Slashdot Mirror
Eyes on Karamba
An anonymous reader writes "dot.kde.org posted an interview with Hans Karlsson, the author of the now pretty popular KDE clone of Samurize, Karamba, which is responsible for the recent craze at kdelook.org. An interesting interview well worth a read which shows that even today most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects after all."
"most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects after all." but if you've installed Karamba, it still very much feels like a hobby project. It's cool, looks great, and easy to program with PERL, but the installation is still very much a work in progress.
From what I remember (some ways back), Apple was sending C&D letters to people making Aqua theme clones. While I'm sure there are some out there, it's doubtful they'll be too mainstream, I would think.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
go to kde-look.org and look around. They have at least 1 or 2 very good aqua themes.
I do security
Link to the Karamba screenshots. The site seems to be rather slow, however.
eyekaramba!
Would it kill the submitter to mention what the program actually does? Is there no "editor" at /. who knows what an actual news blurb looks like? Christ.
"Karamba is a KDE program that can display a lot of various information right on your desktop. Karamba uses the same 'fake' transparency effect that e.g., Konsole can use."
Ah, everyone's constant search for better eye candy to fill their desktops...
I just installed Super-Karamba this morning and I am fiddeling right now around with the Slashdot theme to make it nicer looking on my screen.
Karamba is really cool! I downloaded SuperKaramba due to its Python support and I plan to write some plugins for receiving automatically Mailing list notifications. Should be trivial as far as I can tell.
I think something like this was overdue for a long time and it rivals the Active Desktop from MS Windows.
-- Stephan Richter
I compiled Karamba once and....quickly uninstalled it. Sure it looks nice but I never found it particularly useful. It takes up a lot of desktop space and really is nothing more than a very beautiful way to waste your system resources.
For example, one of its features is the ability to read headlines from news sources such as Slashdot. While its nice to see the headlines right on your desktop, how useful is it? If you want to read the whole story you have to fire up a browser anyways to read it. So whats the point?
Sidebars such as Karamba need to be more useful than just show information. There needs to be a way for a user to interact with the information presented to them. Until that happens they will remain pretty much useless (and off my desktop).
Did anyone else misread it to say "Eyes on Karma"?
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
Is that a Cinco de Mayo joke? :D
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
I can't reach that link right now but from my recollection, isn't this program very much like the Microsoft "Active Desktop" feature from years back which pretty much bombed among the users?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
does anybody know if there is a KDE theme to approach aqua?
What "theme" are you asking about? Icons? Window Decorations? Widgets? Colors?
There's a couple Mac-sh clones for icons, there's a few different ones (and a few of thoses) for the Window Decorations. And there's always Good ol' Mosfet's Liquid for the widgets. And there's a ton of color themes too (Mosfet included one or two in his Widget theme as well).
Just go to KDE-Look. You should find everything you need or want.
And depending on your distro, there's brobably RPM's, DEB'd, EBuilds, whatever for most of the stuff there. I personally use Gentoo. There's a LOT of EyeCandy that's made it's way into the Portage tree. If you're on RH... Well... They've never been too KDE friendly, but I'm sure there's some other stuff that will work on the system from rpmfind.net, should you feel that compiling is too great of a task.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Check out SuperKaramba
Description: SuperKaramba, based on Karamba, is a tool that allows anyone to create and run simple interactive applets on the KDE desktop. The applets, which are defined in a simple text file, can optionally be augmented with Python code to make them interactive. Current widgets vary from simple news headline displays to complete custom replacements for the KDE panel (Kicker).
For those of you who don't know the details:
Karamba is a semi-clone of Samurize. SuperKaramba is a version of Karamba I'm working on that adds python scripting and lots of other enhancements. Most of the cool (in my opinion) themes require SuperKaramba. But I wish the Karamba guys the best of luck and hope we can work together to accomplish our goals for both programs.
The website for it is http://netdragon.sourceforge.net
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
The only major difference being that one actually has the choice of what to put on their desktop, not some mega corporation that only wants to "push" a bunch of silly adds down our throat...
Does anyone else remember "Active Desktop"? The premise is almost exactly what Karamba is. It gives the user the ability to display disparate information that is streamed to the computer over a network connection directly on the desktop, underneath applications.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
No, you actually are the one controlling what's on the screen with AD, not MS. I actually used AD for a while on my laptop to keep a personal simple task list as an HTML page. It actually worked pretty well, but I stopped using last summer and never started back up, and last semester I switched to an old PDA. (this semester, I did nothing :P)
AD could have been cool, but for some ungodly reason MS set things up so that if you use it, it made the desktop an actual IE window, so it refreshed slow as fuck (and therefore made the system seem amazingly slow when trying to move around windows) And it also made any scaled background images quite ugly by using nearest neighbor interpolation rather then bilinear filtering like the 'standard' background display.
It was quite stupid.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ah, Linux, dontcha luv it?
How bizarre would it be if this means that developers finally find a reason to settle on a Linux VM (that's Python) as part of creating kewl desktop themes?
Who needs a strategic plan anyway? And would Dotnet be enjoying more success if it offered semi-transparent weather reports?
And for those who want to foster more cross pollination (in either direction), I present...
:)
Konfabulator!
I know, the K makes it look KDE... it isn't
GPL Deconstructed
Not trying to be a troll here or anything. But this program is really just something that looks nice in the screenshot, but is not really useful.
I actually installed KDE last week, then Karaba and fiddled with both of them. The interesting thing was that I found that I could attach menu entries directly to the panel, like the "drawers" in CDE. But all they really were is just "links" to the regular menu items.
Anyway here's what I really liked about KDE:
1. Konqueror: its damn fast!
2. graphics: KDE is overall pretty nice, and I absolutely LOVE the BeOS style window theme.
Did not like:
1. No way to put a system monitor in the panel
2. Stability: Konqueror seems to crash a couple times a day, sometimes locking the X server! (Probably because I compiled w/ -03 optimizations).
Anyway, I found that gnome supports the drawers better than KDE does! Drawers are definitely the most efficient UI design I have seen. WAY better than the "start menu" where everything springs out of one button. The fact that you can even have sub drawers is pretty cool.
To summarize:
Karamba = pretty, not useful, wastes resources
Drawers in Gnome = useful, somewhat pretty