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| This Week... |
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Complete source rewrite, with many improvements, in KInfoCenter. Important work on the "Quick Launch", "Folder View", and "RSSNOW" Plasma applets. Initial work towards future support for a list of timezones tooltip for the digital-clock Plasmoid. KMoon is obsoleted by the Plasma "Luna" applet. "Ozone", a fork of the Oxygen window decoration style which respects system colour preferences. Get Hot New Stuff support for icon themes in KDE. KNotify notifications interface now conforms to the Galago specification. Screen selection in "presentation" mode in Okular. Work on tooltips in Dolphin. Enhancements, including theming, for error pages in KHTML (Konqueror). WebKit adaptations for various applications with HTML rendering widgets. Support for the "Space Navigator" hardware device in KOffice. Work on duchain support for QMake in KDevelop. New "PIMOShell" tool for administration of data in NEPOMUK. Backup functionality and work on the system tray application in Akonadi. Initial import of WordKubes, and Parsek, a game implementing the Thousand Parsec framework. Various improvements in Kubrick, which moves from kdereview to kdegames. Skanlite moves from kdereview to extragear/graphics. KBoggle moves to the "unmaintained" module. Amarok 1.4.9, a bugfix edition fixing Amazon cover art downloading, is tagged for release.
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Luboš Luňák informs about "Ozone", and developments with default styles for KDE 4.1:
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Some users have a problem with the Oxygen window decoration in that it is rather difficult to distinguish the active window and window border from each other, and it also shows up in some KDE 4 reviews. This is made even worse by the decoration not following the decoration colors in the "Colors" configuration module, so users cannot even explicitly change the titlebar color to avoid this problem.
Argument from the Oxygen people in this case is that there is not really a titlebar but rather that the decoration is meant to be seen as a part of the window and that as such it follows the right colors (e.g. comments #1, #36). I basically find it that they value their artistic design higher than actual practical usability, which I find rather unacceptable for the default decoration, together with some other assumptions - comment #1, shadows (i.e. compositing) is assumed, currently unrealistic due to technical reasons; comment #40, users not liking it are expected to switch to a different style, while in practice many users don't change defaults.
Bug #152030 was about two things for most of the discussion, namely 1) Oxygen (not) following the configured colors for titlebar, 2) poor visibility of which window is the active one, simply because 1) seemed like a trivial (at least temporary solution) for 2). When, after quite some time, it eventually became obvious to me that Oxygen people were strongly opposed to 1) in any way, I split off 2) as Bug #160117 to let these two be solved separately. For 1), when it was mentioned in the discussion that Oxygen should be rather forked and not branched as Oxygen than a patch for making the titlebar colorable would be accepted for it (e.g. comments #57, #65), I eventually saw no other realistic solution for now and decided to go that way (comment #70).
Which means that "Ozone" is just the Oxygen style that isn't branded as "Oxygen", and it has the option to use the titlebar colors (so for a screenshot imagine Oxygen e.g. with a blue titlebar, that's it) and it is the default KWin decoration for now (that way I'm fine with the request refused for Oxygen, since non-default styles don't necessarily need to have as strong requirements as the default one). Depending on how the Oxygen people manage to handle bug #160117 for the KDE 4.1 release (no progress I'd be aware of so far), I may be left up with solving it by shipping KDE 4.1 with this option enabled by default. I personally consider this all pretty sub-optimal (and there have already been complaints, bug #160627), and I'd definitely prefer a more reasonable solution, but right now I don't see any.
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Robert Knight talks about Konsole for KDE 4.1:
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I had a few emails recently asking for a summary of changes in Konsole and in particular "Send Input to All" which was missing from KDE 4.0. So here are the changes in 4.1, in addition to the many bug fixes and tweaks:- "Copy Input To" dialog allows input to one session to be copied to all or a subset of other sessions. (Like 'Send Input to All' in KDE 3 but more flexible).
- Drag and drop re-arrangement of tabs and movement of tabs between windows.
- Better warnings and fallbacks if starting the shell fails (due to missing binary or crash).
- Transparency is available by default (with an option to forcibly disable it).
- Support for bi-directional text rendering (Diego Iastrubni).
- New "Dark Pastels" colour scheme (adapted from one by Christoffer Sawicki).
- Mouse-wheel scrolling in less and other non-mouse enabled terminal applications
Nothing ground-breaking here, but it should make KDE 4.1 a nice step forwards from KDE 3.5 for those who have stayed away from KDE 4.0.
In other news, like several other KDE developers I have started using git and git-svn locally. It is a huge improvement over Subversion, especially when developing experimental features that touch many parts of the code alongside bug fixes to the current trunk. It does make you wonder how you ever managed before. A quick "git branch" on my current local checkout shows 10 branches for various little features in progress, for example:- custom-pty-fd
- image-background
- inheritance-ui
- port-to-mono
- profile-editor-binding
- profile-editor-improvements
- window-tab-settings
Interestingly though and perhaps paradoxically given the open nature of the project, one of the most useful benefits is the ability to create branches to work on features without telling the whole world. There is much emphasis on the benefits of incremental development but at the same time I think it is important to be able to do some things in private so that they can arrive on the scene with a bang that gets attention. Compiz or git being good examples.
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Peter Penz presents the new Dolphin features for KDE 4.1:
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The deadline for adding features to KDE 4.1 is April 20th. This means that the feature set for Dolphin is now finalised:
Beside those features 97 bugs and wishes have been fixed until now. Some important fixes are:- Improved performance for previews
- Optimized selection size and textwrapping fixes for the icon view
- Consistent copy/paste behavior as Konqueror in KDE 3
Still there is a lot of work left for KDE 4.1 and I'd appreciate it if people would check the latest trunk version and give feedback on bugs.kde.org :-) Thanks!
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KDE 4.1 enters feature freeze on April 20th, with the final release due on July 29th 2008.
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| Statistics |
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| Contents |
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Bug Fixes |
Features |
Optimise |
Security |
Other |
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Accessibility |
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Development Tools |
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![[*]](/images/standard/features) |
![[*]](/images/standard/optimise) |
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![[*]](/images/standard/other) |
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Educational |
![[*]](/images/standard/bugfixes) |
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Graphics |
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KDE-Base |
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![[*]](/images/standard/security) |
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KDE-PIM |
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Office |
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Konqueror |
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Multimedia |
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Networking Tools |
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User Interface |
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Utilities |
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Games |
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Other |
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Bug Fixes |
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Educational |
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Benoît Jacob committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kalzium/libavogadro-kalzium/src:
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Various fixes needed for ensuring that the molecule viewer keeps running well on low-spec / software-only OpenGL implementations.
- disable eyecandy in "Low quality" mode
- by the way, always disable the zoom's eyecandy, it's ugly.
- only enable the second light in "High quality" mode
- only keep asserts in libavogadro in 'debugfull' mode.
This prompted changes to libavogadro which I'm posting upstream. |
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Jason Harris committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kstars/kstars:
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Fixing bug #119963. Now you can center & track on solar system bodies, even when they are not being drawn. The centered body remains invisible but does get a name label.
The drawback from this fix is that users can no longer attempt to save CPU cycles by turning off solar system bodies; their positions will still get updated, even when invisible. Still, that's better than centering on a null position when the user tries to center on a real body. |
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KDE-Base |
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Jakob Petsovits committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/pics/CMakeLists.txt:
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Make 3rd-party-theme fallbacks work correctly, part 1:
For themes that don't inherit Oxygen, we either need to hardcode it as fallback, or revive the /usr/share/icons/default.kde symlink from KDE 3.
jstaniek indicated that there might be a workable solution also for Windows (using "shortcuts"), so I'm confident that the symlink is better. Unix only for now, and renamed to "default.kde4".
Thanks to dfaure for the advance work on the CMake script. |
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Jakob Petsovits committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdeui/icons/kiconloader.cpp:
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Make 3rd-party-theme fallbacks work correctly, part 2:
Fix the theme fallback order in KIconLoader in order to
a) include Oxygen as fallback even if it's not included in the theme's "Inherits" property, and
b) make sure that "hicolor" is always included and always goes last in the theme hierarchy, as defined by the icon theme specification.
(a) is what makes you get rid of the numerous "unknown" icons if you use a theme that doesn't inherit Oxygen directly.
Enjoy running KDE with gnome-icon-theme & Co.! :P
Part 1 (reviving the default.kde symlink, r794564) wasn't actually needed in order to make this work, but is still a good thing to have, so I won't revert it. |
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