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KDE's future: Plasma & SimpleKDE
A reader writes: "KDE continues to grow. Early screenshots, mockups, and developer blogs show that the new Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch) will bring innovative approaches to desktop computing. On the other hand, the very first screenshots of SimpleKDE, an unofficial fork of KDE, were meant to be a response to those who criticise KDE as being overbloated."
Hey, you made my day. I am the father of Slicker -- it started as an attempt to write something for KDE along the lines of (classic) Mac OS's tabbed finder windows. See my posts in the Gentoo forum where I posted about its development: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-29746-highlig ht-.html
So, basically what happened was simple. I really was only interested in using it as a way to access Konq, as panels which would slide out based on mouse-to-screen edge movements. I made it relatively plugin-extendable and people whipped up all sorts of nice extensions, like terminal access, K-Menu access, etc etc. People also wanted it to become a sourceforge project and more public, which I was fine with. So, I handed it off, and it promptly died since the people who took it on bickered day and night about website design and themability, and never bothered to write any code.
I then moved on to OS X, where I continued the work that matters to me ( robotics & AI ).
But anyway, it had potential!
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> but its appearance here is horrendous
;)
seeing as nobody's seen it yet, that's an interesting statement to make
right now we are working with a large number of artists who are all throwing ideas and concepts for different parts of plasma into a pot. i, and a few others from the project, go back to the artists with feedback, questions, critiques and the cycle starts over.
we've done perhaps 1 or 2 cycles thus far and have a few months more to go. the final look and feel is by FAR not decided upon. in fact, in august we'll be getting together with the artists doing Oxygen (a new theme and icon style in quiet development that is aiming to be the default in kde4) while at aKademy and banging out some hopefully hi-octane work then.
> lets not forget that we don't want to go with
> too radical a change all at once
yes, i couldn't agree more!
when working out how plasma might work, i ended up at some rather radical concepts. but as you note, we can't drop some totally new way of doing everything on people.
it needs to be introduced step by step.
thus plasma will be familiar enough in its default configuration for people to transition without really noticing it from KDE3, Windows or Mac... but it will introduce subtle new concepts that will allow us to start edging in a direction that gets us out of the WIMP-jail.
the first concept is that the desktop is not a file manager view, but harmonizes with your panels.
the second concept is that the desktop and panels are meant to be first class citizens that actively enable your workflow.
i'd love to say more about it, but i don't particularly like talking about things which i can't let people play with right now (aka "vapourware") even though development is going forward at a terrific pace. i also don't like it when people snag ideas and run off with them, as has happened a few times in the last couple of years. =/