|
| This Week... |
|
Start of the Oxygen Meeting in Milan, with a focus on the Oxygen widget style and window decoration. Continued developments in Plasma, with the addition of a second example Plasmoid, for accessing developer commit feeds. More work in Konsole, with the addition of a command-line tool to manage Konsole user profiles. Support for RockBox-based devices in Amarok. Initial work begins on a Wikipedia-based "Picture of the Day" and "This Day in History" plugins for KOrganizer. Work begins strongly on the KRDC Summer Of Code project. Marble becomes a library, with a plugin for Qt Designer created to allow application authors to include mapping functionality. Many module changes: Marble and KAlgebra move to kdeedu, KJumpingCube, KSudoku and Bovo move to kdegames, in accordance with KDE 4 development timelines.
|
Aaron Seigo further delves into the world of Plasma, interactively discussing Form Factors and DataEngines:
|
|
(ensure sound is on to hear the voiceovers)
the first screencast shows how plasmoids respond to constraints, such as FormFactor, which allows the presentation layer and the plasmoids to co-operate on display issues in an efficient yet flexible manner with only loose coupling between the various components. in the above screencast, i show how FormFactor (one of the constraint types) can be used by plasmoids to alter their appearance so it is appropriate for where they are being displayed.
the second screencast is also about plasmoids, but this time about how we get data to visualizations on-screen. in plasma, we've created a division between data model (DataEngine) and visualization (QGraphicsItem) and genericized it. this allows people from the three disciplines of software development: programming, art and usability, to apply their skills without having to understand the other skills or interfere with the efforts of those who do. it also allows us to very easily connect any given visualization to any given data source in a convenient and safe manner. the screencast above shows how plasmoids use DataEngines.
|
|
Inge Wallin introduces a plugin for Qt Designer, which enables the integration of a Marble widget in applications:
|
This week saw the birth of a new member of the Marble family: a plugin for Qt Designer. We have worked hard during the last week to separate the main features of Marble into a widget that can be used in other applications as well. The plugin will make the Marble widget available for everybody who uses Designer to create dialogs and widgets.
Marble is now both a widget with a Designer plugin, and an application. This way of making the core feature of an application available as a widget or a plugin is a growing trend within the KDE world. Previously, many KDE applications have been available in the form of KParts. With widgets, we can have even tighter integration, which is a very central philosophy of KDE. I would even go so far as to say that it is *the* main distinguishing factor (USP in a salesperson's language) between KDE and the competition.
Another example of this is KSysGuard, which will also be available as a Plasmoid. Plasma creates a natural place to use these widgets. The hard limits between application, embeddable KPart, widget and Plasmoid will become blurred as time goes by, and more and more features will be available everywhere. An application is something that is focused on one use, and it is often very feature rich, but also complex. A Plasmoid or embedded widget has less features, but is simpler. Both have their uses on different parts of the desktop.
Another place where this trend of increased integration is showing up is KOffice, which uses the Flake library and plugins for the same purpose. With all types of Flake shapes available to all KOffice components, integration is at its best. I see no reason why Flakes shouldn't be able to be used in other KDE applications or even Plasmoids. I would like to encourage other application developers to think along these lines and come up with other widgets that be broken out and made available for other applications.
So, where do we imagine that the Marble widget will be used? Marble provides a way to visualize geographical data, and let the user interact with it. Possible uses are time zone selectors, weather applets, to show where other people in, say, an IRC channel are located, and so on. To cite the Marble Manifesto (available in the source code) - "Marble is meant to become for "geo browsers" what KHTML/WebKit is for web browsers already."
|
|
Allen Winter announces the final decisions regarding the KDE 3.5 series:
|
Howdy,
The Release Team has decided that it is time to close the books on KDE 3.5.
To quote coolo:
"No more features, no more string changes, no more docu changes....
Bug fixes are allowed and after some time we'll do another maintenance update 3.5.8 - e.g. in September."
So bugfixes only from now on in the 3.5 branch. If the bugfix requires a string change, you will need to coordinate that change with the translators.
Onwards to KDE 4.0!
|
|
|
| Statistics |
|
| Contents |
|
|
Bug Fixes |
Features |
Optimise |
Security |
Other |
|
Accessibility |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Development Tools |
|
![[*]](/images/standard/features) |
|
|
|
|
Educational |
![[*]](/images/standard/bugfixes) |
|
|
|
![[*]](/images/standard/other) |
|
Graphics |
|
|
|
|
|
|
KDE-Base |
|
|
|
|
|
|
KDE-PIM |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Office |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Konqueror |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Multimedia |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Networking Tools |
|
|
![[*]](/images/standard/optimise) |
|
|
|
User Interface |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Utilities |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Games |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bug Fixes |
|
Educational |
|
Jason Harris committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kstars/kstars/skycomponents:
|
Applying Akarsh's fixes for the following issues:
+ Asteroids were not being drawn due to a a break was used where a continue was needed
+ Display the long version of a constellation's name, instead of the three-letter acronym, in the popup menu and details dialog.
I made a minor improvement to Akarsh's patch: two-word constellations will now have both words capitalized.
Congratulations on your first patch, Akarsh...may it be the first of many! |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jason Harris committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kstars/kstars/skycomponents:
|
Fixed a bug that Akarsh reported where Jupiter moons were not drawn when they were on the far side of their orbit. This was basically an incomplete port of the old way to get the z-order correct between Jupiter and its moons.
Now, we loop over the four moons. Moons further than Jupiter are drawn immediately; those nearer are stored in a list. Then Jupiter is drawn. Then the near moons are drawn. Finally, the moon name labels are drawn (so they will always appear in front of Jupiter).
To do this, I am now storing a pointer to the SolarSystemSingleComponent representing Jupiter in JupiterMoonsComponent.
I also commented out the dubug string reporting the positions of earth satellites. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Graphics |
|
Marcel Wiesweg committed changes in /branches/extragear/kde3/graphics/digikam:
|
Fix rotation in LightTable for high quality image.
Move rotation method to a static method.
Store the fact that an image is exif-rotated in the image object.
Call method again in foreground thread, when as high quality images are unrotated in the cache. Currently, previews are rotated in the cache.
I hope this fixes the problem in all possible situations. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
KDE-PIM |
|
David Faure committed changes in /branches/kdepim/proko2/kdepim/libkdepim:
|
Massive backport from enterprise branch. Initially, to fix issue1657 (extra comma), but this also brings:
- keyword-based lookup
- the Tab and Shift+Tab keys navigate between resources, like Till implemented in enterprise
- the other completion modes than popup should work again |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
