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JLP’s KDE 3.5 Previews - Part 1
Posted by JLP on July 26th, 2005
Introduction
Every year, during the summer holidays, I regularly download the source code of the new version of KDE desktop that is in the works and compile and test it. If any bugs are found I report them and from time to time I also make some feature suggestions. When the feature and message freeze comes into effect I also start helping with translation into Slovenian language. This year is no exception, in most parts. One of the differences is that now I’m testing on two computers: 32-bit Athlon 1200 MHz (with Mandriva Linux 2006 beta installed and GCC 4.0.1) and a much faster 64-bit Athlon 64 3000+ (Gentoo Linux and GCC 3.4.4). It is always good to have things tested on as many platforms as possible. Another change is that this year I’ve decided to post previews of and experiences with development version of KDE on this blog. I’ll try to put up as many screenshots as possible so that everyone can see what is coming in the future.
General
Stability of this prebeta version is very good. I rarely encountered crashes or freezes. Speed is also about the same as with current stable version 3.4.1. The default font sizes have been reduced to 10 points, which makes a little bit more room on the screen. This is how the default desktop looks like:
As you can see there is not much change since the previous versions. Even the version on the wallpaper is still the old one. You can expect to see more innovations in KDE 4. But there are some more or less hidden differences and some of them I’ll show you next.
Kicker
The first thing I noticed was that the new tooltips, first introduced in KDE 3.4 (only for buttons), are now also used for minipager, taskbar buttons and clock. I think it would be a good idea to also use them for system tray icons.
There are now three different appearances for Kicker that you can choose from: Elegant (the default), Classic and For Transparency.
Minipager has received many improvements. It can show icons of applications, background can now show desktop wallpaper or it can be transparent. You can even drag and drop windows from one desktop to another.
Another improvement for kicker is Add Applet dialog. The inspiration probably came from GNOME desktop and it replaces the current context menu based method. It makes it quite a bit easier to find the right applet.
Storage Media Notification
Next new feature in 3.5 is storage media notification. This is something users of the current Windows desktop already have and some Linux distributions, like Mandriva, implemented their own version, mostly just as simple autorun. KDE will now also show a special dialog of possible actions when some media is inserted. I hope authors of KDE applications will soon start to add actions for their program. On the other hand it is simple to add, edit or remove actions yourself.
home:/
KIOSlaves are a special feature of KDE that make it simple to work with files and folders over different protocols. You probably know some of them very well, like file, http or ftp. A new one has recently been added: home. When you open location home:/ in Konqueror you can now see all home folders of the users belonging to the same group as you do.
Konqueror
One of the main complaints about Konqueror was that there were some menu options that just don’t make sense in file managing mode and should only be shown in web browsing mode (and vice versa). The work is being done to correct this.
Konqueror now supports AdBlock content filtering. You can add simple filters by, for example, right clicking on an image and selecting to block it.
There are a lot of other behind the scenes improvements to various parts of Konqueror. And now that Apple provided access to their improvements to KHTML and KJS, KDE developers can and did backport them into Konqueror.
End of Part 1
Well, this is it for the first part. I hope you like it. I’ll take a look at other applications and new developments in following articles. Expect the next one in an about two weeks. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Translations and derivative works
July 26th, 2005 at 13:29:00
Great! I’m really looking forward to Konqueror’s own adblock, and the Minipager improvements really look good. I hope the KDE team also improved kicker’s transparency capabilities, as the Tray on my 3.4.1 system has this bad habit of not starting properly when transparency is enabled (it’s fine after some kind of refresh event takes place).
One thing I’ll never really like are the new “big” tooltips, very eye-candy but slow and greedy on resources; I usually turn’em off for good. That might change if they gained some kind of proper functionality, but with Plasma coming for KDE4, I suppose kicker will go the way of the dodo.
July 26th, 2005 at 13:38:00
it is really sad, that Kicker still has got a white frame/border around it. a better way to handle that is: remove the white frame from the code and including a kicker-wallpaper which has got a white-line or frame in the wallpaper-pixmap. The strange thing is: current transparent kicker hasn’t got any frame, well, it definitly shouldn’t
But People which using a dark kicker-wallpaper might prefer a kicker without any frame. if the function resizing kicker by mouse is back again, then a frame is maybe needed, but then the frame of kicker should be maybe more thick and refelct the kicker-wallpaper color. If the reader of this comment has got no idea of what i mean, just check the look and behavior of windows-xp’s “kicker”, then you notice the diffrences.
thanks
July 26th, 2005 at 16:04:00
> I think it would be a good idea to also use them for system tray icons.
this won’t happen until we have the new systray protocol (coming in kde4) .. sorry =/
@anonymous regarding the kicker border:
what are you babbling about? in svn:
a) the frame is not white (it follows your colour scheme)
b) the frame does not appear if you are using a wallpaper
@giocomo:
no, the transparency will still suck in 3.5 because we still aren’t using composite for it. that will come in kde4.
as for the big tooltips, i’m really not sure where you get the idea that they are “greedy on resources”. as for the “slowness” of them, that was artificial. they were paced down to take 1s to appear. in svn that has been dropped to .5s. if i let them go as fast as they could you wouldn’t see the animation at all
July 26th, 2005 at 19:49:00
great job, it’s nice to see innovation on the 3.5 even with the 4.0 coming up; until then we get more to enjoy from the best desktop out there.
July 26th, 2005 at 21:39:00
Pleas, no more of these new tooltips. I admit that they are very cool, but from a usability perspective they are horrific, and should be removed totally.
So, whats wrong with them? First they make the user wait for the useful text by first pooping up an icon, and then gradually tone in the text. That servs no other purpose than make the user wait longer, the icon provide no extra information. Second, some users interpret the icon as something clickable and tries to click on it.
July 27th, 2005 at 00:39:00
I also have a filling that these tooltips take a bit too long to appear. Maybe there should be a setting to disable this animation. For example the existing Control Center > Appearance & Themes > Style > Effects > Tooltip effect could be used. And if it is set to Disable tooltips should appear well without any animation.
July 27th, 2005 at 00:59:00
Ditto, tooltip animation is too obtrusive. It is nice and all, but all I want is the info on that baloon, and as fast as possible. At least make it configurable, like in Windows.
Besides, this seems to introduce inconsistency into UI, with konqueror and others using the old FAST tips.(and I hope they stay fast as is)
Also, when one sets kcompmanager to fade windows in/out all this effort of 0.5 second eyecandy goes down the drain. I hope the developer reconciders wasting time on this and rather goes and spends some more time with family or friends.
Rounded corners are nice touch though.
Daniel D.
July 27th, 2005 at 12:13:00
I don’t like the “new” tooltips, definitely not improved. All it is is a bigger font which takes up more room. And why is that silly hide arrow on the kicker still default?
The nice feature is the add applet, because it’s better than gnome’s because of the boolean search.
Any news on the google Konqueror sidebar-improvement project?
July 27th, 2005 at 12:14:00
BTW…
are the taskbar buttons in elegant mode always bleeding into each other? Isn’t that bad usbaility?
July 27th, 2005 at 14:07:00
Only a question,use automount and new storage media identification
will cause problems?
July 27th, 2005 at 16:25:00
Why is there work done on konqueror to seperate the file and the webview? i think it would be best to remove the different profiles alltogether! i always have both directories and websites open in my konqueror and i think that it really sucks that konqueror ALWAYS REMOVES THE FAVORITES BAR IN FILEVIEW!
i use favorites to acces kioslaves, local locations and the like, but no matter how often i set it as visible (and save these settings to both file and web-profile); when i change view from web to fileview it dissappears :@
August 15th, 2006 at 11:31:46
[...] When I started my career (if you can call it so) as a blogger, my first publishing system of choice was Google’s Blogger. I was happy with it until I published two parts of a very successful article titled JLP’s KDE 3.5 Previews. The story even made it to Slashdot and then the problems started. Blogger, at that time, didn’t have any anti comments spam system in place. All you could do is turn off comments completely. After all the spamming at that time I started to look for alternatives. I’ve checked out many of them and in the end I was by far the most impressed with Wordpress. Very powerful, flexible and lots of great looking themes and plug-ins. [...]
February 19th, 2007 at 23:33:42
[...] When KDE 3.5 was under development in the year of 2005 I’ve written two very popular preview articles about it. Currently the development of an even more exciting version KDE 4 is in full swing. But for now I don’t plan to write any article about it (if I don’t count this one). The reason for this is that there is no need to. Several people have already done the job and written a lot of great material describing new features, new technologies and the process in which they are being developed. In this article I will try to collect and chronologically list all these articles. I will also do my best to keep it updated. If you know about an article that is missing, tell us about it in a comment and I’ll add it to the list. [...]