this evening at 17:30 i'll be speaking at the calgary unix users group on the topic of "open source desktop software directions". come on out and join the party if you can, it'll be good. the presentation is at the public library downtown (check the cuug site for more info) and i'm sure we'll be visting bottlescrew bill's afterwards. there's a bit of an entry fee to get in, but that's used to bring food and drinks in for everyone and generally support cuug.
i'll be trying out some new material that casts some analysis on the foss desktop community, market and industry before launching into a "status of the kde4" review. so it should be interesting.
i wonder if the novell guy who visited the calgary linux users group last week will be there. probably not, but it would be fun and probably fair play. he presented on novell's new deal with microsoft and attempted to completely by-pass the whole patent agreement issue by not even mentioning it in the presentation, despite that being one of the two major issues people have with the deal. the other issue (openxml) also got short shrift. fortunately i was there. ;) if he does come to cuug tonight he could play critic to my thoughts on the state of our collective efforts. while i won't be talking about the novell/ms deal at all i'm sure there are several points of interest in the presentation for him.
and once i'm done the new slides (finishing them up now) i think i'm going to toddle over to kde4 dolphin for a bit. =)
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8 comments:
Don't dolphin, but plasma, you promised so! Please! Everybody waits. Or is the project cancelled?
it's not either/or. there are a few really key things that must be there for KDE4. one of them is a kick-ass file manager, another is the new plasma desktop, another is a cleaned up kdelibs, another is art and style, another is email/calendaring (i'm not involved with that, though =), etc... we don't need everything completed for the 4.0 release, but some things are pretty much hard requirements.
all this work needs to get done and there are only so many people doing it.
at the same time, there is work going into things that will make up plasma.
but don't worry, it'll all be there for 4.0.
Aroon don't kill konqueror for dolphin
there isn't any intention of killing konqueror. we just see the need to provide something for non-power users as well.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I may be misunderstanding, but I'm not entirely convinced about creating another new simple file manager just because no one wants to touch Konqueror. I can't see that having a power file manager and a simple file manager is the answer at all.
Personally, I would kill Konqueror, but not in the way that its code gets dumped. It just needs a severe tidy. I have three major beefs with Konqueror the file manager:
1. It never remembers my view settings that I change it to or the fact that I maximised it the last time I used it, and it never has done.
2. There is just too much in its settings dialogue that is not file manager related, and does anyone really need Amarok, History and Bookmarks sidebars when they're managing files?
3. It should have one left hand pane with your user directory, the drives and removable devices attached to your computer (dynamically done), your network file shares and your trash, because that's what people want to copy to and from most. That's it.
Konqueror the web browser should also have the same done to it because at the moment it has a lot of configuration settings that have nothing whatsoever to do with web browsing.
One of the key problems with Konqueror the web browser is the fact that the people who wrote it think that everyone wants to be informed of every single cookie that comes in at any time. What happens is that users either stop using Konqueror as a web browser, or they simply accept all cookies just to get the messages to go away. The messages that Firefox gives are enough. Personally, I'd accept all cookies by default, but have Konqueror delete them by default when the user exits. Firefox has a setting for that, but it's not enabled by default.
I see the 'file managing and web browsing use many of the same components but are entirely different use cases and applications' thing hasn't got through yet.
You are right Aaron, there should be a good file manager. With dolphin there will be two file managers, and no one will know which one is good, or as you put it "kisk-ass". Which file manager is going to be a default one? Perhaps, it is going to be up to the disto providers to choose the default one.
What about users? For power users there is always one manager that suites them very well - console. Non-power will have a choice of two filemanagers. Joel Spolsky compared "Choices to Headaches". Dolphin is going to be an additional headache of choice even for power users. I don't think that a new file manager is one of those "hard requirements" for KDE4. Konqueror is fine filemanager, just needs some usability work.
Wouldn't it be possible to integrate the work being done on dolphin into konqueror? I mean in that way we could have a usability-friendly konqueror that can satisfy normal users and power users alike. I'm thinking about stuff like the breadcrumb widget which looks really nice and I think would be great to have in konqueror.
I'd like to mention the efforts of plasma and ideas floating around within the GNOME community. They GNOME developers are looking at allowing gdesklets live on the panel, and panel applets live on the desktop, just like with KDE 4. Is there any work being done jointly by KDE and GNOME developers on this technology so that in the future, GNOME "littleapps" and KDE "littleapps" can be shared across KDE and GNOME?
It would be a shame not to carry through the current standards work into cool new developments like Plasma and whatever the GNOME "littleapps" will be called.
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