I have more closely looked at qdbus and qdbusviewer which did not exist some time ago. dbus-send did but not a man page for it. Certainly it is a step in the right direction but the complexity level can and should be reduced for the end user access.

You are right, there doesn't seem to be much that supports d-bus and that should be assisted in changing by making it as easy as possible to integrate a d-bus port into applications. So easy that even code aware end users could help or at least do it for themselves.

Somehow, I think d-bus application interface may be overcomplexicated http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/D-Bu s/Creating_Interfaces
which does not help to promote it use, certainly not end users. And that is a real shame.

Documentation of what functionality is available in applications having a d-bus port, is also lacking. but this of course would be tied to who ever writes the application interface or at least some way to extract it from the code.

From the Kwallet handbook (a KDE utility; GNOME has equiv.): The wallet subsytem provides a convenient and secure way to manage all your passwords. I'm not sure if this can be done automatically (integrated in browser) but manually, using a master key/password, it is a good way to store passwords for those with Alzheimer or other memory trouble. One could even use GPG/PGP or TrueCrypt (or LUKS/GELI etcetera) as 'wallet'. As long as you can remember/have the master key its more secure and reliable than (sticky) papers, or a plethora of passwords to remember, or using the same password for various purposes. Just make sure you have this data backed up.

No it is licensed under the GPL. The old problem was that earlier versions of QT were licensed under an open source license that had some restrictions which many found irreconcilable.
You can read about it here

They (KDE) tried, but the gnome fundamentalists didn't let them. This was in the middle of the gnome/kde wars, when Qt wasn't pure enough for some.

You can still find references on the web:
http://dot.kde.org/1096230607/1096270511/

I always think, what if they did it ? It would be better than gimp for sure, seeing the quality of other kde apps at the time.

5. There's no way at all to organize your layers in a more complex setup: there are no layer groups, layer folder, or anything like that. It's just a big sack of flat layers, that you can select one at a time, and link them together. This is Photoshop 4 level functionality, and most graphics editors are waaaay past that by now.

I believe this is an artifact of the GIMP's native file format, XCF. This file format is not only undocumented, it's purposefully undocumented.

6. There are no proper drawing tools in Gimp at all.

I've complained about the same thing. Drawing a ring in another graphics application: pick the ring drawing tool, drag from one point to another. Drawing a circle in the GIMP: select the spherical selection tool, select a circle, pick the fill tool, fill the circle, go to a menu and shrink the selection, then erase the selected area.

When I complained about it being too difficult and not at all sensible? I got told that it was my own fault for not reading the manual. That's right, you need to read the tutorials to find out how to draw basic shapes!

i see amarok making its way to the windows desktop soon enough.

The Trolls realize they need to cooperate more, and thus are trying to pursue the common interests. By introducing developer blogs, releasing early snapshots and having a community manager, they hope to increase communication with the community and encourage contributions. Until now, KDE developers often worked around limitations in Qt, but in the future they could send patches.

Troll. There is no application called Kalendar. The calendar component of Kontact is called KOrganizer http://kontact.kde.org/korganizer/

If you are dedicated it's possible to pull your appointments from an exchange server, covert to iCal, and then import them into Sunbird.

I still prefer KOrganiser, not least because it has an exchange plug in. Integration with the mail client is also better in my opinion.

In fact Kontact is overall a fantastic piece of software. My only gripe is the fact that it's handling of IMAP mailboxes is horrific, but I believe that is slated for a total revamp in KDE4.

may be you/he didn't test it. But I'm sure developers of kde spent hours to be able to anononce this: http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/change log3_5_5to3_5_6.php Treat specific attribute values case-insensitively during style matching. With these changes, KHTML becomes the first rendering engine to thoroughly pass the 578 tests of the excellent Automated CSS3 Selectors Testsuite (http://www.css3.info/selectors-test). Fixes bug 135505. See SVN commits 595962 and 597587.

A quick check of the KDE changelogs shows that Konqueror was brought into compliance with the tests with the release of KDE 3.5.6. Linky.

3.5.6 was released in January.

"Default" browser? Does it have an extension to view foreclosures?

And I had to scroll pretty far down to get the joke. Perhaps a credited quotation would have been a better choice.

"Default" browser? Does it have an extension to view foreclosures?

...report to the press that it reassigns the preferred applications, which happens to be something that spyware also likes to do.

The point of Safari for Windows XP is to allow people to test on an environment equivalent to that of the Mac or iPhone while spending only $200 for the upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, not $600+ for a Mac or iPhone.

These statistics make me wonder if Konqueror 4 will become another large competitor on Windows. Konqueror and Safari both share a very common core (KHTML/WebKit), so the renderring and page handling should be relatively the same. Web designers can get another speedy and a more native web browsers that tests their sites for the same purpose, and general users can get a lightweight, standards-compliant, open source web browser (without the OSS requirements, you can already get this with Opera, of course) that won't try to enforce another platform's "look'n'feel" like Apple's apps all do.

For the interested, you can grab an alpha copy of KDE 4 (download qt-copy, kdelibs, and kdebase at the very least; you can use either GCC/Cygwin or MS Visual Studio to compile it). On OS X, there are precompiled universal binaries for everything, and Kubuntu and openSUSE users can get packages for it from their respective websites.

You can read why Apple went with KHTML here: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=10419709231863 9&w=2 Basically, KHTML is a small, lean, fast implementation of an HTML renderer that is easier to develop.

Now how about contributing to KDE and or making a version for Linux?

Perhaps you missed the memo.

Maybe you missed this one too.

As for developing a version for Linux, why would Apple do that when KDE and Mozilla are already there and serving the needs of Linux users? I see no need for Apple to do more than contribute to KDE, which it is doing. There are no shortage of great browsers available for Linux users, and it would be a waste of money for Apple to devote resources to a small, already saturated market.

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/

http://dot.kde.org/1135283071/

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/

http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/08/explorations- in-firefox-ui.html

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/

http://dot.kde.org/1135283071/

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/

http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/08/explorations- in-firefox-ui.html

I was in your situation, and I bought the Mac. I'm an experienced Linux user on desktops and servers, and outside of laptops I haven't gone out and just bought a computer in over 15 years. I had the advantage of already having a MacBook, and an iBook before that that I had gotten used. Now the iBook runs SuSE and is my stereo with Amarok.

Anyway, my intent when I got the Mac Pro was to dual-boot with Linux until I didn't feel like dual booting anymore. Turns out I didn't want to, once I got things tweaked, and once I changed my workflow away from multiple independent displays with lots of shaded windows, things have been very good. I do still miss my display setup, but I haven't found it too limiting.

I have to believe that they can do at least a little better with bundled apps (There seems to be no equivalent to "MS Paint" for example, not that I think MS Paint is great, but there should be ... SOMETHING out of the box, I dunno).

I have no real regrets, I don't dual boot to Linux, though I have been using the VMWare beta to pull data off my old drives. Some things take time to build trust, like iPhoto, some things just suck completely, like iTunes (use Amarok, plug), but overall, you get a unixy development environment albeit with BSD toolchain rather than GNU, a stable desktop environment, though easier for me to crash than X, and a high quality machine for a good price. I priced equivalent HPs with identical hardware before my purchase, and the HP was $1200 more than the Mac Pro 2.6 I got.

By the way, I was driven crazy by things such as "no window auto-raise" and highlight->cut, midclick->paste, and window shading. I'm not going to pay $15 for window shading, the copy/paste thing still bugs me, and after a while, I realized why auto-raise/auto-focus can't work. Since the application menus are in the bar at the top of the screen, every time you tried to get to the "file" menu for firefox, you could end up mousing over another app and changing the bar before you could get there. Sucks, but it's an answer. That makes me wish for independent displays more though, since applications on a second or third monitor still have their menus all the way on the left screen.

Good luck

2) Figure out how much time will be wasted by you and your team trying to get by with 2nd-tier products (i.e. trying to make The GIMP be Photoshop).

Oh, you are so painfully right.

Apparently it all began when some Amarok developers started trying to leverage Amarok's success to popularize the Ruby language, of which they are vocal advocates, by making it a mandatory dependency of Amarok.

Nowadays when you install Amarok it also installs parts of Ruby on Rails!! (Check it for yourself, I am not making this up.) This is non-optional.

These days I no longer use Amarok, it had become too slow. :( I got in touch with the developers to ask if perhaps they could make the dependency optional, but they didn't seem to want to. But perhaps if more of us contacted them and asked nicely they'd change their mind?

I don't want to be a quibbler, but it's actually Amarok instead of amaroK. It was renamed in June 2006. Source

Of course Amarok. It supports many portable devices. Including UMS and MTP

Of course Amarok. It supports many portable devices. Including UMS and MTP

Amarok

KDE bug 140983 .

Well on the qtfpsgui download page there is binaries for linux, windows and OS X. Amarok recently was made to work on Windows http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/374-Amarok2-bu ilds-on-Windows.html As for Konversation, Kopete and K3b they will also be available on OS X and windows once KDE 4 is out.

According to the LINA whitepaper, LINA encourages migration to Linux, because commerical OS users will be introduced to countless Linux applications.

I just wonder - if LINA became incredibly popular - would Windows and Mac users really feel compelled to change to Linux? I mean if you could run the vast majority of Linux programs, but still have a few favourite programs that are not supported in Linux (and assuming these don't even run using Wine) then it might be more attractive to keep using LINA and never touch Linux in itself.

Just think of all those people who started using Linux only to have amarok.

Can I just have Firefox use my existing MySQL server instead? Why does a browser need its own private SQL backend?

Maybe they'll take a hint from the wonderful folks making Amarok. Amarok lets you pick your SQL backend, and only forces SQLite when there's nothing else.

Sticking with the seeing the music.
You can do this with your digital collection on Amarok with the moodbar plugin.

I like KPDF as well and that's my default viewer, but look at what is coming: Okular promises to be, if not an Acroread killer, at least a very serious contender. Note that this is KDE4 stuff (ergo Qt4, ergo it may easily be on Windows machines by year's end!).

Last month, GNOME had 4631 commits http://cia.vc/stats/project/GNOME/. Last time KDE had less than 4631 commits was Jan/2000 http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-commits&r=1&w=2

It took me 10 seconds to find, even though I didn't know it was there. How? Open KControl. Type "double" in the search bar. Select the first suggestion.

Of course, this wouldn't work with the awful, awful configuration dialog that Kubuntu supplies. Deinstall it, it is not worth the bytes on your harddrive. I hear it is a clone from the Mac; if so I pity the Mac people for yet another reason.

Perhaps you're thinking of KDevelop. Much of the User Manual is missing. Here's an example: http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdevelop/kdevel op/ui-elements.html