politically correct? who cares =) over at kde-look.org you'll find several icon themes for KDE that originated in GNOME (now that we share a common icon spec, this will become trivial in the future) as well as several cross-desktop widget and window themes.
it doesn't obliterate it, because it takes it into consideration, at least for me where kontact starts up with kmail as its first loaded component... kmail starts up quite fast, and the fact that Kontact has found a good way to provide a quick loading interface (on-demand loaded components) for a full featured groupware app doesn't lessen the argument, it underlines it.
yes, it uses it as a component, but that doesn't magically make the overhead go away. when i open contact it opens to kmail, and it still opens extremely fast. using components is a clever, clever way to speed up start up time for an app that is functionally equivalant to slower monolithic apps while ALSO giving the user the option to use each component separately.
as for the need for a splash screen, the end user does not perceive "components" they perceive an entire app. if the app is set to open up to your mail (because that's what you last had open) then it had better have whatever is necessary provide user feedback while it loads the mail support (in this case a component), which means loading all your email.
most likely they are not funding SCO's little war. owning stock in a company doesn't automatically mean you see dividends on it. and even if there are dividends being paid out (which i highly doubt), the amount for owning ~5% of TT is likely to be a very small figure.
personally, i hope you apply your same insane level of "corporate responsibility" based purchasing decision making strategy to other items in your life. sure, it makes shopping in the grocery store a little more annoying, but it's worth it. and there really are bad companies out there worth your paranoia, unlike Trolltech. or.... are you just a hypocrite looking for any reason to dis Qt?
i've really enjoyed how this particular meme has mutated over time, actually.. it started out as "Canopy owns Trolltech!" eventually when that became obvoiusly untrue it became "SCO owns part of Trolltech!" (because that's more alarming, right?) and now that it's common knowledge that the ownership level is negligable and insignificant, the meme has become "But it means SCO somehow gets money form Trolltech!"
i'm glad you prefer GNOME to KDE, but we're not copying Windows and we are innovating. more so than most. XML for UIs, Kiosk mode, DCOP, KJSEmbed, the universal viewer via automagically loaded application components.......
as for creating a mainstream, accessible desktop... well, KDE already is mainstream ready and we're working to make it even more polished with more applications to cover the needed application stack. accessability is already coming, with patches for Qt 3.3 available that provide an ATK bridge, which is the same thing GNOME uses. btw, have you ever used the accessability support available in GNOME?
Kontact is not a contacts accessory, it's functionally similar to Outlook and Evolution. it includes email, calendaring, contact management (inc LDAP support), RSS, news and a rather nice plugin system for extensibility.
(one might think learning about one speaks of FIRST before making public statements is a good idea, no?)
since you brought up the button order issue, i'll continue the thought...
changing the button order was probably one of the most irresponsible things the GNOME usability team has done. why? the usability improvements are nascent at best, the sort of improvement that has good theory behind it but in the real world matters only a little at best.
what's more important than the GNOME's minor (if any) usability win is consistency, which you yourself mentioned. on the X11 platform those buttons have appeared in the same order in most apps for YEARS. and then, with one stroke of master-sillyness, the GNOME team decides to create massive INconsistency by putting their buttons in a different order.
now when people use a GNOME app next to a non-GNOME app things are not consistent and usability is damaged as the use can no longer simply learn where the buttons are in all dialogs: they actually have to read each one. this makes X11 look downright silly and stupid.
was the button order so broken as to warrant creating such a huge and obvious inconsistency? no, it wasn't.
so please, don't bring up the button ordering issue in public again, especially not as a benefit. it's embarrassing to everyone who develops for the X11 environment.
widely accepted standards? since when was CORBA, and specifically ORBIT, ever a desktop standard, let alone widely accepted as such? when KDE decided not to use CORBA themselves, and for very good reasons, GNOME's adoption of CORBA was still in its infancy as well. and Qt's signal/slot architecture was the innovator in that design pattern...
KDE is not a non-cooperating group riddled with NIH. if it was, why adopt ATK? take a look at FreeDesktop.org for many other examples of KDE cooperation, or the use of libxml, tightvnc, libsmb and many, many other libraries in core KDE applications and technologies...
GNOME is not ahead on a10y and i18n. if anything, it's behind, as KDE has more translations. both support virtually all script types and have full a10y support. this is something that GNOME actually caught up on, as KDE used to be ahead on it until GNOME gained a minor advantage for a few months with the ability to properly display Hindic scripts, though now both KDE and GNOME can do that.
as for infrastructure, i suggest you look into the power and pervasiveness of KParts, DCOP, Kiosk and XMLUI just for starters and then revisit the topic.
yes, thoughtful, clear and detailed feature requests filed on bugs.kde.org are quite useful. as you note it doesn't mean they'll show up in a future release for a certainty, but they will at least be considered. if someone else has already asked for the feature(s) you were thinking of, you can also vote for that report causing it to rise up the list =)
you imply that the KDE project doesn't optimize at all, or at least optimizes hardly anything. if you read the KDE CVS Digests that come out every week you'll notice that optimizations make it in all the time. there have been a number of optimizations throughout KDE in the 3.2 release, from khtml to the kdepim libraries to kmail to....
as the various libraries and apps mature towards feature completeness, there is indeed a good amount of work put towards making things faster.
if you are looking at the start up times of apps as the measuring stick, you should look in part to GNU linker tools for answers. this is fortunately getting better with time. and not that KDE is blameless, but it isn't the only (or perhaps even primary) cullprit in the start up time area.
> that instead of adding eye candy, it would be more
> worthwhile to improve the included applications
if you read the release announcement and/or actually try out 3.2, you'll rapidly discover that there is actually very little new eye candy over 3.1 compared to previous releases and that the vast bulk of effort for 3.2 did go into improving the included applications.
premiere is a valid spelling, at least according to Webster's and WordNet (ah, dict:premiere).. i suppose it was just a bit of my Canadian showing through, eh...;-)
why JuK (another music player)? because there wasn't a good playlist centric, simple to use player that integrated well with KDE. now there is. the winamp/XMMS interface is horrid compared to the JuK/iTunes style... of course, for those who prefer XMMS or Noatun, they are still there. i would also suggest using JuK before saying it isn't a good music player. it's actually quite kick-ass. (yes, that's a technical term;)
why another email app? in this case there isn't since Kontact uses KMail as a component. there isn't any email code in kontact itself, it's all in KMail which already existed. and why does KMail exist? because there simply aren't any other decent GUI mail clients for KDE.
the answers are similar for word processing, IM client, etc. the apps in KDE 3 integrate well and offer a good number of features. you'll notice that, by and large, there aren't many duplicated KDE applications. there is usually one, and occasionally two, KDE apps that fill any particular need.
Re:Hopefully this fulfills the Exchange Need
on
Kroupware Komplete
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· Score: 1
Kolab uses open standard protocols extensively and exclusively. it does use them creatively in some regards (e.g. using IMAP to provide addressbook syncing "for free"), but it isn't using some new-fangled proprietary protocol. it can be used with any client for IMAP mail, and any client that supports their creative uses of IMAP for calendaring (which uses standard calendaring formats) and contacts (which uses LDAP and vCard)
Re:Hopefully this fulfills the Exchange Need
on
Kroupware Komplete
·
· Score: 1
a Free (GPL'd) Outlook connector in the works. developers have been working on it for a while now and it nears completion. cf: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/78
it's a confusing timeline as it's presented there, indeed. there was a time when Bero was the only person working on KDE in RH's employ, and he did package KDE in his spare time.
then RH decided to make KDE a focus and an officially supported part of their OS. so they put more people on it and that was when Bero quit because he didn't like what they were doing with their packaging of KDE.
it's somewhat ironic that when they had just one person that packaged KDE in his spare time, there were less problems than when they decided to actually focus on putting effort into it.
personaly, i'm not really sure WHAT to make of that state of affairs. my guess is that it's a combination of bumbling and poor decision making on the part of various RH developers and PR people, the high standards KDE users have grown used to, and a vocal (if relatively small) group of people who ma[dk]e a lot of noise on the Web about it thus managing to bring attention to the whole matter.
Re: Random complaints-As usual.
on
KDE 3.1 Released
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· Score: 1
just to clarify, in case someone misses it, KDE libraries are licensed under the LGPL or BSD-type licenses. Qt is the only bit under the QPL (BSD-friendly) / GPL dual license in KDE.
> That krybaby mentality is why lots of us don't want > to be seen using KDE.
so you consider the software you use a fashion accessory or status symbol? personally, i pick what appeals to my aesthetics and ethics and that works for what i need to do. why would you care who else uses the same software you do?
Re:superb desktop, always top notch from the KDE t
on
KDE 3.1 Released
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· Score: 1
unecessary. go to konqueror's web browsing behaviour control panel and select "Open links in new tab instead of new window". this doesn't catch windows opened via javascript, but it does catch those opened with target="whatever"
Re:superb desktop, always top notch from the KDE t
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
this was tried, almost universally despised by users, and then promptly removed. there's a Configure Shortcuts dialog in all apps that have shortcuts for you to define that works well.
usability studies do not require money. they may require performing useful tests on real live users in appropriate and controlled settings, and/or understanding usability principals and concepts and/or being aware of the standards promoted by the framework. but it doesn't *require* money. money just makes it easier (... to tell someone else to do it for you;)
interestingly, people's opinions are often one of the least useful sources of information for usability. their actual usage behaviours are far more interesting...
this shouldn't be a surprise, but: you can switch from A4 to US Letter size paper in the print dialog or the print control panel. as for the rulers, right click on one and be happy to see you can switch to inches (among other choices).
the defaults may be european, but that might be because the people who wrote those features are in europe.
you may also want to expect your American distro maker to set it up for Americanized defaults.
Slashdot Mirror
politically correct? who cares =) over at kde-look.org you'll find several icon themes for KDE that originated in GNOME (now that we share a common icon spec, this will become trivial in the future) as well as several cross-desktop widget and window themes.
it doesn't obliterate it, because it takes it into consideration, at least for me where kontact starts up with kmail as its first loaded component ... kmail starts up quite fast, and the fact that Kontact has found a good way to provide a quick loading interface (on-demand loaded components) for a full featured groupware app doesn't lessen the argument, it underlines it.
yes, it uses it as a component, but that doesn't magically make the overhead go away. when i open contact it opens to kmail, and it still opens extremely fast. using components is a clever, clever way to speed up start up time for an app that is functionally equivalant to slower monolithic apps while ALSO giving the user the option to use each component separately.
as for the need for a splash screen, the end user does not perceive "components" they perceive an entire app. if the app is set to open up to your mail (because that's what you last had open) then it had better have whatever is necessary provide user feedback while it loads the mail support (in this case a component), which means loading all your email.
most likely they are not funding SCO's little war. owning stock in a company doesn't automatically mean you see dividends on it. and even if there are dividends being paid out (which i highly doubt), the amount for owning ~5% of TT is likely to be a very small figure.
.... are you just a hypocrite looking for any reason to dis Qt?
personally, i hope you apply your same insane level of "corporate responsibility" based purchasing decision making strategy to other items in your life. sure, it makes shopping in the grocery store a little more annoying, but it's worth it. and there really are bad companies out there worth your paranoia, unlike Trolltech. or
i've really enjoyed how this particular meme has mutated over time, actually.. it started out as "Canopy owns Trolltech!" eventually when that became obvoiusly untrue it became "SCO owns part of Trolltech!" (because that's more alarming, right?) and now that it's common knowledge that the ownership level is negligable and insignificant, the meme has become "But it means SCO somehow gets money form Trolltech!"
i'm glad you prefer GNOME to KDE, but we're not copying Windows and we are innovating. more so than most. XML for UIs, Kiosk mode, DCOP, KJSEmbed, the universal viewer via automagically loaded application components .......
... well, KDE already is mainstream ready and we're working to make it even more polished with more applications to cover the needed application stack. accessability is already coming, with patches for Qt 3.3 available that provide an ATK bridge, which is the same thing GNOME uses. btw, have you ever used the accessability support available in GNOME?
as for creating a mainstream, accessible desktop
Kontact is not a contacts accessory, it's functionally similar to Outlook and Evolution. it includes email, calendaring, contact management (inc LDAP support), RSS, news and a rather nice plugin system for extensibility.
(one might think learning about one speaks of FIRST before making public statements is a good idea, no?)
since you brought up the button order issue, i'll continue the thought...
changing the button order was probably one of the most irresponsible things the GNOME usability team has done. why? the usability improvements are nascent at best, the sort of improvement that has good theory behind it but in the real world matters only a little at best.
what's more important than the GNOME's minor (if any) usability win is consistency, which you yourself mentioned. on the X11 platform those buttons have appeared in the same order in most apps for YEARS. and then, with one stroke of master-sillyness, the GNOME team decides to create massive INconsistency by putting their buttons in a different order.
now when people use a GNOME app next to a non-GNOME app things are not consistent and usability is damaged as the use can no longer simply learn where the buttons are in all dialogs: they actually have to read each one. this makes X11 look downright silly and stupid.
was the button order so broken as to warrant creating such a huge and obvious inconsistency? no, it wasn't.
so please, don't bring up the button ordering issue in public again, especially not as a benefit. it's embarrassing to everyone who develops for the X11 environment.
widely accepted standards? since when was CORBA, and specifically ORBIT, ever a desktop standard, let alone widely accepted as such? when KDE decided not to use CORBA themselves, and for very good reasons, GNOME's adoption of CORBA was still in its infancy as well. and Qt's signal/slot architecture was the innovator in that design pattern...
KDE is not a non-cooperating group riddled with NIH. if it was, why adopt ATK? take a look at FreeDesktop.org for many other examples of KDE cooperation, or the use of libxml, tightvnc, libsmb and many, many other libraries in core KDE applications and technologies...
GNOME is not ahead on a10y and i18n. if anything, it's behind, as KDE has more translations. both support virtually all script types and have full a10y support. this is something that GNOME actually caught up on, as KDE used to be ahead on it until GNOME gained a minor advantage for a few months with the ability to properly display Hindic scripts, though now both KDE and GNOME can do that.
as for infrastructure, i suggest you look into the power and pervasiveness of KParts, DCOP, Kiosk and XMLUI just for starters and then revisit the topic.
yes, thoughtful, clear and detailed feature requests filed on bugs.kde.org are quite useful. as you note it doesn't mean they'll show up in a future release for a certainty, but they will at least be considered. if someone else has already asked for the feature(s) you were thinking of, you can also vote for that report causing it to rise up the list =)
you imply that the KDE project doesn't optimize at all, or at least optimizes hardly anything. if you read the KDE CVS Digests that come out every week you'll notice that optimizations make it in all the time. there have been a number of optimizations throughout KDE in the 3.2 release, from khtml to the kdepim libraries to kmail to....
as the various libraries and apps mature towards feature completeness, there is indeed a good amount of work put towards making things faster.
if you are looking at the start up times of apps as the measuring stick, you should look in part to GNU linker tools for answers. this is fortunately getting better with time. and not that KDE is blameless, but it isn't the only (or perhaps even primary) cullprit in the start up time area.
> that instead of adding eye candy, it would be more
> worthwhile to improve the included applications
if you read the release announcement and/or actually try out 3.2, you'll rapidly discover that there is actually very little new eye candy over 3.1 compared to previous releases and that the vast bulk of effort for 3.2 did go into improving the included applications.
premiere is a valid spelling, at least according to Webster's and WordNet (ah, dict:premiere) .. i suppose it was just a bit of my Canadian showing through, eh ... ;-)
why JuK (another music player)? because there wasn't a good playlist centric, simple to use player that integrated well with KDE. now there is. the winamp/XMMS interface is horrid compared to the JuK/iTunes style... of course, for those who prefer XMMS or Noatun, they are still there. i would also suggest using JuK before saying it isn't a good music player. it's actually quite kick-ass. (yes, that's a technical term ;)
why another email app? in this case there isn't since Kontact uses KMail as a component. there isn't any email code in kontact itself, it's all in KMail which already existed. and why does KMail exist? because there simply aren't any other decent GUI mail clients for KDE.
the answers are similar for word processing, IM client, etc. the apps in KDE 3 integrate well and offer a good number of features. you'll notice that, by and large, there aren't many duplicated KDE applications. there is usually one, and occasionally two, KDE apps that fill any particular need.
Kolab uses open standard protocols extensively and exclusively. it does use them creatively in some regards (e.g. using IMAP to provide addressbook syncing "for free"), but it isn't using some new-fangled proprietary protocol. it can be used with any client for IMAP mail, and any client that supports their creative uses of IMAP for calendaring (which uses standard calendaring formats) and contacts (which uses LDAP and vCard)
a Free (GPL'd) Outlook connector in the works. developers have been working on it for a while now and it nears completion. cf: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/78
it's a confusing timeline as it's presented there, indeed. there was a time when Bero was the only person working on KDE in RH's employ, and he did package KDE in his spare time.
then RH decided to make KDE a focus and an officially supported part of their OS. so they put more people on it and that was when Bero quit because he didn't like what they were doing with their packaging of KDE.
it's somewhat ironic that when they had just one person that packaged KDE in his spare time, there were less problems than when they decided to actually focus on putting effort into it.
personaly, i'm not really sure WHAT to make of that state of affairs. my guess is that it's a combination of bumbling and poor decision making on the part of various RH developers and PR people, the high standards KDE users have grown used to, and a vocal (if relatively small) group of people who ma[dk]e a lot of noise on the Web about it thus managing to bring attention to the whole matter.
http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/t h.unl.edu/~rdieter/
http://www.ma
just to clarify, in case someone misses it, KDE libraries are licensed under the LGPL or BSD-type licenses. Qt is the only bit under the QPL (BSD-friendly) / GPL dual license in KDE.
> That krybaby mentality is why lots of us don't want
> to be seen using KDE.
so you consider the software you use a fashion accessory or status symbol? personally, i pick what appeals to my aesthetics and ethics and that works for what i need to do. why would you care who else uses the same software you do?
unecessary. go to konqueror's web browsing behaviour control panel and select "Open links in new tab instead of new window". this doesn't catch windows opened via javascript, but it does catch those opened with target="whatever"
this was tried, almost universally despised by users, and then promptly removed. there's a Configure Shortcuts dialog in all apps that have shortcuts for you to define that works well.
usability studies do not require money. they may require performing useful tests on real live users in appropriate and controlled settings, and/or understanding usability principals and concepts and/or being aware of the standards promoted by the framework. but it doesn't *require* money. money just makes it easier (... to tell someone else to do it for you ;)
interestingly, people's opinions are often one of the least useful sources of information for usability. their actual usage behaviours are far more interesting...
succinctly: no.
this shouldn't be a surprise, but: you can switch from A4 to US Letter size paper in the print dialog or the print control panel. as for the rulers, right click on one and be happy to see you can switch to inches (among other choices).
the defaults may be european, but that might be because the people who wrote those features are in europe.
you may also want to expect your American distro maker to set it up for Americanized defaults.