In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KViewShell is renamed Ligature. Okular gets support for Text and Line annotations. KSame and Konquest start their conversion to SVG graphics. Marble gets enhanced support for presenting and displaying geographical data interactively, and showing national flags. Mailody, the alternative email client, continues to develop at a rapid pace. Telepathy support in Kopete starts to emerge from experiment towards a usable implementation. Kile gets scripting support, with improvements to scripting across KOffice. KPresenter receives export to text document (OpenDocument) functionality. Improvements in the Magnatune music store facility in Amarok.
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For those who don't know this yet:
http://people.mandriva.com/~lmontel/screenshot-kde4/images.html
Thanks Laurent Montel for the screenshots and also all those KDE Windows team!
Also thanks Danny for providing weekly digest!
Why do the developers want to port KDE apps to Windows or Mac? I'm just curious because my gut feeling is that it weakens incentives to move to a free OS. Which I feel weakens the free software movement. It seems to me that we should use KDE and its apps as an advertisement to show off just how great software can be when everyone pitches in where they and when they can. I could be totally off base, and everyone is entitled to scratch whatever itch they may have.
Keep up the great work.
That's easy, there are enough people that e.g. must work with MS on their
corperate computer/notebook. I would love that have kontact running next to
MS word and powerpoint. And no, vwware crossover and the like are not the
answer for. It's most likely going to be easier to install a kde app than
partioning the notebook and have linux installed. The latter is not allowed
by many corperate helpdesks anyway.
This is one reason. The other reason is that it makes it possible to let
people become used to kde applications one at a time. Once they are used
to kde apps, migrating to linux will be a breeze.
Having kde apps run in MS natively is definately the way to go!
Development wise it's more attractive to write code that can run on multiple operating systems as well. So in theory it should/will attract more developers to the KDE project.
and finally dev-cpp (gcc-based ide for windows written in delphi itself) will be replaced by kdevelop
Oh yeah!
But I hope they find some way to hide the automake/autoconfigure scripts, because windows users aren't used to it and probally will run in fear if they see it :)
Ahh but KDE 4 uses CMake. :)
KDevelop 4 will support both Automake and CMake with a graphical interface.
My guess is that everyone will like CMake better :-D
But there is already a better alternative to dev-cpp for windows: codeblocks http://www.codeblocks.org/
And that is also available for linux!
Thanks for the info, I'll take a look on it.
Being dependent on an operating system and its applications is more involved then you obviously think. People can not just stop using Windows and start using Linux AND stop using all the apps they are used to and start using new ones. Stopping smoking cold turkey is also very hard and why there are nicotine patches for those that want to do so gradually.
Being able to switch to KPDF on Windows instead of Acrobat, and using KOffice on Windows instead of MSOffice makes it easier to one day choose some unix and KDE since they are cheaper and better than their current OS, and the software they already use even works better on it.
> Stopping smoking cold turkey is also very hard and
> why there are nicotine patches for those that want to do so gradually.
As a matter of fact it's been quite extensively confirmed that stopping smoking cold turkey is easier than using nicotine patches. Besides, the data seems to suggest that only those smokers that have never developed an addiction to nicotine can quit while using the patches. In other words, the patches reinforce the addiction and make it impossible to quit for nicotine addicts.
See this for more details:
http://whyquit.com/
http://whyquit.com/joel/Joel_03_02_cold_turkey.html
(This post is really off-topic, but given the dangers within the opinion you're perpetuating, I had to...)
Yeah, I also quit using this site, so really kudos to whyquit.com
And I also did it cold turkey, and after 2 weeks it really wasn't that hard anymore, but most friends who try to stop by decreasing their cigarettes/day came back to their old amount of cigs very quickly.
Not everyone is so strong willed as you apparently are.
I've heard many people that stop cold turkey and then 1 or 2 months later there is a party and they just have to light one up. Just because that person doesn't have the craving for the drug anymore doesn't mean that person is able to say 'no'.
Its not only about the drug addiction, its about learning to change your habits so you don't feel like you are in detox for the rest of your life.
Anyway, this is indeed of topic.
My earlier post was only based on the fact that stopping cold turkey is indeed 2 weeks of living hell. At any such point people will be able to stop and get back to their old ways of doing things.
Its the same with switching to Linux, if you have to replace 100% of the apps you used then its not going to be fun until you mastered their replacements.
People who tried this and failed will most probably not try again any time soon.
while i see no point to using KPDF on windows (there are already just fine pdf viewers there) i can with KOffice due to the ODF.
There are? Please enlighten me! Acrobat is big and sluggish, and the rest are quite clunky to use (foxit, sumatra). KPDF rocks. I wish I could run it on Windows.
i wasn't meaning to say any particular pdf reader for windows was better or on par with kpdf in any particular way (or vice versa). a lot of kde software is simply better than what most people use on a day to day basis.
the question is whether there is a strategic benefit to having okular on windows. there certainly is a strategic benefit to koffice and open office (ODF support), but what is the benefit for okular on windows? the benefit i can see is that some users will enjoy using it on windows.
what is the cost to the okular team?
what is the cost to other KDE projects, particularly the desktop workspace?
what is the cost to other Free software projects?
these questions are a non-trivial one to answer. i won't even attempt to do so here, but it's one that i feel most people don't ever ask themselves. it's all "i want, i want!" without much thought to the consequences of fulfilling that desire.
The situaton is even more complicate. People are used to apps and work flows on Windows that are so stone-age, buggy and slow that it isn't funny anymore. If you tell them "Hey you deserve something better than pain and frustration" they panic because I don't give them the answers they want to get:
They ask:
"How do I use Norton Internet Security? It makes the internet so secure if I have it. On a friends computer it was able to block thousands of attacks and it did find all viruses."
I tell them:
"Forget about antivirus, antispyware and personal firewall software. They don't solve your computer problems they make them even more worse. There are easy to use systems that inmediatly release you from that burden knowing about such things."
They ask:
"Hey where do I get the crack/serial for $software? Do you have $software-professional-version? My copied installation CD has a copy protection and does not work."
I tell them:
"Why do you care about serials/cracks and installation medias with copy protection? Why do you ask for just one single programm? There are systems that have eveything ready for you just a mouse click away. And you don't need to know about serials/cracks. And of course you can update the whole system including every app with a single mouse click or even automatically. No need to separately look for updates for every app you have."
I could go ahead...
Windows people have accepted so much horrible things as an inchangeable law of nature/god that you can pull them completely off the track if you answer such things. As none wants to realize that he wasted a lot of his time with unnecessary thing they don't believe you most of the time but believe the opposite in order to feel comfortable just for the moment. So they think "Linux is a confusing complicated system for evil virus programmers that is not useable by honest people because it even lacks Norton Internet Security!" I'm not kidding. I have heard this more than once.
The problem is that Linux is so much ahead of Windows that you cannot gradually switch to it as you need to change some fundamental things in your painfully trained useless habits.
Linux apps on Windows won't help attracting more users to Linux because Windows inherits and enforces a totally different mentality. Linux apps on Windows will help average people to lower their pain but not removing their pain. As removing these pain means looking into the mirror of awareness people won't do it if they just can stand the pain or can lower them quick without awareness.
I am not talking about people that already did look into the mirror and that appreciate Linux but are forced to use Windows. For these people Linux apps on Windows are a great help but you don't need to convince convinced people but not yet convinced people if you want to increase market share of Linux desktops.
>> the benefit i can see is that some users will enjoy using it on windows.
One could argue that is the major motivator for open source software in general. Someone will enjoy using it.
>> what is the cost to the okular team?
Hopefully nothing. Of course, developers that are not interested in Windows wouldn't be doing the work to port it. Only if there is a developer interested in a windows version would it even get done in the first place.
>> what is the cost to other KDE projects, particularly the desktop workspace?
what is the cost to other Free software projects?
Valid points, but equally valid is the question of what is the _benefit_ to each of those groups? Cross platform apps have a potential for more users, more bug reporters, more potential developers. Same with the switching issue, there might be some people that don't bother switching to Linux, since they can use KDE apps on Windows as well, but for all we know there are just as many that will use this to gradually switch to free software, and then switch OS as a last step.
Adobe's PDF reader is buggy. It randomly stops printing and emailing PDFs and doesn't exactly allow much customization or preference setting. I have a whole office of users running Windows because the ERP software demands it, calling me out because they can't print reports that are downloaded as PDF files. Every time, I tell them to log out and log in and do it again, it works. Adobe Reader is buggy.
... and a 30MB installer.
Bring Okular to Windows!
On another note - imagine if a Linux-savvy admin could replace a user's programs one by one. Out goes I.E., in comes Firefox. Out goes Adobe Reader, in comes Okular. Out goes Outlook, in comes practically anything else. Out goes Office, in comes OpenOffice.org. Out goes Winamp, in comes Amarok. Finally, out goes Windows, in comes Kubuntu - with Firefox, Okular and OpenOffice. Instead of one big jump, the user would be presented with several small adjustments to their workflow. Their software doesn't change when they move from Windows to Linux. This is the route to happy users.
Bring Okular to Windows, please.
I HATE Acrobat with a passion ! Where I work PDF files are flung across the network all day, everyday. Its a constant thing. Acrobat does not help me get the job done, it gets in my way ! It pops up with that distiller error and yes it has been upgraded, re-installed and what not. Ever tried printing something with bar codes in it with Acrobat ? >:@ Ever tried combining documents what weren't saved with Acrobat ? >:@
When I do reports that have to be sent to two company directors at the end of every week, they expect to get a PDF with annotations, the last thing I want or need is Acrobat stuffing me around. Its not just the bugs, the false positives (deciding I'm a pirate and refusing to work >:@), and the general user-unfriendliness (how long did it take me to figure out how to create a yellow text box with black borders and write some text in it in Acrobat 8 simply because I wasn't familiar with the keyboard shortcuts and Adobe couldn't be bothered with decently featured, accessible/discoverable default toolbars ???? Don't even ask... >>>:@). Usability with Acrobat is a joke.
Whatever you do don't try and be like Acrobat - Simply offer the most commonly used features in a nice, easily discoverable way. THATS a winner.
Most of the time all I want to do is put a red line through some text, or highlight something, or create a text box to write in... I don't need Acrobat's better part of 1 gigabyte install for what I need it to do.
Okular looks very promising to me. *cue the angelic singing and the fragrance of Vanilla* (hey, I like vanilla).
I HATE Acrobat with a passion ! Where I work PDF files are flung across the network all day, everyday. Its a constant thing. Acrobat does not help me get the job done, it gets in my way ! It pops up with that distiller error and yes it has been upgraded, re-installed and what not. Ever tried printing something with bar codes in it with Acrobat ? >:@ Ever tried combining documents what weren't saved with Acrobat ? >:@
When I do reports that have to be sent to two company directors at the end of every week, they expect to get a PDF with annotations, the last thing I want or need is Acrobat stuffing me around. Its not just the bugs, the false positives (deciding I'm a pirate and refusing to work >:@), and the general user-unfriendliness (how long did it take me to figure out how to create a yellow text box with black borders and write some text in it in Acrobat 8 simply because I wasn't familiar with the keyboard shortcuts and Adobe couldn't be bothered with decently featured, accessible/discoverable default toolbars ???? Don't even ask... >>>:@). Usability with Acrobat is a joke.
Whatever you do don't try and be like Acrobat - Simply offer the most commonly used features in a nice, easily discoverable way. THATS a winner.
Most of the time all I want to do is put a red line through some text, or highlight something, or create a text box to write in... I don't need Acrobat's better part of 1 gigabyte install for what I need it to do.
Okular looks very promising to me. *cue the angelic singing and the fragrance of Vanilla* (hey, I like vanilla).
During work I have to work on Windows. I would love to use Quanta, Kate or KOffice instead of all the MS apps.
It would also be nice advertisement.
I'm also a software developer and from my perspective I would like to see my software used as much as possible. So if there is a chance to get it to run on additional OS's with no or just a bit of additional work I would love to do it.
Being non present on Windows and Mac is hurting KDE. No name recognition, limited pool of users and their problems.
Jep, I don't get this eather. I would cladly switch to Windows if it had Amarok, Kmail and Konqueror. Those (and Emacs) are the apps why I installed Linux on my workplace.
What makes Windows so much more attractive for you?
more games and applications and hardware vendor support... i still wouldn't run it because i prefer a world with Free Software, but i understand him very well... as a Desktop Environment, Windows sucks, imho. but many ppl rather work with such a rubbish piece of software and be able to play their favorite games and use their favorite applications, apparently.
Because those who are doing the work want to. This is open source, he who does the work decides how it is done.
From what I can tell the main koffice developers generally (there may be exceptions) don't care about Microsoft Windows support or Mac OSX support at all. However there are some side contributors that care more about other OS support than the main application development. They wouldn't bother adding new features to koffice, but they will bother to port, so we get a port.
As for those who don't care about other OSes, they care about code quality, and it is generally agreed amoung good programers that the more systems (Both OS and CPU) supported, the better the code is - just because it forces you to fix some potential nightmares that you can ignore if you limit your platform (Both maintaince problems, and also bugs that are 1 in 10,000 on one system by everytime on the other). So the main koffice developers get better code, which they care about, and the other platform developers get another office suite to choose from.
Everyone wins. (Note that world domination is only as issue to immature people who have not discovered compition is good)
> it is generally agreed amoung good programers that the more systems (Both OS and CPU) supported, the better the code is
Source ? Adding lotsof #ifdef win32 hardly makes the code better in practice.
Good programmers do not use #ifdef for that purpose.
Yes I know there is a lot of code out there that uses #ifdef for things like that. There is however NO good code that uses #ifdef for that purpose.
Good code uses (often writes) abstraction layers (a good thing) for those few areas where things are different. The abstraction layers once written can abstract even more things.
KIO slaves are an abstraction layer on file operations. You just write a different KIO slave for Windows file operations (if they are different, I don't know the Win32 API well enough to know). As a bonus you can now write a KIO slave for ftp, and get transparent file operations on remote files. (Yes I know KIO slaves were designed long before Windows compatability was dreamed of. Expand the idea for the other areas where there are compatability issues)
Besides, most of the compatability issues SHOULD be taken care of by qt anyway.
I am developing a small RTS game with AI in SDL, and porting it to windows helped me to find a LOT of bugs that Linux just ignored - probally due to different gcc/mingw versions. Thje last gcc version also helps a lot, because dosen't allow some minor errors in code - as a void pointer being cast as a invalid object. So in my little experience, yes, porting helps the quality of the code.
Anyway, anybody knows how to solve the problem of SDL include without ifdefs? (in linux SDL.h, in windows SDL/SDL.h). Thanks in advance :)
Shouldn't it be SDL/SDL.h on both platforms?
Sounds like the include path directives are different if it isn't
On *nix you use sdl-config for the path, ie.
gcc `sdl-config --cflags` -o somecode.o -c somecode.c
gcc `sdl-config --libs` -o someapp somecode.o
Several other things behave like this as well including KDE itself (kde-config). In this case the --cflags gives "-I/usr/include/SDL -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_REENTRANT" on my system, the initial -I param changes the nature of the include statement to SDL.h not SDL/SDL.h, you can just stick with SDL/SDL.h if you want but on *NIX this can bite you on the arse later if someone installs SDL into a prefix (eg. /usr/local making the path /usr/local/include/SDL/SDL.h) and if that path is not in GCC's known include directories (/usr/local/include usually isn't) then they'll get a 'cannot find SDL/SDL.h' when they try to compile on that system. The best way to handle it is generally autoconf, it should also be able to locate the directory on Winslows as well although it will probably require a Cygwin environment to run.
There are two reasons:
- First much more people take notice of KDE and its programs and use them.
- Many users mean much more feedback which is rewarding and gives programmers better focus about what is perceived as important. (Feedback is very important, because it makes programmers feel appreciated and in return they invest more time in their programs.)
- Finally we are able to compete with the real competition - there are more windows programs for every task than most people are aware of. KDE is ready for that, so lets do it.
For me, personally, I'd love to use several
applications under windows.
First thing I thought was: wow! Now I can use
Konqueror under windows!! I don't like Windows File Explorer,
tried Directory Opus but it was *too* much, so I'm glad
finally it seems like I might be running Konqueror on Windows.
Also, after a moment of reflection, K3B and Amarok would be
great additions too.
As long as the applications are recognizable as open source ones,
I don't think there's much to worry about. After all, someone
who sets this up on Windows will already have done some research beforehand.
Thanks for the screenshots, but I *really* think they should use the qt windows theme by default when run under windows.
ah, the best part about open source projects and being open for all to see is how people just can't wait to share every little bit of information that is being discussed. *rolls eyes*
would it be too much to ask to actually have people wait for the project to speak for itself?
look at the thread that ensued here. lots of questions, lots of 'answers'. the accuracy is mixed and the level of interest (and concern) is high. please, before going off and trying to figure out just what the crazy people of kde have in mind and in plan give us a chance to put this information together and share it with everyone ourselves.
i would safely say we can expect something in december on this.
Waiting without talking about it is no fun, see Apple trying to close gossip sites ;)
Kate under Windows :-) I have been missing that!
I agree with those who say that users of ms-windows will not change to Linux because of that, but will use KDE and apps. as part of ms-windows and will thank billy boy for such great and payless apps.
For me the world isn't the same any more. It is going cold down my neck. So I have to think about including Linux specific resources in my apps.
That will improve ms-windows three times and I think it is turning around and users will go back to ms-windows because they can now play their games and use the best apps. without rebooting and changing the system.
Bad, bad world ... has anyone a cord ?
That KDE is running under Mac OSX is no secret (Yellow Dog dist.) and I would be proud to see my apps. running under OSX, because Apple cooperates with Linux and does many good changes to KDE- and Linux OS-code (e.g. to Konqueror for taking code for Safira).
But Linux and KDE is changing too fast, so billy boy will never be able to follow.
In future the response on ms-windows will be! - is that something to eat? - What does it taste?
s/11/12/
Fixed, thanks!
Danny
One link of 603095 is broken.
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/guidance/powermanager/icons/...
The whole of http://websvn.kde.org seems to be down to me...
Danny
just checked them both. Ligature is seriously faster than Okular, and it's text selection works. on the other hand, Okular has the annotations and stuff (tough it's not that great yet, and slow). Okular shows nicely with a red square where you are in the document, but the thumbnail preview 'jumps' while it moves smoothly in Ligature.
now there's the darwinian stuff, and anyone should work on whatever he/she likes, but it both apps are so much alike in interface and everything, it's not funny anymore. i wonder how much code they share?
I know when okular was started as a summer of code project, there was no interest in sharing code with what now is called Ligature (great name, btw). i think that was a missed opportunity. but guys, can't you talk again? those apps don't just have an overlapp (eg Krita and Gimp) but they are really really almost the same. now okular wants to get in kdegraphics, but i would say NO. sorry, but two apps, not just DOING the same, but also LOOKING the same and WORKING the same is just plain silly. one of the two can get in, and Ligature was simply first...
btw, i just showed those apps to my girlfriend, she thought you guys needed to get laid... maybe that would help on the cooperation front?!?
unless your girlfriend is willing to help right there, this is not a very constructive comment.
I do agree the existence of both apps is very unfortunate, though.
well, how could she help? the developers must find a common ground, and try to help each other instead of duplicating the work. i don't know if this is possible for them, and i'd rather see two enthousastic teams working on two apps which do the same in the same way, than 2 teams fighting and not having fun working on a great app.
but it'd be great if things would work out, and i'd like to ask them to try again...
>>> she thought you guys needed to get laid
>> unless your girlfriend is willing to help right there
> well, how could she help?
LOL!
Ok... that was NOT what i meant ;-)
tough i'm sure she's willing to give em a makeover, at least she loves 'beauty and the nerd' :D