Re:Coolest feature yet...
on
KDE 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Maybe you're even more impressed if I tell you that the stars in the background aren't random stars. They show the positions of the real stars. So if you look above the earth's north pole you can spot the big dipper and polaris.
> Ummm.... neither of those links shows > Ubuntu (the company behind it) putting > money into a KDE distro.
Ask any of the top contributors of the Kubuntu project whether they are working for canonical (that's the name of the company that creates Ubuntu) what they are doing currently during their working hours and you'll see that you are _plain wrong_.
> I can assure you that Kubuntu is not > "official" in any real sense of the word.
So who believes crap claimed by an Anonymous Coward like you? Hey, you urgenly need psychological help!
BTW: I'm sitting in the very same office next to amu@canonical.com each day during working hours, so I should know better than you what he's working on;-) If you don't believe me just ask him...
"This is an official Ubuntu project aimed to provide an excellent KDE-oriented distribution based on Ubuntu."
> * There are Canonical employees who > have been hired to work on Kubuntu, > Wrong.
Actually Andreas Müller is working on Kubuntu (you can see this in the changelogs). Apart from that there are two other people working as contractors for canonical who are working on Kubuntu as well.
> * KDE is not in universe but in main > (which means it's officially supported) > Wrong. Being in main has nothing to do with > being an official ubuntu project.
"main" means it's officially supported and that in turn means that it's official. What's so hard to understand about that?
> were distructive whiners.
The only one who seems to be upset is _you_. Don't spread FUD. There's no reason to be scared:
Kubuntu looks to me very much like an "official" ubuntu project: * There are Canonical employees who have been hired to work on Kubuntu, * KDE is not in universe but in main (which means it's officially supported) * and as far as I know Mark Shuttleworth encouraged work on Kubuntu and seems to be quite happy with the current result (especially with Kubuntu's attractive konqi models).
Of course I feel bothered by the fact that they filed a patent that is about 95% the same as my idea with the remaining 5% an addition that is automatically triggered as soon as you implement it and use it.
If someone wants to attack this patent and try to declare it void I'd certainly be willing to help.
Of course I noticed the thread -- especially as the reference featured MY NAME in the first place!
Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.
One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if
- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already) - the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.
It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.
Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997. E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE. It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places:-) So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers;-)
As long as people avoid other people (or their work) just because they are using "K"'s in their name or stars on their clothes (or because of their race or religion), then these people haven't learned any lessons from the past.
> As a software developer, you are better > with Gnome or Microsoft than with QT.
This would be correct if the cost of the Qt license would actually matter compared to the benefits you get by actually using Qt.
In reality the licensing costs for Qt are being weight out by the advantages that you get when using Qt and amortize within less than a month.
Just guess why companies like Adobe, Ati, Boeing, BP, Daimler Chrysler, Disney, Fujitsu, General Electric, Hitachi, Honda, HP, IBM, Intel, Motorola, NASA, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Shell, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, Toyota are actually using Qt already for their products.
> But if you want to see Adobe Photoshop on Linux,... you are wrong concerning this as well. Adobe already _does_ use Qt for their Adobe PhotoAlbum and there are rumors that they will use it for their other software as well.
Tackat
Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking
on
Koffice 1.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
> KHTML is LGPL, but KOffice is not.
Actually KOffice _is_ LGPL. You probably mixed this up with the rest of KDE which is mostly GPL.
> Okay, plug a CompactFlash reader in to a USB port. > Let's say your kernel was set up correctly, and lucky > you, you don't need to run modprobe or edit > modules.conf. But you still need to (for KDE) manually > create an icon for the desktop to let you mount the > CompactFlash reader, or (for GNOME)
You might be correct for other desktops.... But you are completely wrong for KDE -- at least if you use SUSE Linux. Whenever I plug any USB device into my Laptop or PC a new icon pops up on my KDE desktop.
Maybe it's time for you to consider changing your distribution to something more sophisticated:-) ?
The example you are pointing to is in fact one of the best examples you could have given that you are completely wrong with your reasoning.
The KDE Groupware project builds on Kolab
http://kolab.kde.org/
The Kolab Server has been a KDE independent project from the start in 2001. You don't need _any_ KDE libraries to use it and it's not built on top of anything that would be KDE specific. It was intentionally built this way to make it possible for other projects to _use_ it as well. It has been finished and stable since more than 8 months ago.
Still I don't see Ximian using it - Instead they seem to reinvent their own wheel from scratch now...
And as you would find out if you were more open minded this isn't the only example where KDE creates technology which has never been KDE specific and which is has been discarded by other projects just to reinvent their own wheel.
No I'm referring to using them all over the environment in realtime _without_ conversion. Conversion to png was just done because we decided that we couldn't test all possible cases within 4-6 weeks.
just nitpicking: I'm not aware of Gnome having used SVG icons desktop wide - except for one application in gnome (a filemanager) which was able to use SVGs up to a certain point;-)
So as far as I know KDE (read: K Desktop _Environment_) was the first free desktop environment which used SVGs in the whole environment.
KDE in it's CVS version for KDE 3.0 was able to render.svgz (gzip-compressed svg's) in realtime as well (to be more exact: all crystal icons that existed up to that time) the feature has been disabled mostly due to maintainance issues and due to the fact that it was meant to be used for the default icon set. As the stuff hadn't been tested thoroughly until then and as it was only finished right for the last beta we postponed it for 3.2. Another reason was that the icon set wasn't in a final state.
So although almost all icons in kdelibs are rendered using svgz files you have to invoke kde2png explicetly to create larger pixmaps from svgz's.
> but I could and should have said this a bit more delequately.
I guess you are old enough to realize something like this _before_ or _during_ an interview, aren't you?
> But I do think that icons and other look & feel > work ARE very important.
> look & feel is a key part of the desktop.
At least we agree on this point;-)
> the default icons and some of the other look & feel > elements really are KDE's biggest weakness and the > default icons that ship with KDE need a make-over.
Well, I don't know if you already realized it but KDE makes much more use of more icons than other desktops. As a result there are a few thousand pixmaps in KDE which the artist team needs to take care of. As not all of those icons were made by artists the quality of the set of course varies from icon to icon a bit. There are some icons which I consider beautiful and others which I'd like to replace myself if I had the time. I painted most of the icons for KDE though and recently focused on mimetype-icons and toolbar-icons only. In my opinion these are excellent. For application-icons I agree with you: They certainly need a makeover. Most of the application-icons have been designed during KDE 2.0 or even before at a time when we didn't have alphablending.
Also be aware that some people who are not satisfied with the looks of KDE icons don't realize that they use 32x32-versions of the icons (while Gnome uses 48x48-icons by default) - Of course you can choose 48x48 in KDE as well. Also some people don't have alphablending enabled (so they don't have smooth borders and lack shadows in the icons).
Of course there are always some people who don't like the style of the icons. And of course you will find always people who don't consider a certain iconset professional enough.
A lot of people don't like the Mac OS X icons because they are photographs instead of icons. A lot of people don't like Windows XP -icons because they are way too glaringly colorful and look too much like toys (taking the default wallpaper into account "teletubbies" come to my mind...). A lot of people don't like Gnome icons because they look too muddy and rather focus on looking cool than on being usable (at least this was the case for Gnome 1.x - For Gnome 2.0 this has improved and as a result they look much more KDEish). A lot of people don't like KDE icons because they don't focus on looking "cool" and because they look too technical or too cartoonish.
In the end you can't satisfy everybody. The current look of KDE's icons is a compromise between beauty and usability and it looks neutral and modern at the same time. You'll find some reasons for the current look of the default icons here:
http://dot.kde.org/1012076875/
Of course everyone's opinion about artwork is highly subjective. Therefore we rather chose something "neutral" for the default. Thanks to the fact that KDE is great software;-) you can customize your icons in KDE to whatever you prefer:
If you want KDE to look like Windows XP then you choose an icontheme like the one Lycoris is using. If you want something that looks rather photorealistic or like Mac OS X then you might want to try "Slick" or "Crystal". If you like Gnome then you can choose one of the gnome icon themes on KDE Look (http://www.kde-look.org).
Actually I think that it's great that KDE 3.0 already offers so much choice that I can choose between all those great iconthemes depending on my mood.
If you want to help improving icons in KDE feel free to write a mail to kde-artists@kde.org
Cheers, Tackat,
kde-artist team
Re:Magnifying glasses say it all...
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: 1
Shame on me:-)
It's a known issue and will be fixed for KDE 2.2.1. If you have a nice idea what a "find"-icon should look like then send your idea to icons@kde.org
> Providing programmability for the fancy graphics software remains an open problem.
Get KDE 2 -- or even better KDE 2.1 which will be released in the next few days.
Accessing the GUI from the CLI is already possible in KDE 2 for a long time via DCOP. Fire up kwrite (make sure you don't have two kwrites there at the same time -- otherwise you have to add the pid to those commands) and type into your favourite xterm:
or bind the command "dcop kdesktop KScreensaverIface lock" to your "Pause"-key using kmenuedit. That way you can start kscreensaver by pressing the "Pause"-key.
To explore the possibilities you might want to use kdcop.
We do not only claim this.It *IS* already possible in KDE 2 for a long time via DCOP. Fire up kwrite (make sure you don't have two kwrites there at the same time -- otherwise you have to add the pid to those commands) and type into your favourite xterm:
or bind the command "dcop kdesktop KScreensaverIface lock" to your "Pause"-key using kmenuedit. That way you can start kscreensaver by pressing the "Pause"-key.
To explore the possibilities you might want to use kdcop.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you're even more impressed if I tell you that the stars in the background aren't random stars. They show the positions of the real stars. So if you look above the earth's north pole you can spot the big dipper and polaris.
Actually the KDE/Wikipedia Cooperation has been in the works since more than two months.
Greetings,
Torsten Rahn
> Ummm.... neither of those links shows
;-) If you don't believe me ...
> Ubuntu (the company behind it) putting
> money into a KDE distro.
Ask any of the top contributors of the Kubuntu project whether they are working for canonical (that's the name of the company that creates
Ubuntu) what they are doing currently during
their working hours and you'll see that you are
_plain wrong_.
> I can assure you that Kubuntu is not
> "official" in any real sense of the word.
So who believes crap claimed by an Anonymous
Coward like you? Hey, you urgenly need
psychological help!
BTW: I'm sitting in the very same office next
to amu@canonical.com each day during working
hours, so I should know better than you what
he's working on
just ask him
I forgot the most important indicator:
0 05 -January/019774.html
:
0 05 -January/018101.html
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2
Matt Zimmerman
"This is an official Ubuntu project aimed to provide an excellent
KDE-oriented distribution based on Ubuntu."
> * There are Canonical employees who
> have been hired to work on Kubuntu,
> Wrong.
Actually Andreas Müller is working on Kubuntu (you can see this in the changelogs).
Apart from that there are two other people working as contractors for canonical who are working on Kubuntu as well.
> * KDE is not in universe but in main
> (which means it's officially supported)
> Wrong. Being in main has nothing to do with
> being an official ubuntu project.
"main" means it's officially supported and that in turn means that it's official. What's so hard to understand about that?
> were distructive whiners.
The only one who seems to be upset is _you_. Don't spread FUD. There's no reason to be scared:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2
Additionally I'd like to mention that
* You need Kubuntu to get http://www.ubuntu.com rendered standards compliant correctly (including shadows).
Kubuntu looks to me very much like an "official"
ubuntu project:
* There are Canonical employees who have been hired to work on Kubuntu,
* KDE is not in universe but in main (which means it's officially supported)
* and as far as I know Mark Shuttleworth encouraged work on Kubuntu and seems to be quite happy with the current result (especially with Kubuntu's attractive konqi models).
1) Thai Food
2) dict: dump
Ok, it seems that Matthias Elter's initial CVS commit which actually includes task grouping was on May 4th 2001
6 &w =2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&m=9890042380909
Of course I feel bothered by the fact that they filed a patent that is about 95% the same as my idea with the remaining 5% an addition that is automatically triggered as soon as you implement it and use it.
If someone wants to attack this patent and try to declare it void I'd certainly be willing to help.
Torsten Rahn
Of course I noticed the thread -- especially as the reference featured MY NAME in the first place!
:-) ;-)
Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.
One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if
- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)
- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.
It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.
Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.
E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.
It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places
So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers
As long as people avoid other people (or their work) just because they are using "K"'s in their name or stars on their clothes (or because of their race or religion), then these people haven't learned any lessons from the past.
No, it's just MyDoom.K ;-)
> As a software developer, you are better
... you are wrong concerning this as well.
> with Gnome or Microsoft than with QT.
This would be correct if the cost of the Qt license would actually matter compared to the benefits you get by actually using Qt.
In reality the licensing costs for Qt are being weight out by the advantages that you get when using Qt and amortize within less than a month.
Just guess why companies like Adobe, Ati, Boeing, BP, Daimler Chrysler, Disney, Fujitsu, General Electric, Hitachi, Honda, HP, IBM, Intel, Motorola, NASA, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Shell, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, Toyota are actually using Qt already for their products.
> But if you want to see Adobe Photoshop on Linux,
Adobe already _does_ use Qt for their Adobe PhotoAlbum and there are rumors that they will use it for their other software as well.
Tackat
> KHTML is LGPL, but KOffice is not.
Actually KOffice _is_ LGPL. You probably mixed this up with the rest of KDE which is mostly GPL.
> Okay, plug a CompactFlash reader in to a USB port.
....
:-) ?
> Let's say your kernel was set up correctly, and lucky
> you, you don't need to run modprobe or edit
> modules.conf. But you still need to (for KDE) manually
> create an icon for the desktop to let you mount the
> CompactFlash reader, or (for GNOME)
You might be correct for other desktops
But you are completely wrong for KDE -- at least if you use SUSE Linux. Whenever I plug any USB device into my Laptop or PC a new icon pops up on my KDE desktop.
Maybe it's time for you to consider changing your distribution to something more sophisticated
Regards,
Torsten Rahn
Hi,
...
...
The example you are pointing to is in fact one of the best examples you could have given that you are completely wrong with your reasoning.
The KDE Groupware project builds on Kolab
http://kolab.kde.org/
The Kolab Server has been a KDE independent project from the start in 2001. You don't need _any_ KDE libraries to use it and it's not built on top of anything that would be KDE specific. It was intentionally built this way to make it possible for other projects to _use_ it as well. It has been finished and stable since more than 8 months ago.
Still I don't see Ximian using it - Instead they seem to reinvent their own wheel from scratch now
And as you would find out if you were more open minded this isn't the only example where KDE creates technology which has never been KDE specific and which is has been discarded by other projects just to reinvent their own wheel.
So much for the pot calling the cattle black
Regards,
Torsten Rahn
No I'm referring to using them all over the environment in realtime _without_ conversion. Conversion to png was just done because we decided that we couldn't test all possible cases within 4-6 weeks.
just nitpicking: I'm not aware of Gnome having used SVG icons desktop wide - except for one application in gnome (a filemanager) which was able to use SVGs up to a certain point ;-)
So as far as I know KDE (read: K Desktop _Environment_) was the first free desktop environment which used SVGs in the whole environment.
Crystal SVG was developed using Adobe Illustrator 9.
KDE in it's CVS version for KDE 3.0 was able to render .svgz (gzip-compressed svg's) in realtime as well (to be more exact: all crystal icons that existed up to that time) the feature has been disabled mostly due to maintainance issues and due to the fact that it was meant to be used for the default icon set. As the stuff hadn't been tested thoroughly until then and as it was only finished right for the last beta we postponed it for 3.2. Another reason was that the icon set wasn't in a final state.
So although almost all icons in kdelibs are rendered using svgz files you have to invoke kde2png explicetly to create larger pixmaps from svgz's.
Hi bArt,
;-)
...).
;-) you can customize your icons in KDE to whatever you prefer:
> but I could and should have said this a bit more delequately.
I guess you are old enough to realize something like this _before_ or _during_ an interview, aren't you?
> But I do think that icons and other look & feel
> work ARE very important.
> look & feel is a key part of the desktop.
At least we agree on this point
> the default icons and some of the other look & feel
> elements really are KDE's biggest weakness and the
> default icons that ship with KDE need a make-over.
Well, I don't know if you already realized it but KDE makes much more use of more icons than other desktops. As a result there are a few thousand pixmaps in KDE which the artist team needs to take care of. As not all of those icons were made by artists the quality of the set of course varies from icon to icon a bit. There are some icons which I consider beautiful
and others which I'd like to replace myself if I had the time.
I painted most of the icons for KDE though and recently focused on mimetype-icons and toolbar-icons only. In my opinion these are excellent. For application-icons I agree with you: They certainly need a makeover. Most of the application-icons have been designed during KDE 2.0 or even before at a time when we didn't have alphablending.
Also be aware that some people who are not satisfied with the looks of KDE icons don't realize that they use 32x32-versions of the icons (while Gnome uses 48x48-icons by default) - Of course you can choose 48x48 in KDE as well. Also some people don't have alphablending enabled (so they don't have smooth borders and lack shadows in the icons).
Of course there are always some people who don't like the style of the icons. And of course you will find always people who don't consider a certain iconset professional enough.
A lot of people don't like the Mac OS X icons because they are photographs instead of icons.
A lot of people don't like Windows XP -icons because they are way too glaringly colorful and look too much like toys (taking the default wallpaper into account "teletubbies" come to my mind
A lot of people don't like Gnome icons because they look too muddy and rather focus on looking cool than on being usable (at least this was the case for Gnome 1.x - For Gnome 2.0 this has improved and as a result they look much more KDEish).
A lot of people don't like KDE icons because they don't focus on looking "cool" and because they look too technical or too cartoonish.
In the end you can't satisfy everybody.
The current look of KDE's icons is a compromise between beauty and usability and it looks neutral and modern at the same time.
You'll find some reasons for the current look of the default icons here:
http://dot.kde.org/1012076875/
Of course everyone's opinion about artwork is highly subjective. Therefore we rather chose something "neutral" for the default. Thanks to the fact that KDE is great software
If you want KDE to look like Windows XP then you choose an icontheme like the one Lycoris is using. If you want something that looks rather photorealistic or like Mac OS X then you might want to try "Slick" or "Crystal". If you like Gnome then you can choose one of the gnome icon themes on KDE Look (http://www.kde-look.org).
Actually I think that it's great that KDE 3.0 already offers so much choice that I can choose between all those great iconthemes depending on my mood.
If you want to help improving icons in KDE feel free to write a mail to kde-artists@kde.org
Cheers, Tackat,
kde-artist team
Shame on me :-)
It's a known issue and will be fixed for KDE 2.2.1. If you have a nice idea what a "find"-icon should look like then send your idea to icons@kde.org
Greetings,
Tackat
> This opens a single command line. History? Tab completion?
Yes, If you select the keyboard-scheme "Unix" you get tab-completion in KDE 2.1. A history exists as well.
> Providing programmability for the fancy graphics software remains an open problem.
Get KDE 2 -- or even better KDE 2.1 which will be released in the next few days.
Accessing the GUI from the CLI is already possible in KDE 2 for a long time via DCOP. Fire up kwrite (make sure you don't have two kwrites there at the same time -- otherwise you have to add the pid to those commands) and type into your favourite xterm:
--snip--
dcop kwrite KWriteIface insertText 'Windows rocks!' true
dcop kwrite KWriteIface setCursorPosition 0 8 true
dcop kwrite KWriteIface insertText 'sux! KDE ' true
dcop kwrite KWriteIface shiftHome
dcop kwrite KWriteIface writeFile 'conquer_your_desktop.txt'
--snip--
or check your Mail using KMail by entering:
dcop kmail KMailIface checkMail
or bind the command "dcop kdesktop KScreensaverIface lock" to your "Pause"-key using kmenuedit. That way you can start kscreensaver by pressing the "Pause"-key.
To explore the possibilities you might want to use kdcop.
Greetings,
Tackat
We do not only claim this.It *IS* already possible in KDE 2 for a long time via DCOP. Fire up kwrite (make sure you don't have two kwrites there at the same time -- otherwise you have to add the pid to those commands) and type into your favourite xterm:
--snip--
dcop kwrite KWriteIface insertText 'Windows rocks!' true
dcop kwrite KWriteIface setCursorPosition 0 8 true
dcop kwrite KWriteIface insertText 'sux! KDE ' true
dcop kwrite KWriteIface shiftHome
dcop kwrite KWriteIface writeFile 'conquer_your_desktop.txt'
--snip--
or check your Mail using KMail by entering:
dcop kmail KMailIface checkMail
or bind the command "dcop kdesktop KScreensaverIface lock" to your "Pause"-key using kmenuedit. That way you can start kscreensaver by pressing the "Pause"-key.
To explore the possibilities you might want to use kdcop.
Greetings,
Tackat