Who did this?

Here another "KDE4 is really usable" blog. Well, I just want to point that out up front. Oh, and my day was different from Wade's. Yesterday I gave a talk to dutch students about KDE 4, I didn't get machette's to my head. Aaah well, everyone's different.

The real topic is something else, though - I wanna know who did the following:


That person deserves some kudos. I haven't seen any blogs or whatever about it, but I think it's a great job. Solid Usability Work the KDE Way (tm): make it easier to use and more powerful at the same time. Yes, it's a bit harder, but much more rewarding to not take the easy route of 'dumbing down'. Nice work... Of course, there is more to do, maybe the person who did this can spare some time on the 'edit toolbars' dialog as well.... Currently drag'n'drop is broken ;-)

Another thing which I wanted to mention: Cornelius said he was amazed by the speed of KDE 4 apps. Now I took that with a grain of salt, as I hadn't seen any amazing speed yet - Okular was slow, I had seen konqi using 100% cpu and still stutter on scrolling, KWin didn't exactly go smooth... But while making the above screenshots I used kwrite, and indeed - kwrite4 starts faster (feels at least twice as fast) as kwrite3 (both in my kde3 session)! And other apps do the same. Gwenview is like 10 times faster, and konqi4 seems faster without pre-loading than konqi3 with! Konsole seems a tiny bit slower, though.

Sure, you don't want kbuildsycoca4 to run first, but after that's done - applications are wonderfully fast. It's like someone turned 'speed' on in Trunk, somewhere in the last week... Whoever did that, nice work!

Now, the last thing: colors. I've just been trying the colorscheme things, and they work great - see the following screenshots (yes, the second one, called Beos(?), gives the higher contrast many ppl seem to want from Oxygen).





The oxygen style also does a pretty nice job on darker colorschemes (unlike most KDE3 styles):

picture viewers & widgets

While writing stuff about KDE, you have to make screenshots. And often modify them basically (resizing, converting, stuff like that). So I get to play with some image viewers like Gwenview and showFoto and with image editors like KolourPaint & Krita. Kolourpaint and Krita are rather complementary. Kolourpaint, after all, is basic, quick and easy to use while Krita can do the heavy lifting. Gwenview and showFoto, do have more overlap, but Gwenview is faster, smaller and does the basics, showFoto is more featureful. Now I know there are more imageviewers in KDE (kview, kuickshow, and some third party things like squirelsomething) but I'm glad I don't have them installed - I'd rather see showfoto as fast as Gwenview, and I'd ditch Gwennie (or the other way around). Now Gwenview gets some love for KDE 4, and as far as I can tell, it's going to be the default imageviewer. Maybe. Why maybe? Well, I'm unsure - it seems Okular also wants to be an image viewer, right? On one hand - cool - annotation. But I'd rather then see the annotation stuff shared between KDE apps with Nepomuk or Strigi or something...

Now on to something more positive. Someone started a discussion on the kde usability mailinglist. It's rather long, but I became interested when the pretty pictures came. Someone pointed to this problem:







I found a solution which is already used in KOffice:




It looks pretty good, but there where some comments - discoverability isn't great. A right mouseclick is needed to be able to enter text, and it isn't obvious that it is possible at all. Plus, the guys wanted a drop-down. So Hans Chen made a mockup:



I'd say, with a editable combobox instead of a 'hidden' one on hovering (see top right mockup), it's great and should be the default zoom thing in KDE 4... ;-)

demo videos

We had a booth at T-DOSE, yesterday and today. I made a bunch of movies, to put them in a playlist and let it run.

Unfortunately, my laptop's videodrivers act rather weird, so xine gives a blue screen to many of the movies, vlc crashes, and mplayer can't properly resize the movies, so it leaves the previous one on the screen. KMplayer does a great job, but I've not been able to get it to just PLAY (let alone loop) the frickin' playlist (WTF is it for?!?). It just stops immediately after each video. Blegh, spend a lot of time on these issues :(

So however useless these video's where, I'm putting a few of them on youtube for your viewing pleasure. Here is the first one, showing off Kalzium.



Edit and another one, KSudoku.


Indeed, the edu apps and the games make for excellent videos ;-)

cooperation

Some time ago, there was a discussion on the KDE PIM mailinglist. A certain Michael, apparently a big fan of the RS (RetroShare) messenger technology (serverless/p2p stuff), came asking if it would be possible to integrate that application (Qt-based and FOSS) into KDE PIM. He noted how Google Mail has Google Talk integrated, and how Thunderbird is also working on integrating IM.

Others on the mailinglist explained him there was already some integration with Kopete. He then started talking about OO.o, which apparently was looking for an email application to integrate into the suite, together with IM (and probably cooperative stuff as well). He pointed out KMail and RS messenger would have a shot. At a certain point, I said to him:

Let them work with the other freedesktop standards instead of doing ad-hoc integration. Working with Telepathy and Akonadi would be much better, as that would mean integration with all apps that work with those infrastructures, so much less duplication of effort.

He then asked me if I would like to help translate RS to dutch, and I did help a bit with that. Story closed, apparently. This was a little over a month ago.

Then, a few days ago, it started again, on the KOffice mailinglist. He said he heard on the KDE PIM/KMail mailinglist there would be integration between KOffice and KMail. With integration, he apparently meant they would merge, which of course lead to a "huh?" from Boudewijn.

And again, I tried to explain how it would be unlikely KDE would integrate with just one application, but rather go for a common infrastructure. Then came the email I really wanted to let you guys read, as Kevin Krammer wrote such a beautiful response, pointing out the exact flaw in reasoning which made this discussion go on and on:

Basically a misconception based on the way applications aggregate functionality on uncooperative platforms such as Windows, i.e. by putting all in the same application.

Of course! And this other way of thinking and working seems pretty hard to understand. See how companies often have trouble separating "Freeware" with "Free Software". And even when they do, how hard it can be to play by the rules, or to cooperate with the larger community. See how users have trouble with the paradigma's in the FOSS world, like how installing and managing software work.

And of course, the central theme of FOSS is cooperation. It's what we do, breath, live (see what I stumbled upon yesterday, or how LWN.net currently has a story about Volkswagen working on the linux kernel - which you can't read yet, subscribers only). And apparently, it is hard to understand it's full implications, no matter how basic it is for human nature... Kevin on that again:

Obviously KDE applications, on any platform, can do better, i.e. using our framework's cooperation infrastructures and shared libraries.

So the idea/suggestion can be rephrased as "thing about using communication infrastructure", which I am pretty sure the KOffice developers are already thinking about for future releases, e.g. collaborative editing.

Topics such as this show how more advanced the KDE framework is. While other office projects have to basically swallow communication tools (probably a full blown PIM suite), KOffice has the option of just interfacing with the respective domain specialists' work.

Amen. The KDE, the Linux, the FOSS way of thinking is so much more advanced, many on the other platforms don't even get it when we try to explain it ;-)


I really hope and expect this to change. Over time, both users and companies will start to understand. And that will benefit FOSS enormously. It's about communication. Explaining how we think and work is incredibly important. Cooperation is so fundamental to how we think and work, even when we 'compete' with other projects, we don't even see it that much anymore. We don't get it when others don't get it, and try to explain the details instead of the big picture (like I did).

Love to ya all,


/Jos

performance 2

Now I got a few responses on my blog about performance in windows, so I thought let's add a few new irritations.

My university has recently build a really amazing new library. It's architecture is pretty stunning, imho. Of course, it was WAY over budget, but hey, spending a few million on great architecture - I'm not even that opposed to it. Though they cut all college hours by a few % to pay for it... Aaah well.

There are a lot of PC's in there. They use thin clients, win Xp... Big, 19" screens, nice keyboard and mouse. Feels like they choose the wrong resolution, though (non-native). I can't change it, the whole thing is locked down pretty heavy.

So. And how is the performance on those things? Well, it depends. Sometimes, the Start menu reacts in 2-3 seconds, but it can be minutes. It often takes me 3 minutes to start Calculator... It's very irregular, though. SPSS runs reasonably fast, at least when doing it's calculations. Yet, every time I middleclick a link in IE 7, it takes at least a minute before the new tab is opened.

Those of you with a lot of work to do and slow hardware know how frustrating this is.

Aaah, well, that gives some time to play...

Putsy!

This morning, we found blood on the chair and table next to my little lovely dwarf hamster Putsy's cage. Which of course scared the hell out of us.



Now Putsy proved to be allright, fluffy and lovely as ever. He now comfortably walks over me, and I can carry him around. You've got to be careful, though, as he doesn't understand heights at all - just walks around... Rather stupid, but hey, what'd you expect from an animal which fits in a toilet roll... :D


He really likes that transparent ball to run in, btw - he runs through the whole room. We where afraid he wouldn't like it, but as far as I can tell he's really into it - as soon as he can get into it, he will...



Edit: for those concerned (thanks), I forgot to mention we thought our cat got Putsy ;-)
We now figured it probably went the other way around and Kippy, our cat got hurt. We can't find any wound, but hey, furry animal...

Bugs

While making screenshots for my presentation, I found a few bugs. First in the file open/save dialog, where drag'n'drop to the bookmark bar on the left didn't work. Yes, DID not, Rafael Fernández López fixed it a few hours after my report ;-)

Now there's a weird problem in dolphin, which I stumbled upon while I was making a screencast - the Columns view doesn't work properly with Split screen mode - see the Youtube video:



As there's a huge bugfixing and coding frenzy going on (do you guys ever sleep? I think there's an average of 100 commits/hour right now, been like that since yesterday). So I hope this gets fixed too. Rafael is already in contact with Trolltech about the "horizontal scrolling in Dolphin's Columns view goes with 1 pixel per scroll" issue. Boy, is that a busy guy :D

Anyway. If someone has a working Dolphin, I'd love to see a screencast like the one I made earlier - but then with Oxygen style, and also with some Columns view animations.
I can't get kde to compile right now - which makes sense with our Special Extra Extra Binary Incompatibility Day - but you know, I've got a presentation tomorrow and I want to show off some stuff ;-)

Back to the (too much) work I have...