which reminds me of one of my favourite evening moments from dublin: we were standing outside the mongolian grill restaurant we were all going to eat at and i started getting groups of 4-6 random kde people to sing "hello" in harmony with each other. the kde people have a rather good sense of pitch it turns out. or maybe having 5 equally off-tone people makes for a good sound? ;) either way it was interesting as a social exercise. (and i wonder why people look at me weird at times ;)
and speaking of stuff that happened in dublin, if you haven't seen it already in seli's blog, kwin can now composite not only with xrender but directly via opengl. and that's without the need for xgl et al. nice =)
also on the coolness meter is the "marble" widget:
i'm also happy to see usability progress being made in kde4 with discussions such as "how to refer in user visible strings to desktop service applications like the character selector". it may sound like a small thing, but it all adds up. and seeing as these things will be making their way into the new user interface guidelines (which celeste has been asking for feedback on, btw on kde-*-devel; help her out with your feedback devs!) we'll actually be capturing these conclusions so we can implement them.
i figure that the new guidelines will result in a bevy of interesting but introductory-level jobs for those who wish to get their feet wet in kde development.
6 comments:
Is it possible to use a design like in the Marble sidebar, for the Konqueror sidebar (F9)? I kind of don't like (understatement) the vertical 'collapsing' tabs... to me it's hard to read and the icons don't make clear what the tab section is about either.
OpenGL for Usability:
I don't like all those fancy OpenGL effects. Only one (which could be default?): All inactive windows become slightly darker. This helps to concentrate on the active window. That's much more usable than most other effects like opacity and should have only low requirements for graphics hardware (no transparency).
@anonymous: I mostly agree, but after using KDE on XGL for a while, I am hooked on (slight) window wobble and shadows. The cube effect is only good for wowing spectators. Window wobble and shadows, however, gives a more fluid and natural feel to the desktop, like the windows are real, moveable objects. Matter of taste, I suppose.
> Is it possible to use a design like
> in the Marble sidebar, for the
> Konqueror sidebar (F9)? I kind of
> don't like (understatement) the
> vertical 'collapsing' tabs... to me
> it's hard to read and the icons
> don't make clear what the tab
> section is about either.
There has been an suggestions at kde-apps for a while now:
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=17049
I really like it :)
"The cube effect is only good for wowing spectators."
Well, it does give the desktop(s) more tangible feeling. Before, the virtual desktops were just other desktops. Now you can visualize them as being different sides of a cube.
Related to this... I have seen ideas floating around of using the top and bottom sides of the cube for To-Do's and the like. How about butting a full-screen terminal in one of them :)? No windecs or menubars, just the CLI.
"and that's without the need for xgl et al. nice =)"
It still needs GLX_texture_from_pixmap I suppose, which is provided by Xglx as well as the normal Xorg (with some drivers only). This is no different than compiz and metacity 2.16.
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