“KDE 3.5 is a vivid platform. We looked at some reasons why three weeks ago and also last week. Today, we look at the photo-manager digiKam, the plotting application QtiPlot, the LaTeX-dreamteam Kile and KBibTeX and the upcoming KDE 3.5.3 release.”
“KDE 3.5 is a vivid platform. We looked at some reasons why three weeks ago and also last week. Today, we look at the photo-manager digiKam, the plotting application QtiPlot, the LaTeX-dreamteam Kile and KBibTeX and the upcoming KDE 3.5.3 release.”
When will we see more news on KDE4’s development?
When will we see more news on KDE4’s development?
I follow it somewhat through http://www.planetkde.org, since it consolidates the developers’ blog postings.
From what I gather, and I could be waaaay off base here since I’m not a dev, they’ve recently managed to port kdebase and kdelibs to Qt 4.x and I believe that was the biggest step in laying the foundation for work to proceed.
Now the stuff that has been isolated or experimental (solid, plasma, phonon etc.) wil probably start being applied to the base libraries and KDE 4 will start to take shape rather than simply being a group of concepts and ideas.
I think at this point you can even download KDE 4 (KDE 3.99 actually) from svn, but I don’t think it’s anything more right now than KDE 3.5.x ported to Qt 4.x, so there’s nothing much to see unless you’re a dev and want to start experimenting. You probably won’t start seeing screenshots or things of that nature until closer to release, they will likely want to maximize the impact of the desktop changes, the work from the Oxygen team, etc.
Some of what they’re planning is extremely cool, I dearly hope that they’re not shooting for the moon with expectations and that they’ll actually be able to deliver on what they’re proposing. It seems like there’s much rational thought behind the planning rather than wishful thinking, so it looks promising.
Personally, I think one of the things that can really push the envelope for the KDE team will be the portability of the libraries to Windows. Being able to run KDE applications in Windows starts to elevate KDE from simply being a desktop environment to becoming a self-contained application framework. I think Solid is an important part of that initiative as it should reduce any hardwired dependency KDE may have on the underlying system/OS.
Like I said, I’m not a dev so take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt, it’s all based on my interpretation of the things I’ve been reading.
Regardless, there’s definitely some cool things ahead with KDE 4.
QtiPlot sounds sissy
Probably best to check out http://dot.kde.org as they follow KDE 4 development alot closer, but so far they’ve announced Plasma and the new multimedia framework which can have multiple multimedia backends such as jackit, gstreamer and Xine.
I’ve been pretty happy with programmers’ text editors such as Vim and SciTE for LaTeX, but I suppose that I might have said the same for C, Java, or C# had I not tried good IDEs for those languages.
Is the LaTeX support in Kile of sufficent benefit to make the switch?
Kile is really good. I have used it myself. There are popup dialogs which assist a user in inserting latex code all the way. It is not really easy to keep track of all the latex tags. I find kile one of the most slick and userfriendly latex editor around. I dare say much better and flexible than LyX but there may be detractors in what I have just said.
Take a look at the screenshot, however, and compare it to a Lyx screenshot. You can give people Lyx as a writing tool, when they are not at all technical, know no Latex, and are coming from WP, and they will be comfortable and familiar in an hour, and reasonably independent and enthusiastic in a day.
Kile may well be better as a Latex tool, and maybe one day they will graduate to it, but its a restricted set that will be able to start out with it, and if you are really looking for a writing tool as opposed to a tool to write Latex with, Lyx may be better at that?
A bit like nvu and a ‘proper’ editor, maybe.
Time to have another look at Kexi. Has anyone else used this version in anger, and does it still suffer in terms of features and ease of use for naive users, in comparison with Filemaker?
Well, there’s nothing so big public would actually care about it. At this moment the work is going on on porting the libs to qt4 and cleaning up interfaces. Meanwhile some apps have been converted to use DBUS if I have understood correctly and there’s been some work on the new multimedia framework. But I’m sure there will be some news when they get some more work done.
Pity half of the apps do what half the other apps. That’s pretty ‘Krap’.
Does KDE still ship with 3 different text editors which all do the same thing?
All we need is a proper control panel, video subsystem support and less redraw artifacts, and it’d be great.
half of the apps might do things the other half can do, but generally speaking they just USE that other half to do it… and this will be even more so in KDE 4.
KDE has 2 text engines, the one in kedit and the one in every other text input field (like konqueror, kmail, kwrite (text editor) and kate (small development tool) and many others). the one in kedit can only do one thing the other can’t, i don’t remember what it was. bi-directional or something like that? anyway, that’s why kedit is still there – some ppl simply need it. its fixed for KDE 4.
control panel – KDE has the best. not too bad laid out, and with an easy quicksearch. the one in windows is un-usable (most options are not in the easy one, so you have to use the classic – which is hopeless). Gnome has no control panel. ok, kcontrol might be improved (try kubuntu, has a cool systempanel based on kcontrol but much better) and it will be for KDE 4.
video subsystem – there is none. both xine and mplayer are used in KDE apps, tough and they work better than any windows media player (exept maybe for vlc). but name me a DE that has a video subsystem? KDE 4 will have it, most likely, in Phonon.
redraw artifacts in KDE? try a good theme, or buy a video card…