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The People Behind Quanta Plus
anonymous writes "In this fascinating interview, Eric Laffoon and Andras Mantia give us a glimpse into the world of the Quanta Plus project. Read on for everything from tantalising references to Kommander, billed by Eric to be part of the foundations for the next generation desktop and user experience, to details of future plans for Quanta VPL (Visual Page Layout)."
"Tantalising glimpses of Kommander" Sounds like this person has a KDE fetish.
In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters imagine YOU!
Koffeemaker - for KDE hot drinks
Kondom - for KDE developer safesex
Kommode - for taking a KDE Krap
but i was kind of into this story about a guy who's banging his sister in the pooper
w00t w00t I made it!! no failures this time!
There is only one Quanta.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I mean, good god, look at the layout of the tabs in that dialog for Kommander. Most of the other shots don't get much better.
Is it too much to ask these guys to put down the source code for 5 minutes and skim a chapter or two in an HCI book?
Can I Play With Madness?
Shouldn't it be, "Kuanta"?
I use vim for all my work, be it writing c/java code, shell scripts, html/xml , emails . basically everything that requires using keyboard for extended amount of time.
Over the years i have tried various IDEs and WYSWYG editors and gave up on them after some time to fall back to my trusted VIM.
Most of them are too bloated and takes ages just to start up. Plus you need a special directory structure and so on so forth.
Quanta plus is very fast, the pre-view actually works , and very intutive piece of s/w.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
http://saveie6.com/
This has nothing to do with former Green Lantern and current Sinestro's ring holder Guy Gardner, so I am not interested.
A/S/L, everyone?
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It'
Sorry to say,
YOU FAIL IT!
Better luck next time.
w00t!
There are 6 good reasons I wouldn't want to be this person today, right there. That has to be hurtin' still :*)
Holy crap! Marcie in Advertising got a story posted at Slashdot! YOU GO, GIRL!
i realize they have a KDE fetish, but is it really necessary to make something to general as a web development environment based on kde *schtuff*, so that i need to load all the bloated libs to use it? they seem to proud of their quality, but rather restrictive with respect to a user's preferences for desktop environment. doesn't seem to be any good reason to not use gtk2... just my unwanted $0.02
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
This has already been discussed, look better and here. Thats the beauty of opensource. It gets better.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
KOMPRESSOR - crush computerfiles small with industrial might!
--
WHY FOR THE LOVE OF FUCKING GOD!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
the kde dev's dont give a damn about how their overloaded interfaces actually affect average users, they utterly reject all HCI research.
Haaa haa haa...
My thoughts exactly. "fascinating interview" , "tantalising references"
What suspense! What drama! Goodness gracious, I'm practically beside myself in anticipation of the goodies yet to come!
Best Windows Freeware
The Quanta Plus page claims HTML validity and even sport a "Valid HTML" button, but the site doesn't actually validate.
Their front page is generally pretty weak. I have no real idea what their software does. Is it a text editor? A web IDE? A WYSIWYG page-churner? All of the above? All I see is a verbose attempt at associating their project with PHP, Apache and Linux, and at saying their software is the best - but doesn't really say what it's best at or what it's better than. Even worse, looking at the links, I have no idea where I should go next to know more about the product. The Documentation perhaps? That's the first place I'd go after downloading the product. But before that I'd need a reason to download their software, wouldn't I?
All I know is that they've failed to interest me in their product. That's pretty abysmal - a project about web development that fails it's own web development!
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Quanta has *never* crashed, not once. They've only had one instance where some minor technical difficulties prevented the launch of the product.
No crashes, never. How's that for uptime?
their own website sucks goats
Just moment ago I finished putting together a 50 page annual report - I decided at the very beginning of the project to give Quanta a shot; I knew I was in for a lot of copy and paste, I've been working with vi for ages and had a feeling that I may be able to save time by taking this on using Quanta.
End result? There's little doubt that it saved me time; probably 8 hours in total. Not bad. There were some annoyances as with all software of this type, and most of it can probably be chalked up to my inexperience with this software package; tags being auto-closed when I didn't want them to and vice-versa, strange text colouring, etc. Then there were some quirks like when some tags auto-closed they also moved the display up a couple of lines; so if I wanted to paste with my middle button right after having a tag auto-complete it would end up somewhere else. Stuff for me to R{more of}TFM and submit bug reports, but bottom-line is that I was quite pleased, it kept me organized and saved me some time. I'll certainly use this for future [applicable] projects and provide the community-feedback these guys deserve. Well done, check it if you haven't already!
SHE DOES!!!
Maybe you guys should rename it Kommand Line, it's about as prehistorical. This is what about when you let engineers think they know anything about users.
They've said it before and they say it here: They plan for Quanta to be the best webdev app under the sun, which means they have to compete with one of the best commercial apps out there: Macromedias Dreamweaver.
Other than the usual BS about Gimp being a PS killer (utter nonsense) I think it's actually doable to eventually dethrone DW as king of webeditors. I see no way DW can go any further than now without getting hideously bloated. And if Macromedia doesn't manage to get into detailing DW and rid it of anoyances and bugs but instead going on pressing it with their acquired Cold Fusion crap (which is somewhat likely) I see a bright future for Quanta. But then again there's a long way ahead of them. I use them both and DW still is lightyears ahead.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
. .
-- "Naughty little whispers of Gideon." ."
-- "A playful spank of KwikDisk."
-- "A lingering yet mournful longing for the world that DCOP would bring, yet knowing it shall never be. .
---
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
>The Quanta Plus page claims HTML validity and even >sport a "Valid HTML" button, but the site doesn't actually >validate [w3.org].
Missing ALT tag? Oh, boohoo!
These are such nits you are picking. Minor bugs that can be fixed in a few seconds. Instead of sending a polite bug report, you decided to pull a tantrum on slashdot.
Good for you.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Will it work with a dark text background and support emacs key bindings?
Quanta Plus is probaly the only WYSWYG editor i have used and liked.
Quanta is not WYSIWYG my friend. I once wished it were, but then I discovered learning HTML is not that hard.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Are you in the about box of anything besides the walls in the public restroom? This must be the only place people go to bitch about what they get for free.
I've been using Quanta for a few years now. My favorite HTML editor used to be Homesite, but it got too bloated. Then I found Quanta, which was like the older versions of Homesite, but has steadily improved while Homesite has gotten more and more bloated. Quanta has been my favorite HTML editor, on any platform, for quite awhile. Thanks, guys!
BTW, I also think KDE is a better Windows than Windows.
I have to say that Quanta has so far been my tool of choice for web development since switching to a Linux platform. I like to think of it as an InterDev "lite" -- it has all the useful editor and project functions I actually used under InterDev without all the overhead, crashes and expensive per-seat license.
The only things blatantly missing from Quanta (from my perspective anyways) are the database tools that InterDev has. It's nice to be able to view table and field properties, edit data, test SQL statements, etc., all from within the dev environment. But I'm not complaining. The PHP code completion/hints are excellent and the built-in HTML/PHP/CSS/Javascript reference docs are invaluable. Why they would disable the ability to copy from the docs pages to the editor are beyond me, but other than that I think it's a great tool.
So when is Quanta going to have SVG and SMIL, or WAP?
would be intra and interapp scripting that is consistent and based on a real component model.
There are tons of bloody component models, why can't one be agreed upon? Because they all seem to suck.
* KParts is not robust - its basically standard C++ linkage with a funner preprocessor. Also GPL bound. And I'm a GPL fan, but this is too restrictive.
* Bonobo is ridiculously overweight and doesn't seem even half sensible. The CORBA C binding? You have got to be kidding me. It is an absolute mess if you wanted to define a new interface and actually use it from a C program without wanting to gouge your eyes out with POAs and BOAs and excremental error checking. So you have to wrap it up in a GObject - ie you may as well forget defining an interface. And CORBA is fugly in any language.
* XPCOM - dunno, only used by mozilla atm... uses lots of ugly random numbers (UUIDs). Seems like a clone of MSCOM
* UNO - OpenOffices COM clone...
Either we pick one or really try to find an optimum. Hopefully ban the use of random numbers in source files (UUIDS), use domain strings instead.
Hopefully freedesktop.org or someone will try to standardise here - atm it is horrible.
You should be able to
* write a widget component and use it in a GTK, QT, Tk etc program.
* write a theme component and use it to control the look of any of these toolkits. - hopefully a better solution than duplicating or triplicating theme plugins.
* the whole ole shebang
* write non gui components and mix languages.
MS have had this working in a very ugly (on the source and implementation level) way for *ages*. Some of it is due to the level of control they exert, but we need to catch up.
This would be especially good because if we had a reasonable C mapping, people wouldn't be forced to use C to write infrastructure. Which isn't everybodys cup of tea.
None of this is new or clever, its just something that annoys me every now and then that no progress is being made.
Yeah yeah, I know, "show me the code" etc, etc.
Don't try and tantalise me - just tell me what you're selling.
Or expect fewer page views.
Marketeers suck
Visit www.matrix4.net for more reality information.
they both suck, i mean totally suck, i rather use ICEwm or Blackbox/Fluxbox and use Bluefish or if it is something simple just a text editor like NEdit is about the best text editor for Linux...
http://www.nedit.org/
Actually, I really like Quanta. I've been more productive with Quanta so far than any other HTML editor on any platform. Maybe it's less what Quanta does, than what it doesn't do - mangle code, for one. I was used to graphical/WYSIWYG editors for a long time, but now I really do prefer to write HTML code with the excellent tag properties menus. As much as one can write HTML in a text editor, I just can't always remember every attribute for every tag I use. So, it helps me be complete. I think most people can read HTML better than write it, just in the sense of forgetting an attribute here and there.
Most of the HTML I write isn't incredibly complicated, but I do mix PHP scripts in quite a bit, and for that, Quanta's been incredibly useful. It is, in fact, the only KDE application I use.
I had tried Bluefish and some others, but they all had annoying quirks or non-intuitive interface design.
There are a lot of features I'd like to see added to Quanta to bring it in line with something like Dreamweaver, but I'd definitely recommend it now, and it is maybe the most useful Linux application I use. If you write a lot of HTML in a text editor, Quanta is worth a try, because it basically has most or all of the benefits of a plain text editor with a lot of enhancements that you are free to use, or not use, such as Syntax Highlighting, end-tag insertion, and the very handy pop up attribute dialogs.
I'm a big fan of it. I use it almost every day.
Why would I buy or use an html/web page editor form a company or organization with quite possibly one of the most ugly and ametuerish web sites I have seen in a long time?
I don't mean to be rude (or to sound like Simon Cowell!) but after the excellent web page designs we saw here and most especially here, how could I take any tool seriously when created by people who clearly can't do good web design.
I personally would like to know what Radu used...;)
And for the record, I don't pretend to be a web designer extrodinaire, but I'm quite sure ANYONE could do a better job than that. If I had created an HTML editor, I'd make damn sure the web page I "sold" or "promoted" it on looked a little better than one created by a grade 9 student...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
wysiwyg.
Other posters have said Quanta is wysiwyg. Last time I checked, its not. Someone else mentioned it is in cvs. I hope so. And I hope it gets to the stable release fast, as I don't know how to use something from cvs. Nor can I deal with dependency issues.
Hand coding and using vi (or is it vim?) may be all that, but it ain't for me and a lot of other people. I'm not a programmer or web designer. Period. But I have been able to get good looking web pages up and running for my business in the past, one site numbering over 100 web pages, without any html design experience or knowledge. And I checked them in Netscape (before Mozilla), and they looked acceptable. And I know others liked them from the feedback, the jobs and product sold, and the visitors who numbered over 1,000 per week for a small local service company.
I haven't booted into windows in almost a year, but I miss dreamweaver, and prior to that, frontpage, so much that I stopped creating web pages for friends completely, when I could be making a decent living at it while learning html at the same time.
If Quanta really gets wysiwyg, and I'm able to track (and drag and drop) web pages for large sites and have the hyperlinks automatically update the way I can with frontpage, I'll be using it, and I'll be showing my appreciation by sending money from my very limited budget to the developers. Especially if I don't have to spend money on crossover whatever and update dreamweaver 4.0, what I currently have (and no longer use because I don't boot into windows anymore), to dreamweaver mx.
Hey macromedia, don't want to port to linux? Well then, fuck you and the horse your mother rode in on!
And billie,
Welcome to the Jungle!
Templates please.
Lots of 'em.
Please.
While we're at it. Since GTK2 is supposedly so neutral, how the hell can I theme GTK2 apps without running that crapass gnome -settings-damon. You know, that neutral piece of software that clobbers my root window and gets real pissy if I want it back for KDE.
First of all, let me say I think it's great that there are a lot of programmers out there (myself included) who take the time to write free software.
What bothers me is the user interface design. While I understand there have been plenty of UI design tools out on the market that have this same design, Visual Basic is of course the one that first comes to my mind. Look at the interface, it looks like a clone of VB.
When will the programmers of the world wake up and realize that Microsoft's user interfaces suck. Sure, they have all that wonderful user testing they do, and some will argue that Microsoft has refined the design very well with that testing. However, I'm of the opinion that it lacks any sort of design whatsoever. It is a clear example of design by committee gone horribly, horribly wrong.
All of the MS apps have the same (or similar) UI. Unweildy menus with a billion options along with unweildy toolbars with a million icons. As if that wasn't bad enough we have the properties table whereby we have a list of options, usually aranged alphabetically, on the left side, with values on the right.
These programs might get the job done, but they are far from ideal. The interface confuses the user by presenting him with many options all at once. Then, when someone finally realizes that it's too hard to use the program, they add wizards that force the user into a linear progression of choices-- essentially preventing the user from seeing the big picture and instead holding their hand.
It may be the current state of the industry, and it may be an interface that a lot of people are comfortable with (having used it for so long) but it's by far not the best design I've seen. It's also not true that because the task is complex the interface needs to be. Look at the Macintosh. Yes, I use Mac OS X. No, I never used Macs before that. There are a lot of great things about the OS X interface.
Menus are reasonable. There's no chevrons at the bottom of them revealing all of the choices; if there's that many choices, then something is wrong. Toolbars are another great example. They have a handful or two of very large icons that are easy to spot. The whole purpose of a toolbar is to provide very quick access to very commonly used and unique functions, not to duplicate the menus in the toolbars. For instance, you rarely find toolbar buttons for new, open, save, and print. Those are functions that are always located in the file menu, why duplicate that on the toolbar? The purpose of the toolbar is not to save a click, it's to save your brain from having to think which menu to pull down to send your e-mail or to compose a new one (something specific to an e-mail program). It's also great for back and forward buttons (something specific to a browser).
Another great UI design is the inspector panel or floating pallette. To some extent, this has been copied on other systems (on Microsoft as right-click -> properties) but it's not quite the same. The inspector is different, it's a modeless dialog that follows the item you have selected. A find dialog functions similarly, it always operates on the active window yet it can stay open and will always do what any normal person would expect.
The final key concept I can think of on short notice is drag and drop. Drag and drop is too often overlooked. When first getting familiar with the mac, there were countless times I pondered for a few seconds about how to do something, and on a whim I figure, ah, what the heck, lemme try drag and drop. Sure enough, it worked. Now (after only about a half a year of using the mac) it's the first thing I try. Why burden myself with trying to dig through a menu for some predefined action when I can just do what I want to do and have it work?
That's just a quick rundown of some of the often overlooked problems with user interfaces, and a quick rundown of already implemented solutions to those problems. Don't get me wrong, OS X has its UI warts. For instance, in 10.2
I scoured the website, but I couldn't find any screenshots -- maybe I'm just missing them?
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
This may be a little off topic, but I thought it'd be a good time to ask: Can anyone recommend a good free/Free editor for HTML? I'm not looking for a WYSIWYG editor -- just something that allows me to hand-code more easily (with syntax highlighting and the like).
My current favorite is probably Crimson Editor. Its big features include syntax highlighting (of course), a tabbed interface, and change detection (it notifies the user if someone else has changed the file on-disk).
Any others I should look into? I've heard the suggestions for jEdit, but it doesn't seem to have a tabbed interface (at least not that I could manage to activate). HTML Kit is another one that always comes up, but I don't believe it has change-detection :-/.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Are you a fucking loser who thinks knowing VBscript and Kylix makes you the self-appointed King of Slashdot? Because, you're right.
And dont forget XParts. This is how KDE embeds Mozilla and VIM.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Got VPL? Try wearing a G instead.
Yeah, it's pretty scarce on screenshots... Well, take it on trust, it looks like an IDE :-P
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Kitty Hooch is Eric's business. He pays Andras to work on Quanta. Thats not much dough a month (Andras lives in Romania of all places) but its all out of his own pocket.
And for what its worth, cats like his catnip a lot more than the store-bought one.
Dreamweaver. Accept no substitutes.