31 October, 2008

Qt Creator

Hi everyone,

Just enjoyed the article about the new Qt Creator from the trolls. I knew the guys at Qt software were excited about it. They announced it at the Qt developer days in Redwood City, California.

I had seen the website & some screenshots. I must say - looking at most modern IDE's doesn't make me consider learning C++, this one kind'a did. Well, at least, it looked like I could give it a shot. Lovely interface.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see such a extensive, interesting dot article from Richard Moore about it. Of course, some to-be-expected comments followed about KDevelop and duplication of effort. On one hand, I see why - duplication of effort is sometimes a waste of resources. On the other hand, it can enable innovation, bring new things - and sometimes working with a community can have downsides as well. Qt Creator has some different goals as KDevelop, and hopefully in time they can coƶperate on some stuff.

This project seems to be off to a good start, and many in the comment section noted they are happy with a cool Qt IDE - clearly, the verdict up and until now is good. I'd say GOOO trolls!



Moving on, I'd like to mention how KDE trunk is getting impressive lately. Konqi is really getting in shape, to such an extend that I just decided to stop using firefox and get back to my dear old dragon again. Don't ask me what's so good about it - it's really hard to say. Just works, I suppose. Smooth scrolling doesn't slow down on some sites anymore, zooming works great, google maps works like a charm (me big fan), it's bloody fast and I love the integration & decent session management. Oh, and the bookmarks-as-homepage rocks :D

Plasma is improving still, getting a bit more crash-resistent. Sure, applets can crash it, but it just tries to start again - which often works. Not always, and I'm wondering if there is (should be) some routine to figure out what applet caused the issues. Then again, it's probably hard - esp since it's often not me adding an applet which crashes stuff, but simply starting plasma after an upgrade which (clearly) broke things.

Oh, and KWin has done some great things as well. I love (no, **LOVE**) the present-windows-alt-tab-application-switcher. Whatwhatwhat? Yeah, it's the old and well-known alt-tab window switcher which doesn't use a boxswitch (just showing a list of running apps) or one of the good-looking-but-not-too-useful other effects like coverswitch or MS clone flipswitch. No, it shows windows thumbnails like the expose/present-windows effect. You can even use the mouse in there. VERY useful, I must say. Meanwhile, eyecandy is improving as well.



Then there are dolphin & gwenview, improving the little-things-which-count. I'm addicted to show-in-groups, sorted on date, as a way of viewing my files. The most relevant (recent...) are always on top, and the filterbar is there for other files.



Clearly, Amarok rocks harder every day. I do miss some of my favorite features (the que manager and quickfilter in the playlist, boy, do I miss those) but it does the job while looking very good. Does work better on widescreen than my 4:3 one, I must say, but everybody is buying widescreen these days - I really don't understand why MS introduced the ribbon which clearly does NOT take advantage of that. KOffice is imho 'slightly smarter' in the direction they've chosen ;-)

Further down the stack, KDElibs has seen a new & improved file open dialog - really worth it, though it still needs some refinement. The default size & settings, for example, aren't always great (I sometimes see a preview on the right just giving 1 row of icons - turn that preview off, and enable previews on icons - which shouldn't be so darn small either). But hey, details, and there is still a lot of time until it's januari ;-)



Of course I'm skipping over the many many many other apps which are being improved - sorry about that, these are just the ones I use all the time...

From what I can see in trunk, 4.2 will be lovely... KDE, rock on!

9 comments:

  1. > simply starting plasma after an upgrade

    if you are following trunk, then it's *imperative* that you keep your build up to date with libplasma otherwise you will run into problems.

    we're on the back-end slope of the final API review for the existing classes before sealing them up with binary compat guarantees; that shifting about is not something the end user will have to deal with. ditto for the introduction of the new tasks and systray applets, which had crashes left when i first merged them into trunk for testing but have since matured due to that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello! I haven't checked 4.2 for a long time but it seems it will be a nice surprise when I do. I know this is not the right place to post this, but I just thought of it and I'm kind of in a hurry so excuse me for both posting it here and "hijacking" your original picture of the file open dialog. Here are some mockups of the dialog I just did on how it could improve :

    http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=fana8j&s=4

    http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=1zq3hpz&s=4

    http://i36.tinypic.com/19vwbq.png

    What do you think. I believe at least the first one makes a lot of sense.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know this is unrelated, but do you know what happened with KDE 4.2 alpha? I thought it was going to be released on October 28, but I haven't heard anything about it

    ReplyDelete
  4. It would be better to no post screenshot with such folders in.... ;P

    Anyway you have an old revision, you're still sporting the old systray which created artifats sometimes... the new one is a definitive improvement.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You might want to try avoiding posting screenshots of movies that you've obviously downloaded.

    ReplyDelete
  6. You guys shut take an exact look at the movie titles before you start yelling ;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. David Nolden, author switched screenshots ;] Former movies were divx rips

    btw. this mistake was much more funnier ;]
    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472370
    //now i see gnome folks blocked this link ;]

    ReplyDelete
  8. I have to agree with you that the speed of Konqueror trunk is really impressive. Kudos to Konqueror + KHTML team!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Why are you still using Google Maps? Marble + OpenStreetMap rulez! :-)

    ReplyDelete

Say something smart and be polite please!