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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."
Konfabulator?
Sure... if you define "anywhere" to mean "anywhere but windows"
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.
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.
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.
Apple users looking to exploit the availibility of more games that Linux provides may now consider switching.
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.
Can you explain to me, from an accomplished software engineer's perspective, what's so bad about modular components that can be reused in multiple applications?
The problem with Internet Explorer was never that it was coupled too deeply into the file manager and it was therefore buggy and insecure, and only someone with no clue whatsoever would tell you that. Internet Explorer is problematic because it has multiple zones with different security settings, and as history has shown, it's very, very easy to trick Internet Explorer into thinking that a script executing from the Internet zone is actually in the Local Computer zone, and thereby able to overwrite files, instantiate arbitrary ActiveX/COM components, and do all manners of naughty things that it shouldn't be able to.
Well things in the style of the OSX dashboard widgets can be useful too. In this interview, Zack Rusin (the guy mentioned in the summary for this article) talks briefly about OSX-style eye-candy in KDE4, and he says that they want their interface to be useful as well as good-looking. If you still don't want the useful magic eye-candy thingies because you think they're too heavy on resources or annoying or whatever, then you'd probably be better off not using KDE anyway. You could just use XFCE or Fluxbox or something like that instead. You'd still be able to run apps from KDE or GNOME or whatever, but the DE would be more minimal.
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!
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.
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 :)
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.)
Who knew that the "write once, run anywhere" promised to us by Java, would be beaten to the punch by an Open Source project?
Wow! So this means that these Dashboard widgets can run on my mobile phone? On Windows? On IBM z-Series mainframes? Can you write databases using these widgets? Application servers? Distributed network applications? Numerical applications?
Excellent! Then I'll abandon the hundreds of thousands of lines of portable Java code I have written and translate it into HTML and JavaScript after reading your informative post.
Oops! Hold on! Let's take a look at the article:
"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. Likewise, it's possible that Mac OS X users may also have to face not being able to run some widgets that depend on KDE somehow."
Oh well, back to Java....
Yeah; GNOME 2.12 is already far ahead at the "shaving off bloat" to the point where Linus said "fuck it" and switched to KDE. As long as the bloat is optional and configurable, everyone can be happy.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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
SuperKaramba, Kicker and the Desktop are going to be merged in to one coherent whole in KDE4 called Plasma. These widgets and related technologies will be part of Plasma. So, in KDE3.x, we use SuperKaramba to handle widgets like these. In KDE4, it will be handled by Plasma.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.