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Plasma: The Next-Generation KDE Environment Review
slashy writes, "MadPenguin has taken a quick look at Plasma, the next gen. KDE environment. 'Plasma is an ambitious project being pursued by the KDE 4 team which aims at providing a workflow-sensitive design of the user interface that improves productivity of an average KDE user. The focus is on improving the clarity and reducing the clutter present in today's desktops. The plasma development will bring together key contributors, such as the visual artists, usability experts, technology experts, programmers, and enthusiasts at a very early stage during the development process. This will enable them to create a new desktop environment that meets the requirements of novices and experts alike.'"
No. SuperKaramba will be built in (think Apple OSX Widgets). So your calendar, inbox contents, local weather, PC stats, whatever can be displayed on your desktop. Active Desktop was IIRC just a way of putting HTML or Animations on the desktop - they weren't programs per-se, that could tell you useful stuff.
Content: nil
Useful information: nil
Reviews of implemented features: nil
Screenshots: nil
What it "will" be: 8 paragraphs spread over two pages for no other reason than to increase advertising revenue.
How they're going to do it: nil
Useful links: nil
Poor poor CMS, the "article" is just some text, full c&p below:
It has hardly been a few weeks since the release of KDE v3.5.4, one of the most popular desktop environments for Unix/Linux/FreeBSD operating systems, and the KDE development team is already hard at work. They have a dream of revolutionizing the concept of desktop by providing an array of innovative features aimed at improving both the looks of the desktop environment as well as the productivity of end users. In this article, we will look at one such component called Plasma that promises to change the look and feel of a conventional desktop.
Plasma is an ambitious project being pursued by the KDE 4 team which aims at providing a workflow sensitive design of the user interface that improves productivity of an average KDE user. The focus is on improving the clarity and reducing the clutter present in today's desktops. The plasma development will bring together key contributors, such as the visual artists, usability experts, technology experts, programmers and enthusiasts at a very early stage during the development process. This will enable them to create a new desktop environment that meets the requirements of novice and experts alike.
One of the immediate goals of plasma is to provide a better looking desktop. The team is cashing in on the improved graphic capabilities of X server (namely COMPOSITE) and Trolltech's Qt application programming interfaces (APIs) to mesmerize you with those stunning looks. Although a great looking desktop will be a welcome step, the KDE team is not assuming that everyone will have the latest version of X server installed. Thus, care is being taken not to make such looks integral to the functioning of the system. Plasma is being designed in such a way that even people with older versions of X server will be able to effectively use their desktops without the unnecessary frills.
Plasma will be divided into four distinct components. They are:
- Desktop: In plasma, the role of the desktop will be much more than a place where one keeps beautiful looking icons and immediately required files. In fact, it will be a place for the user and the computer to interact with each other. The desktop will no more be a static entity with a fixed set of icons. Your desktop will be capable of providing different kinds of items and services as and when you need them.
- Applet: Applets are small programs, such as clocks, weather notification and application launchers (to name a few) that will help you better manage your work. The aim of the plasma team is to make them easy to develop as well as easy to distribute. They can be authored in a plethora of languages including C/C++, Java, Python and Ruby. The team is currently in the process of developing the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will expose the functionality of libplasma library. After developing the applets, they have to be packaged together with all the artwork, HTML and other resource files into a single archive file. This archive file can then easily be distributed over the Internet.
- Panels: Panels are basically containers for other plasma element. They will be responsible for providing a way to connect applets together.
- Extenders: Extender is a standard graphic element that provides a plasma element to temporarily grow in size (through some sort of animation) and reveal a larger usable space whenever one clicks or hovers over them. This helps to group related widgets that need not be visible all the time and take up important desktop space. Instead, whenever the user invokes them by means of clicking or hovering, the extender provides a mechanism to reveal the extra information.
The KDE 4 desktop aims at revolutionizing the concept of a desktop by providing not only an eye-candy look but also a workflow sensitive design. With full support for newer frameworks such as KHotNewStuffs , it will become extremely easy for applications based on KDE to search and download new plugins, extensions and updates from the Internet. According to Zack Rusin, a prominent KDE developer, "Plasma will blow you away. Nothing you've ever seen or will see in the coming years will come even close to what you'll experience with Plasma. And that's a promise." We agree.
QT 3's internal data structures are quite bloated and require a lot of memory. In QT4 a lot of bloat has been removed or trimmed, and a number of things can now share memory where previously they had each their own copies.
Simply re-compiling a trivial GUI app from QT3 to QT4 will give noticable performance and memory usage improvement (even if you do not change the code at all).
Not to mention the other improvements in things like MOC which make debugging and testing easier.
LL
AFAIK, there is no way to compile directly Qt3 applications to Qt4. The Qt4 does not support all previous Qt3 widgets, and their is no automatic and efficient way to transform Qt3 code to Qt4. That said, Qt4 is certainly more memory efficient than Qt3, as it was the main development goal. My 2 cents.
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
There is a Qt3 support library in Qt4. It does look like some renaming of classes will be required, but I'd imagine any small codebase could be converted reasonably quickly.
we should ditch X-windows altogether. there's really no demanding need, at least in the linux world, for X-windows. sure, one could argue that it's a must in thin-client setups, but the overwhelming majority of linux boxes are not thin clients.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. X is being overhauled as we speak (modularization, GLX implementations, etc), but one thing that is staying is the client/server architecture of X. There is nothing wrong with the way it works on a local computer, and it has the added benefit of being able to work across a network. A myth in the FOSS world is that the client/server architecture of X is one of the biggest problems with Unix.
Time makes more converts than reason
Remember XP's desktop cleanup wizard, which attempted to help people remove things from their desktops that they didn't use often?
Oh yes, very well. It is among the worst pieces of idiocy created in the name of helping inexperienced users I know. Apparently it is purely date-driven and disregards the existence of actual user sessions during the time span it waits until moving the user's files from the desktop into a subfolder. The result was that my mum, who often does not log in for a month and more, called me everytime she did log in, saying "I don't know what happened. All the files I created last time are gone." That is, until I visited and disabled it of course.
The fact that this hopelessly thoughtless implementation did not help users to be more organized is no proof that users are hopeless.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns