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KDE 4 to Support Apple Dashboard Widgets
Ryan writes to tell us Applexnet is reporting that Zack Rusin, a lead developer of KDE, has confirmed that KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets similar to Mac OS X 10.4. From the article: "Basically, this means that a layer (similar in some ways to layers in Adobe Photoshop) in the KDE desktop could function the same way that Dashboard does in Mac OS X. Widgets themselves are not inherently difficult to write nor properly interpret, since they are usually just HTML and Javascript (although Cocoa code can be included, the developer's skills permitting). Furthermore, since Konqueror and Safari share very nearly the same rendering engine, KHTML and WebKit, this too will simplify the process."
Who knew that the "write once, run anywhere" promised to us by Java, would be beaten to the punch by an Open Source project?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Konfabulator?
Apple already took a lot from UNIX. It pretty much *is* UNIX. Perhaps it will lend something to KDE.
Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI. Perhaps KDE will convince Apple to make the GUI Free Software.
Or maybe Apple will just sue the socks off of the KDE project.
I switched to the ex-Konfabulator, Yahoo! Widgets and now my PB doesn't seem to thrash as much. That, and I've added a number of additional widgets.
They're comparing a 'layer to display widgets on' to Adobe Photoshop? Something really doesn't seem right here.
I'm so glad they're putting so much work into shaving off the bloat in KDE4.
I think this is a great idea. Right off the bat, there will be lots of Widgets available.
The Apple community will also benefit, because there are probably a lot of people in the Linux community that will write new Widgets that haven't been thought of (or thought necessary) by the Apple programming community.
I, for one, welcome our new Widget overlords.
None of the UNIX people I know use MacOSX. And I personally think the UI is awful.
You haven't used KDE lately, have you?
Each release has been faster than before with 3.5 being noticably faster than 3.4.1.
Finally, get off your whiney ass and compile it for yourself using Konstruct. Pick just exactly what you want and make it nice and slim for you.
That is what the source code is for, you know.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I was writing notes down and being ready to write my own widget dashboard for kde. Someone beat me to it.
I know about gdesklets but it seems a little unstable at the moment.
http://saveie6.com/
who thinks this is rather bad idea?
Why do we need to bind the browser this deep to the GUI?
Haven't we learned anything about bad design from microsoft and IE5?
I mean something like this.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
The article title makes it sound like the widgets that are available for Dashboard will be directly compatible with KDE 4 (just download and run), which I'm not sure is exactly true.
On the other hand, if KDE is slow for you (on hw with speck >= to my duron conf.), than you screwed up your config (or your distro screwed up kde). KDE permorms admirably well these days...
The very first thing I do, whether an OS is Mac, *NIX or Windows is turn off all the eye candy that slows the box down. Yay, One more thing to disable.
Apple users looking to exploit the availibility of more games that Linux provides may now consider switching.
Kde4 should use less memory because it will be based on qt4. I've read somewhere that some apps use about 15% ;)
less memory when compiled with qt4 instead of qt3 - so hopefully it wont be too bloated.And even if it is then you still have e17
On the topic of OSX, why would anyone want to write commercial software for the OSX market? If your product is successful, Apple will simply duplicate the functionality, include it in OSX, and act like they invented it.
Look at it any way you want... it does not change the fact that this will make Linux even more viable as a desktop OS in the future to the common masses, as what they (the common masses) want is a pretty GUI and some form of familiarity.
What these new widgets will do, is make Linux look more familiar to OSX users, thereby increasing the overall Linux user base.
Privacy is underrated!
I think this is great. KDE is a wonderful, powerful, flexible, full featured desktop enviornment. I currently run KDE 3.4.3 on a P3-450 laptop with 256mb of ram and it runs great.
Do I think that KDE 4 will also run great on that hardware? I'll be honest, I have my doubts, but that is fine. I have seen how the KDE team did a great job of optimising the KDE 3.x series. Every release got faster and smaller (in memory). Still, if I need to get more ram, I'll do that.
For people that want to run a computer with less ram, or can't afford any more: Don't run KDE! You can run blackbox, fluxbox, IceWM, twm, and many more!
GNU/Linux/*NIX/OSS/Free Software is all about choices, so PLEASE don't sit around complaining about bloat (or anything else, for that matter.) Make sugestions. Make contributions. Enjoy the amazing bevy of free software!!
That's just apple's workaround for "we think virtual desktops are too complicated." No need to impose that on KDE.
I'm not sure there is a more useless feature in all of OSX. Some widget thingy that does not fit in with the UI and I have to actually leave my working desktop in able to use? Why don't dashboard widgets a) get bounded by a normal window and b) follow the same window stacking rules as every other application?
Turning the dashboard off lest I accidentally trigger it is my first priority on OSX - even before installing quicksilver.
You forgot to add "and if you don't like it you should write your own Window Manager, that's the power of open source". That's my favourite knee-jerk dismissal of constructive criticism.
If the KDE community is happy for their user base to be restricted to those willing to hand tune and compile KDE, fine. But if we're going to stick with the "Linux Desktop takes over the world" mantra beloved by many here, the way KDE runs out of the box does matter.
I've been using KDE for several years. It's hard to say if it has slowed down or speeded up, as I keep upgrading my hardware. But this laptop I'm typing on ran XP and Office just fine in 256Mb of RAM, but needed twice that to run KDE and OpenOffice comfortably.
Now maybe that's down to KDE, or Open Office, or the Redhat Network icon for all I care, the point is that overall system performance does matter, especially when it is worse than that of Windows, and berating the users for noticing the bloat is not a great growth strategy IMHO.
Virtually serving coffee
If I recall correctly, the original code of the machintosh OS came from BSD 3... (Before they modifyed it extensively for commercial release) Now Opensource is taking the apple standard? This is interesting. Maby Microsoft will see this and include dashboard widgets for windows? It would be nice for once to be able to write something and run it on every os, not just Mac and Linux or Windows and Linux.
Features != bloat (especially if off by default)
Btw, KDE has had this for years, namely SuperKaramba.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
As someone who would dearly love a mac (since their OS has had a BSD core and a brilliant GUI) as a second computer this is good news to me. If i could take the eye candy of a mac and put it on my debian kde box it would be excellent.
I have to admit, I am completely new to KDE/Linux. However, I just installed kubuntu on a HP omnibook p3 600 w/ 256mb RAM. It runs beautifully and flawlessly with zero post-installation configuration. I dare say the notebook is a good deal snappier than when WinXP was installed on it. I'm very happy with it, and I plan to run it in the future...whenever possible.
And now they've got Active Desktop!
nt
There's nothing like a good gunfight to uplift the spirit--Calvin
Nobody expects end users to build their system. You should vote with your dollar and buy from a linux packager that makes a slim kde distro. At least in the linux world you have choice.
Or it could be like in the windows world, where you can't build it slim and don't have the choice of a vender that builds it slim.
If you find KDE bloated, you need to quit loading 3,281 programs in your system tray and turn off the eye candy. I found KDE 3.1 and later ran just fine on a dual Pentium III (which has since burnt up - literally. A power supply took it out) and KDE 3.5 runs just fine on a dual Celeron. Of course I can't enable the composite extension and alpha blending on the Celery but then, having half a clue, I know better than to turn on eye candy and expect great performance on a older, slower system.
.rc files).
Try running the Gnome desktop with all the eye candy and background applets and see how well THAT desktop runs on an older system - you'll then be saying that Gnome is bloated and we should all go back to fvwm2 (and the associated pain of customizing menus by editing
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
KDE's runtime will be able to run most widgets designed for Dashboard. Also, KDE's runtime will be limited in that it will not be able to run widgets properly that use AppleScript or Cocoa in some way.
Those two statements are contradictory. Most widgets for Dashboard, especially for those that anyone considers useful, use Applescript and/or Cocoa. So in fact, KDE will be limited to only the simplest of widgets. Not much of a feature, IMHO.
I hate to break it to you, but Java beat them by a wide margin a long time ago. Java has been able to do the write once, run anywhere since around JDK 1.2. Yes, you still need to do testing on platforms you plan to officially support, but the big difference is that Sun has made incredible strides in making Java that reliable on all officially supported platforms.
Now, as a Java developer I see nothing wrong with this and even see a good place for Java in the development of widgets. It's an easy language to pick up and you have the applets concept which was the first attempt to create something similar to widgets. All things considered, Java is an asset, not a competitor, for widgets.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Now the kde4/dashboard widgets just need to be merged with the custom boxes on Google's Personal Home Page, and Microsoft's vaporware feature set will be matched :D
I currently have following things running on my KDE-desktop:
- Konqueror with 4 tabs
- Kontact
- Konsole
- Basket
- Kopete
- Bunch of KDE-related services (Wallet-manager, Klipper etc.)
- The usual Linux-services
How much RAM is being consumed? 149 megs. Let me repeat that: KDE, with all those apps running plus host of other Linux-services, is consuming 149 megs of RAM. Not exactly the 395 megs you quoted, now is it? Let's make this interesting, shall we? I also often run K3b, Amarok (with 7gig music-library), Codeine and Kword. How much RAM is being consumed with those apps running as well (for a total of Konqueror, Kopete, Amarok, Kword, Codeine, Kontact, Basket and Konsole running at the same time)? 310 megs, it seems. So we are getting closer to your figure of 395 megs (which you claim KDE consumes with nothing but Konqueror running).
If I add System Settings (this is a Kubuntu-machine), KPDF and Kate to the mix, RAM-consumption jumps to 323 megs. Still not the same as your figure. Adding SuperKaramba, Info Center and Help in there, and the system consumes 338 megs of RAM. Kspread and Kedit make the RAM-consumption to jump to a whopping 347 megs, still not as high as your figure. And I don't even know what other apps I could be running here. My taskbar is full of running apps, and the RAM-consumption is more than reasonable.
Then keep on using those old GUI's. If modern GUI's are slow and bloated, why are you using them?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
So now KDE users can enjoy the same RAM-hogging pleasure afforded us OS X users by an array of useless, bloated widgets. Now THAT is progress! ;-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
The title read:
"Malicious Web Pages Can Install Dashboard Widgets". It was about Safari and OS/X, *NOT* about MS-IE.
This needs no special tuning whatsoever. Plain vanilla KDE will work fine without any tweaking on a puter with 256Megs. My main machine has 512, and even after extensive use, my swap partition isn't even touched. That with lots of apps loaded by default: skype, amarok, kmail, 4 preloaded instances of konqi, etc. My system begins swapping only if I start up firefox or ooo-build. (Or perhaps krita with an 50meg PNG :)
KDE's memory management is very efficient. In fact, considering what it does, I would say that I'd expect higher memory usage. Of course, we can throw numbers around here with little or no way to back up our claims, I realize that, but if you check the specs of people running kde (on forums) you'll see that configs like a 700Mhz duron with 256Mb RAM (I mentioned this in another post) is enough. I don't know where your K browser using 384Mb RAM comes from (well, except if you pull it out of your ass). Actually I made some screenies of kde 3.4.3 here. One of the screenshots displays memory usage. If you check the clock, you'll see that it shows the state of memory after opening a lot of apps, including scribus, with images loaded, etc (and you'll see what I have running in my systray). So I don't understand people who report excessive memory usage of KDE - it is either FUD, or they should switch distroes :)
You're forgetting where you are. This is Slashdot, where anyone that isn't happy keyslapping arcane commands into a white on black console isn't really using a computer, and any piece of software that tries to do anything for the user is heretical.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I had, and so have several others, a similar problem with my Mac Mini until I upgraded to OS 10.4.4., but you probably already knew that.
And you are hitting your HD how much with this config? So are you saying that running KPDF should take up over 200 megs of memory if I need it running? Also, asking why I am not runing 3.1 or 7.1 is asking why did you start using the 2.6 Kernal when 1.3 was running fine? Oh, you mean I can run final cut on a 68030?
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
That's exactly the problem with Dashboard though ... it's too tempting to approach it as "let's load it up with all types of crazy widgets!". By doing that, you make it less functional. (Takes longer to switch to them when you've got a whole screen full of them, etc.)
s /). That's something I occasionally need to do, and it's something you don't really want to load up a whole word processing package for.
Certain Dashboard widgets *can* change the way you work, but only when you select the right ones, and eliminate the rest!
For example, Ambrosia Software makes a free widget for easily printing addresses on envelopes (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/easyenvelope
I find the weather widget handy too. It lets me get the forecast on a whim, while not constantly running and eating resources when I don't need it. Sure, you can visit a web site to get the same info - but a widget is faster and always saves your preferences. (Web sites usually rely on cookies that you might clear out of your browser cache.)
It's not that I think it is bad, I just don't like it exactly because of these kinds of things.
KDE just adds anything which seems popular at the moment.
If flash is opensourced and becomes THE most popular thing ever, KDE will probably RUN on actionscript!
Is this the kind of desktop that you want to be using? Maybe you, but not me.
People who have no sig are cool
Then dont run the parts you dont like... Pretty simple.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
YAY! More useless bloat in KDE!
only YOU can prevent java-troll-karma-whoring!!!
The criticism wasn't constructive, it was trollish whining.
I just installed Slackware 10.2 and upgraded to KDE 3.5 & OpenOffice 2.0.1 on my neighbor's computer over the weekend. 350 MHz P-II w/192 Mb of RAM and the system is very usable. It is faster in booting, program load and overall use than the Windows 2000 that was on there.
Firefox does load slower than IE did, but more than a few seconds. However, once up it is more than fast enough and the benefits of things like adblock make it more worthwhile.
OpenOffice also load slower than MS Works, which is what was on there. It is fast enough, though.
By "fast enough" I mean it doesn't elicit complaints about speed and no excessive swapping to disk. In most cases, faster than Win2000 w/Works on the same machine. K3B, Amarok and the overall interface get compliments on their responsiveness and feature set. The latest Kopete supports MSN webcams, and that was the last "feature request".
The machine is used for browsing, homework, playing music, IM and burning CDs. The number one compliment by my neighbor was "I'm not going to get viruses, spyware and trojans? I don't need to run anti-virus software? And it can play my MP3s and read my Word docs? Excellent!"
Yes, I took the time to set the local firewall, modify the KDE menus to remove 90% of the stuff they'll never, ever use and install a decent set of extensions to Firefox. I even tweaked Firefox on what domains to never accept cookies from.
As far as "how KDE runs out of the box" -- that isn't KDE's issue. It is an issue with the distribution packagers. The problem stems from trying to please all of the people all of the time.
Windows and Mac run nice "out of the box" because they contain no end-user software other than a few basics. Neither come with an image processing program worth a damn. No sound or video editor, either. You buy that stuff afterward. Less options up front means less configuration.
Hell, XP is only decent "out of the box" if you didn't get that box from a major manufacturer. Dell, HP & Gateway throw so much extra bullshit on there it takes 30 minutes to clean everything up before it is usable.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Well, you can run MOST of office. There's no Outlook or MS Access, which prevents Macs from being used in many corporate environments. It looks like Entourage can finally work with an Exchange server, which may eliminate a barrier to Mac adoption in the corporate world.
Hitting the HD would increase the amount of cached/buffered RAM. But that wasn't what I was measuring. I was measuring the amount of RAM the apps themselves consume. Cached/buffered RAM is basically free RAM. Of course, if I loaded some huge file to Kate for example, the RAM-consumption would go up. But that's hardly KDE's fault, now is it?
What makes you think that? KPDF itself takes few megs of RAM. KDE itself might consume some RAM, but I hardly consider the amount it consumes to be a lot. With the two apps I use the most (Konqueror and Kontact), it consumes under 150 megs of RAM (that's including whole KDE, the apps, and the related services). And considering that 512 megs is the minimium amount of RAM shipped these days, that's more than reasonable. 256 megs is really, really low end, with 128 megs being unheard of. 128 would be a bit too little for comfortable use, but 256MB would be perfectly doable, with 512MB being more than enough.
So you wanted the advanced features of the newer GUI's? Guess what? Those advanced features need RAM and CPU-horsepower! TANSTAAFL.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
because the menubar is global, and will change to the menu of another application if the mouse moves over its window while on its way up.
I'm skeptical that one nees an entirely new UI mechanism just to print addresses on envelopes. Seems like a utility would exist just fine outside of dashboard.
I mean, if the Dock and Finder are designed as well as everyone says, then you shouldn't need save a few seconds by using a special launcher for your Envelope-Printer-Utility. And if that special launcher is more useful than the Dock/Finder, then you ought to be able to use it to launch Microsoft Word and Photoshop.
Dashboard is modal interface that comes with it's own desktop and it's own dock, sitting on top of the regular ones. Really seems to me like something the Marketing Dept thought up with the only goal of looking K3WL, rather than by the HCI Designers with the goal of being integrated and useful.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I also seem to recall having about 5 different versions of the Java VM installed on my laptop at one point, one for each app the company was developing at the time. Admittedly that's just because the in-house programmers were lazy, but it all adds up to a not-very pleasant experience with Java.
On the other hand, my favorite online poker site uses java for their application and it works great with just my web browser. Apart from the fact that the browser and java VM crash after about 5 hours of online play, easily avoided by restarting every other break or so.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What I meant was several people had problems with Dashboard widgets taking up huge amounts of memory in 10.4.2 that was fixed in 10.4.3 and that he was probably aware.
As only mentioned by one poster earlier. Isn't superkaramba an older implementation of the same idea? im curious since everyone seems to give apple credit for the concept.
runtimes for Dashboard widgets also appear in GNOME or even in Windows, if not from Microsoft, but a third party. Ok Don't we just call this Konfabulator already? The guys/girls/dude/chick that wrote konfabulator then had the idea taken by Apple, don't seem to get much credit. Am I missing something? Why is Apple getting so much praise for Wigets and Konfabulator getting so over looked for coming up with the idea to begin with. Is this a, yahoo bought it now its evil thing? Anyway Konfabulator, Is free and runs on windows and Mac OS. Oh and does anyone really know the differnce between wigets and konfabulator running on the Mac? I just use wigets because they are there and I don't know the difference.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Just to set the record straight, there already exists something like this for Linux (and, more specifically, KDE). In fact, there are two major branches in development for such widgets:
1. The fancy branch (since sometime in 2003):
SuperKaramba, which spawned from the plain Karamba.
2. The non-fancy minimalistic branch (since god knows when - probably early 2004):
Conky, which spawned from the even less fancy Torsmo.
- shazow
Check out gdesklets for gnome. There are all sorts of widgets for the desktop, including starterBar, which is much like the animated icons at the bottom of the screen on OS X.
Read even the summary: KDE is *not* going to run Apple widgets. They're simpyl copying the idea. Nothing to see here, move along.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Hmm
And KDE also has something similar: SuperKaramba (which is official part of 3.5). In fact, gdesklets appeared after Karamba/SuperKaramba appeared. So it's not like this widget-functionality exists in GNOME today, whereas it doesn't exist in KDE.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I'm running 2 konqueror instances konqueror with 4 tabs each, kmail with some image attached email, konqueror, kinternet (suse dialer), konsole, knetmonApplet and xmms-kde on kicker, aMule, kget, kgpg, kwallet and amarok playing. 339 megs used. I still think it's a bit too much, but hey, memory those days is so cheap I even got more 256 (meaning a total of 512) 3 months ago. My PC is a built non-mark Duron 1.6Ghz and runs KDE 3.5 very well. Could it be faster? It will be faster with KDE4 I'm sure, because each new release of KDE just gets faster. I belive we should, yes, complain and ask developers to lower memory usage, but at same time congrat them because of their already in progress work on this matter.
I don't think memory use is much of an issue these days. You can buy a gig of RAM for peanuts so there is no reason not to have your box loaded with as much memory as it will take. All modern operating systems just love the RAM, Linux included. But, adding a new abstraction layer will effect performance, there is no way around that. However, if it's easy to turn off it's not that big a deal and, if you want blazing speed on old hardware, fluxbox is hard to beat. What it will do is make life harder for administrators because the end users love their eye candy and woe betides him who stands between them and the latest toy. That means users with 16 widgets, mostly written by amatures, crapping up their system and you know who they'll phoning to fix their 'puter. Great.
Don't just go through a top display and decide KDE is hogging memory. If you use a properly configured KDE desktop you'll notice that despite the big numbers, everything seems to be running smooth. That's because the reality is that KDE is sharing memory very effectively, and people who just look at top without investigating further have been going off half-cocked about KDE for years.
Get the real story on this here and here, because KDE's code reuse is awesome, not bloated.
If you think KDE devs spend their time trying to be like OSX, then you've obviously only ever used KDE or OSX. Support for "dashboard widgets" turns out to be a relatively simple thing to do because of a few things (A) Plasma and (B) the fact that Apple based all of their HTML rendering on KDE technology. Dashboard widget support would be a single (optional!) feature in a sea of others. Last time I checked, (uh, right now... I'm typing this post on a KDE desktop and sitting next to a Powerbook laptop), KDE's differences from OSX make it *vastly* more usable.
Will I use dashboard widgets in KDE? Likely, no. But I'll be happy to have the choice.
I don't think it's a passing fancy. There have been some form of desktop widgets out there for almost as long as there have been GUIs. The key to longevity will be whether anyone can actually come up with a set of useful widgets, and I think that's entirely possible.
Open source despite all the efforts to prove otherwise continue to be a concept for lame programmers to steal ideas. Nothing open-source is original, it steals, it help steal and it's downright bad at it. The idea is good but one has yet to see anything comming from open-source that isn't a rip-off of something else badly done, badly layed-out, crapility implemented and riddled with bug. Open source fail on all of its promises and is merely an excuse to a total and uther lack of originality and quality.
This again, the "we steal widgets" is a point in case, "yeah but apple stole it from konfabulator" said the oss twit, yeah that for sure makes it legitimate for you to steal too. But im sure every oss proponent has an excuse and some obscure software to prove its not about stealing and making software that help stealing, open source lives on its promises cause thats all it has to offer promises, not a single piece of crap comming from this movement is worthy of anything but intellectual masturbation.
We are in 2005 if by now, after tens of years of existence it still doesn't deliver, face it, it never will. Happy copying!
Each release has been faster than before with 3.5 being noticably faster than 3.4.1.
Every time someone posts the "mozilla is great if you use the nightly builds" troll, Jesus rips the wings off an Angel.
Seriously -- stupid assholes cut-and-paste this stupid troll in every story, about every non-Microsoft project in existence. This isn't interesting or insightful or informative. It's redundant, stupid, misleading, and usually just plain wrong.
KDE 3.5 is a full release, and has nothing to do with nightlies or any other developer build. Notice the work "release" in my original post? That's the clue I wasn't talking about developer builds, nightlies, SVN/CVS builds or anything other than the official, stable packages.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why is it that Linux offers pretty much the features of Windows or OS X, or Unix for that matter? What is new and unique to Linux from a usability or UI point of view?
And yes, I know about the benefits of free or open source software, but that doesn't explain what I can do in Linux that I can't do in OS X or Windows. I have licences for both anyway, so why should I install Linux? If it's just a political statement ("Software should be free!") then that's not much of a benefit for those of us who either don't agree or don't care enough.
Cherry-picking features from other OSs isn't a good way to develop a coherent OS. I know there's a lot of programming talent in the Linux userbase, but is there any design talent, or more particularly, UI-design talent?
I think this may be one of the big issues Linux has to face to gain wider acceptance. When a thing works just like something else that people already have, they may not find a reason to switch.
However, the next program you load might only require a handful of components that over what the first program loaded. As you load more programs, the odds of each applications dependencies already being loaded by something previous asymptotically approach 100%.
I think that really explains the difference between loving and hating KDE. If you're a one-app-at-a-time user, then it will seem tremendously bloated, since each app is overwhelmed in size by its dependencies. If you use many apps at a time, though, you'll probably love it since the marginal additional resources required to launch a new program are nearly zero.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
K-Names make me want to K-rush my K-cranium in a trash K-ompactor.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The underlying software behind NeXTstep was BSD and the Mach microkernel. This was before the more recent "free software"/"open source" movements, so to call it based on "open source" would be fairly anachronistic. NeXTstep was, of course, not free.
Anyway, BSD and Mach were not the most interesting part of NeXTstep, they were not what set NeXTstep aside. Its most unique feature was an object-oriented programming framework based on Objective-C.
NeXT was a business failure.
Circa 1997, Jobs came back to Apple which purchased NeXT. Apple, who had been desperately searching for something to replace the cruft that was Mac OS 8 at the time, decided to make NeXTstep into the new Mac OS. They gave NeXTstep the Mac OS 8 look and feel, and called it Rhapsody.
The big Mac OS software vendors didn't like Rhapsody, because it deprecated the APIs that Mac OS 8 used, which dated back to the 1980s. This meant that the big Mac OS software vendors (Adobe, etc.) would have to rewrite most of their utilities to use Objective-C, and they didn't want to do that.
So Apple created Carbon, and called the NeXTstep libraries "Cocoa". The rest, as they say, is history.
Personally I think Apple marketing has intentionally confused this history. They want potential customers to think they're riding the wave of the more recent free software/open source movement, when perhaps the more significant (characteristic, unique, innovative) portions actually have their roots in NeXT. They also probably want Unix users to buy their stuff, so they emphasize that part. End result? You see posts on Slashdot that say "Mac OS X is basically just FreeBSD", and make no mention of NeXT.
Each release has been faster than before with 3.5 being noticably faster than 3.4.1.
In my experience, 3.0 was much slower than 2.x and 2.0 was much slower than 1.x.
KDE has been slowing down with each major revision. They should go back to the 1.x design, as it was the cleanest, fastest version of KDE ever. It ran on a Pentium 133 with 128MB of RAM extremely quickly, and just plain looked better.
Oh man, if you think C++ is the worst OO language, clearly you haven't seen GObject + C. http://www.le-hacker.org/papers/gobject
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
Why is it that Linux offers pretty much the features of Windows or OS X, or Unix for that matter? What is new and unique to Linux from a usability or UI point of view?
You seem to be suggesting that people should be using new systems only if they offer "new and unique features". Well, why are you using Windows or Macintosh then? Those systems didn't offer "new and unique features" when they came out--most of their interfaces are copycat--derivative from earlier user interfaces of systems like UNIX and X11.
In reality, originality has little to do with commercial success or market share; when it comes to user interfaces, copying someone else and then improving on it is the norm, and there is nothing wrong with that.
And yes, I know about the benefits of free or open source software, but that doesn't explain what I can do in Linux that I can't do in OS X or Windows. [...] If it's just a political statement ("Software should be free!") then that's not much of a benefit for those of us who either don't agree or don't care enough.
Many people who use Linux use it for reasons like better reliability, usability, compatibility, interoperability, lower cost, and higher performance. If you don't care about any of those features, just don't use it--it's a free country.
Wouldn't it be nice if Yahoo! open sourced Konfabulator so that people could port it to Linux?
Well, I think advertising has a lot to do with it. Imagine you are an advertiser and you haven't much luck getting your message onto Linux desktops. Well, browser objects are tailor made for it. Putting a toolbar in Konqueror or Firefox would be trivial and well within the users permissions. Of course, the object itself is a perfect place to put an advert. Heck, you could even rotate the ads while the widget is looking up your stock quotes or whatever and it could keep track of which ads you click.
KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX [...] They're both based on C++ which is, quite honestly, the worst [...]
... because it's "themeable"? That's "the point"? Have another look at GNOME one of these years -- they're just as themeable as GNUstep.
Never developed for GNOME, have we? I can't imagine why you would think it's "based on C++". It's not.
incessently try to be like OS X when they have no hope of ever being so.
Never read a GNOME mailing list, have we? I can't imagine why you'd think they try to be like Mac OS. (Several times I've even advocated a Mac-like solution, only to be shot down.) How do you account for the huge differences between GNOME and Mac OS X, then? Perhaps they're simply trying to do a good job, and Apple is trying do a good job, and so naturally they ended up making some similar decisions.
Besides, whether GNOME has a "hope of ever being" "like OS X" has little to do with what language it's based on. Even if it was, you said that being "based on C++" is what's damning it -- and it's not based on C++, so that argument is empty.
GNUstep, on the other hand is themeable and can look like OS X or anything else for that matter. You see, GNUstep HASN'T missed the point.
GNUstep is better
I haven't found any way to theme GNUstep to make it look anything like a Mac. What theme are you using to put the menubar across the top of the screen? What theme uses my GPU to draw widgets and composite windows? What theme includes the Finder and the Dock and Expose?
As for Dashboard widgets... they're a passing fad, IMNSHO.
After what you've demonstrated you know about GNOME, I wonder if you even know what Dashboard widgets *are*.
You know how to clean up Windows XP from Dell in only 30 minutes? Damn, you're good. The fastest I've yet been able to do it is how long a clean install of XP takes.
Before telling me to check my facts, maybe you should check yours, or at least read the very article you cite. It states: "May marks the first time notebooks have outsold desktops over the course of a full month, the firm said."
You obviously haven't used the dock and dashboard. I was pretty skeptical of it myself. I had tried Konfabulator and I never found it particularly useful. I couldn't live without Dashboard, though. I love the label printer, the weather widget, the dictionary widget. They all are major time savers with me.
No one seems to have pointed this out, but dashboard is very much the unix way of doing things. "Do one thing, and do it well" is the unix mantra. Dashboard is the GUI version of that -- tools that do one thing and do it well, and quickly.
I'm a big fan of GNUstep. I actually think its goal of a truly cross-platform development framework makes it a much more noble project than Cocoa, and thus, I have more respect for it than Mac OS X.
But its strength is not its appearance. In fact it's pretty ugly.
I've used OS X for half a year now, and I find the dashboard widgets to be very useful for quick stuff. Although it is a _huge_ memory hog from what I've seen (as others have commented). Some widgets (especially third party) can take up 20+ megs of ram, and that adds up. I ended up getting 512M on top of 512M onboard just to run the widgets. Otherwise, it's a waste of time. Hopefully KDE will make their own type of widgets that don't take up as much memory and perhaps rely on shared memory for various things. I'm not a very skilled programmer yet, but I fail to see why this many widgets have to take up 20M+ each when most aren't really that complicated.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I gather this is HTML- and Javascript-based, whereas (Super)karamba is python-based, I think.
But, the biggest difference will probably be proper support for desktop widgets. In other words, it won't be a "hack" any more that doesn't really work like you'd expect it to.
Right now, superkaramba widgets, like gapplet applets in GNOME, are little windows on the screen, that stay on the bottom. But, this screws up various things. For instance, icons get hidden underneath them, rather than the widget or the icons moving around to fit nicely together.
At least, I hope they're going to fix that... the whole "layer" thing is a little worrying. But yes, proper design and integration will be the best part of KDE 4's desktop widgets.
When you install 10.4.3 (I mistakenly said 10.4.4) it lists Dashboard improvements among the changes and if you check Activity Monitor the amount of memory for each widget drops by a lot. I just wondered if the fellow installed 10.4.3 that's all, I didn't expect the third degree.
Well that's true -- the XUL system used in Firefox was originally designed so that AOL could make an advertising-enhanced version of Mozilla.
The MS ActiveDesktop thing spawned a bunch of junk that was little more than ad rotators. Probably one big reason the feature was forgotten about (much like Dashboard will be).
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Yes sure, lets all waste cpu time on running scripted programs in our OS, they are not horrible enough on websites... script languages are so great because every moron can use them... do you realize that the fastest "programs" written in SCRIPT languages need about TWENTY TIMES the ammount of cpu time that a COMPILED C++ Program would need? Is it so important to us, that every idiot can write "programs" for us? do we need them so badly that we have to throw our CPUs performance out of the window for them? just my two cents I love my c++ compiler =) AlgoMan
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/ Gimp also has layers. Must we continue to perpetuate the mythology by implying that it's a Photoshop-only feature?
ScuttleMonkey posts that:
"Ryan writes to tell us [that] Applexnet is reporting that Zack Rusin ... has confirmed that ..."
Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.(c) Straight from the source ...
Kris Kerwin kkerwin@insi__REMOVE_ME__ghtbb.com
One of the things which is going to become the focus this year is precisely that. The look is badly in need of an update.
I'm one of the maintainers of GNUstep, so I'm hoping to beautify GNUstep in the months to come.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
wake me up when they have driver for the airport extremes and the spanned desktiops on the Powerbooks, that can be run right off the install of Linux on a mac. So far, that's the showstopper for me. To get even a user-friendly install like ubuntu, or a debian install to even recognize an external monitor is like pulling teeth barehanded. When Apple, or broadcom, gets through blaming 'the other guy' for why the Airport Extreme chip can't be ported oiver to Linux, well, then they're onto something. But dashboard? who gives a fuck?
why don't gnome people make news like this ? :-(
Sent from my desktop computer
My big problem with KDE is, the fonts look substandard and shoddy compared to Windows and Mac OS X. They need to be a bit more polished and professional looking.
power to building something. Sure, knowing C++ & Qt I can figure out how to do something in KDE but, it's a lot of work; being a moron's level of difficulty means I might actually do it.
Someday we'll all be negroes
Hi,
I'm the AC from before. I did a google search or two and found lovely screenshots like this one. Very nice. With looks like that, GNUstep really does have a shot at some kind of acceptance at the end user level, which it currently lacks.
For a few weeks now I've been messing with GNUstep and objc for kicks. As someone who's been frustrated before with Java's general strictness (and how awkward it is to use reflections, for example), I must say I really do appreciate it. Keep up the good work.
This is sort of apropos, but what would you recommend as a project for someone who knows his way around Unix and C, is maybe not an objC/NeXT genius, but wants to contribute something or otherwise help GNUstep? I was thinking of maybe reimplementing Cocoa's NSStream classes (since I ended up doing something similar for an app I'm working on anyway, and I have it mostly working), but I'm not sure where to start in communicating this.
The lists are the best place to start for this. Either discuss-gnustep@gnu.org or gnustep-dev@gnu.org. You can join either. Just go to the following URL to subscribe: http://www.gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html#de vel.
You should simply say you would like to work on something. For base, you should talk to people on this list for contributions to the things which they are responsible for. Myself for gui and Richard Frith-MacDonald for base.
Later. GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep