Slashdot Mirror
Preview of KDE 3.5
tr_x_data writes "There is a quite interesting KDE 3.5 preview with screenshots on JLP's Blog. I thought there wouldn't be so much improvement to KDE 3.4 since everyone is working on porting KDE4 to QT4, but obviously there are quite a few changes. Look forward to "Storage Media Notification", "Adblock" for Konqueror, new Tooltips, better Workspace-Pager, and so on. Read for yourself."
The new KDE looks good. Except for the one pet peeve of mine-->the taskbar is way too huge. It would be much better at half or even a quarter of it's size. The real highlight is storage media reconizing. This is a whyI have loathed KDE-->the lack of such.
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
The storage medium notification is not untuitive the way XP (and now KDE 3.5) does it. Basically, the user puts in a disc and then some time later, gets a notification that interrupts whatever is being performed.
A better way to do it would be to stick a little message notification bubble above the system tray. This would also prevent movies from auto-running.
A big problem with XP is that DVD movies often have crap software that auto-installs on the computers of people who don't know any better. If OSS wants to become a widely used desktop, then it needs to be better than the status quo, rather than a copy. This means that it has to protect users rather than facilitate spyware and junk.
More
Personally, I've always found the resemblance to Windows to be entirely superficial, and KDE's excellent integration across a wide-range of apps and its nifty kio_slaves (along with a whole bunch of other reasons) made me fall in love with it. I'll let a GNOME fan argue the other side :)
You don't really expect that people will do that work for you? For an overview what is going on right now, check out "this month in SVN": http://www.hoult.org/~canllaith/svn-features/14-07 -05.html
Seriously... I do.
It was light, fast, stable, and pretty enough. Using wmaker right now because XFCE4 has a few drawbacks. While I might look at KDE 3.5 just to see, i still might cobble together all the 1.0 code and try to run it on my fbsd 5.4/athlon system. It oughta fly balls!
do() || do_not();
Have the KDE people figured out how to make the desktop icons line up properly yet? I'm sorry if this sounds like another "Why can't KDE be like Windoze?" whine, but when I turn on icon auto-arrangement in Windoze, I get nice, neat vertical columns of icons. Do the same in KDE and I get some quasi-random scattering of icons. I have no idea why that is. If I right-click the desktop and select Icons > Sort Icons > By Type, it works fine. But the auto-arrange seems to use some completely different arrangement algorithm that creates multiple columns, some of which aren't even full, and some of which only have one icon. WTF?
When my sister in law's kids com over and want to play with the computer I load up Mr. Potatoe. After all, one of them is OCD and my copy of Civ or Sim City is a bit too much for him, and the other one gets hyper if allowed action games. Mr. P. keeps them happy during computer time (20 min each)
We are the Borg...
I think it's too bad we'll have to wait until 4.0 to see an improvement in the default setup. Everyone agrees that it's ugly and not very useful, but there's been so little done to change it. If they start the process with 3.5, then they can get some feedback for 4.0.
More than that, the unchangable UI things need some improvement. KDE has really bad right-click menus in almost all cases. The options availible there need to be pruned down, moved into sub-menus, or "hidden" as accelerators attached to clicks.
I'm a big fan of the "hermetic interface", where simple commands are availible from the menus, buttons, and so forth, but really powerful commands are "hidden". They don't clutter the UI, the newbie doesn't care about them, and the old-hands will find out how to use these features.
An example from gnome is the hidden type-in box in the file selector. It's extreme (type-in isn't that ugly a thing to have in a selector!), but once you know you can hit "/" and just enter a path, it is really cool.
Gnome's new "three top-level" menus is also pretty cool, if you've used it. It helps to take the clutter out of the menu.
(Not to say I love everything gnome. The KDE apps are much better in general. Konqueror is more useful than nautilus to me. Konsole is worlds better than gnome-terminal. KDVI is without peer.)
Oh, I should say something nice about 3.5. The changes to konqueror are great! It cuts the fat out of the menus. Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code, but the UI should be different in each mode. This is a very positive change for konqueror.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I'm glad they're slowly tidying up the interface. My current pet peeve is the default icon set is really ugly. I know that you can replace it, but when I look at the KDE screenshots I don't get excited at the improvements to the interface or to Konq. I am put off by how ugly it looks with the icon set.
The KDE website has a list of upcoming features at:
- 4.0-features.html
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde
Judging by how many items there are on that list, and that this is a port, not a re-write, I think that KDE4 will be full of features. Though there are some which could go, really minor useless ones.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Long as it's configurable, unlike gnome, I'm fine with it. I'll keep the buttons in the order I'm accustomed to.
When was the last time someone asked you a "no or yes" question? Dialogs should support natural idiom, including those of English, and not the whims of some developers, regardless of how many single-sourced HCI studies they can cite.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
> Have you seen a list of things that will be
;)
> removed from KDE4?
i haven't either. perhaps you could educate all of us
if you're afraid KDE4 will be "KDE, without the features" then perhaps you're thinking of that "SimpleKDE" fork thing or perhaps you just got wrong information.
we are certainly aiming for a more usable KDE, but not a featureless one. popular perception aside, the two are not mutually exclusive.
yes, we prescribe meaningful verbs whenever reasonable. you'll still find situations where 'Ok' is the best fit, but most of our dialogs do use verbs these days.
if you'd like to help police this, you're more than welcome to join the project =)
> Politics I guess is the main reason for not
> doing this
no. it's because we've done it this way forever, as has the DOMINANT desktop: microsoft windows. there's little to be gained in practical usage from switching the buttons around, except to annoy users who are used to it the other way around.
i'm highly unimpressed at GNOME for having broken this otherwise consistent placement of buttons on X11 by opting for a theory that in practice is largely nascent in benefit. fortunately now Gtk+ allows you to switch those button orders at runtime in its dialogs, thanks to SUSE wanting Gtk+ apps to look proper in a KDE desktop.
> with nice and clear icons and a nice solid feel
> to things.
=)
I disagree, so that blows the whole "everyone" argument out of the water. I find Gnome to be uglier and less useful. I think Gnome's goals of simplicity are good, but those of us who are used to the power and supposed "complexity" of KDE find it addicting. I hope that KDE and Gnome continue to be different along the lines of power -vs- simplicity. This means that there is something that suits both types of users.
"Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code"
How does it make technical sense for a file-browser and a web-browser to "use the same code"? I've never heard a good reason for this and believe that KDE just copied Windows in this respect. Microsoft made Windows behave this way so that they could more easily make the claim that IE was an integral part of Windows and could not be removed.
my personal points of love since 3.0 are mostly found in kontact. (kerberos support in pop3/imap/smtp) and ongoing improvements in the groupware scene. kde text to speech was also a quite fun addition with many potentials. (but I would like a better backend with support for natural voices...) konqy fixes are render bug every release and speed has increased nicely overall. all in all I think there will just be less announcements like when we got our first kmail release or kopete messenger, simply because most apps are already there. I think kde is slowly getting to a point where more and more time is spend on polishment. the major framework is getting there where it should be. but don't get me wrong... getting everything cleaned up is VERY important.
Google maps has been working pretty well for me for the last month or so. For some reason I don't get the intial "default" map of the US that I get in Firefox when I connect, but otherwise typing in addresses, GPS coordinates, etc into the search bar and/or getting directions seems to be working for me reasonably well in Konqueror.
If you add "fc=1" to your query it'll bypass that obnoxious "you aren't using a 'supported' browser!" warning, too (e.g. "http://maps.google.com/?fc=1").
YMMV - I'm a compulsive updater of KDE and I'm running a recent SVN build.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend