What blog about software would be any good without screenshots, right? Documentation also requires screenshots, and both patch reviews and bug reports are helped when accompanied by screenshots. Sounds like we need a good screenshot tool to take pictures of our desktops, and thankfully KDE4 comes with one of the nicest ones around: KSnapshot.
KSnapshot in KDE4
As in KDE3 we have a picture of our snapshot on the left (which you can drag and drop), our main controls to the right of that and our snapshot settings at the bottom. As in KDE3 (and just about any KDE application), you can save your files to a remote system (that's how I got the snapshots online for this blog entry, in fact) and KSnapshot lets you define how you want your snapshot taken. Don't want window borders? No problem! Need X seconds to set up your perfect shot? Can do! If you put a number or a date (!) in your snapshot name, it will auto-increment it for you on your next take. Such a handy little app.
It sports four snapshot modes: full screen, full window, section of window and region. The "section of window" is very cool in that it allows you to click on an area of a window, such as a toolbar or the document area, and it will grab just that portion of the window. So far, other than the nice Oxygen stylings, things are the same.
In KDE3 there was one recurring theme from users of KSnapshot: "we want more control over the final result." Some wanted to print (which was supported in KDE3), others wanted to crop, put drop shadows, annotate .. and on and on. If the KSnapshot maintainer, Richard Moore, hadn't been careful KSnapshot would soon have become a full image editor! What to do?
The print button was removed and replaced with an "Open With" button which lists every image manipulation application that is registered on your system. So with one click you can open your snapshot in Gwenview or Krita or KolourPaint or whatever app you want, really (sure, go ahead and edit it in KHexEdit ;). From there you can manipulate the snapshot to your hearts content without restrictions. This decision helped keep KSnapshot itself small and focused in its mission.
Another nice touch in KDE4 is the region mode. In KDE3 you could grab a region of the screen, but there was virtually no feedback as to what was going on while you did so. Not any more!
KSnapshot in region grabber in action
When you click "New Snapshot" a little timer (which, of course, follows your colour scheme! ah, details!) appears in the upper left corner counting down the seconds left until the snapshot is taken. When in region mode, once the time has run down to zero a snapshot of the whole screen is taken and you can now click and drag an area to snapshot. The selected region remains clear while the rest of the screen is grayed out, as you can see in the screenshot above. You don't have to get it right the first time, either: little translucent drag handles appear on the edges and corners of your selection that allow you to adjust the selection to your heart's content.
It is that one feature alone that has me falling in love all over again with this handy tool that I end up using so often.
KSnapshot isn't the even the beginning of the parade of small tools in KDE4, though. Take KCharSelect, for instance: in KDE3 it was very, very basic and very, very cryptic. You could pick a font and it would list all the characters in it. And I mean all. So if you were looking for the copyright symbol ... you could be hunting for a while.
Besides allowing one to pick both the font type and size to peruse, KDE4's major improvement comes in the form of search and metadata in a more pleasant layout:
Selecting a character will give you some information on it in the information panel. The information includes details on the character itself, it's representation in various formats such as XML/HTML encoding and even cross references to related characters.
Where this gets really useful is when using the search bar. Located at the top of the widnow, the search bar allows you to sift through this text quickly. Typing "copyright" at the top brings up all the characters which have the term "copyright" in their information blurb. Finally I can find special characters quickly and without even necessarily knowing their exact name! I love it!
For those large Unicode fonts which may have hundreds upon hundreds of pages of characters, KCharSelect allows you to define the set pages you'd like to look at. This is done via a pair of selection lists right next to the font selection. This lets you select a font, a size and then narrow down which characters are displayed by simply moving through the fields left to right (or right to left if using an RTL desktop).
For quick note taking, KDE4 comes with KJots. If you want a full-meal-deal kind of note tool, I recommend checking out Basket. It's an insane app that can do pretty much anything with notes and does it with an extra helping of style and eye candy. But sometimes you just want a simple note taker (as I often do), and that's what KJots is for. Like KSnapshot and KCharSelect, KJots got its start way back in KDE1 and it still with us in KDE4.
It's gone through a few UI revisions in that time, as you can imagine. It started out as a useful if slightly ugly duckling with a menu listing your note books, a row of buttons at the bottom for bookmarks, and a list of pages in the currently open book on the left. This obviously didn't scale very well if you had lots of note books or bookrmarks. In fact, it gave the app an downright odd use pattern: open a menu (or call up the book dialog by keyboard shortcut) and select a book, move to the left pane to select a page, move to the right to edit; or mouse to the bottom to select a book, uhm, bookmark, move to the left pane to select a page, move to the right to edit.
The file format also left some things wanting: you couldn't have more than one level of pages and no nested books and it was a bit brittle.
When I took maintainership of the app in KDE3 times I cleaned up the UI a bit by harmonizing the navigation into the left panel, added printing, a book overview so you could view all your pages in one scrolling view, proper bookmarking, autosave and cleared up a bunch of bugs.
Then along came Jaison Lee. We met a conference in Ohio shortly after Jaison started contributing patches to KJots and if I recall, it was during the conference that I tricked .. er .. convinced Jaison to take over maintainership of KJots. Under his hand, KJots really stepped up.
KJots in KDE4
He swapped the file format to XML, added rich text editing, made it possible to nest books and added a bunch of other nice touches. Auto-bulleted lists, being able to mark pages in the left side with colours and content search are nice features as well. Pradeepto Bhattacharya and Stephen Kelly are now looking after KJots, so the legacy continues, hopefully for another 10 great years.
The rich text editing alone is enough to make me fall in love all over again with KJots. Colour marking is useful if a bit rough still, the overview HTML looks straight from 1992 (my fault, I take the blame) and could use a nice facelift (any HTML/CSS gurus out there? ;) and being able to add images or other attachments to pages would be nice. Even as it is, though, KJots is approaching a very nice balance of power, reliability and simplicity: the configuration dialog has all of three options in spite of being able to do so much with it!
As a closing teaser, if you've ever wanted to clear out the tracks your web browsing and file editing has left behind, look no further than Sweeper from the KDE Utils package:
Sweeping out my usage tracks with Sweeper
Simple, fast and powerful. Beautiful!
I could go on and on about tools like KGpg or KCalc or ... but I'm out of time. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of very nice tools in KDE4, many of which have improved noticeably from KDE3 to KDE4. I hope you take the time to explore the various nooks and crannies of KDE4 long enough to discover these jewels; remember: KDE is more than a desktop shell and a file manager .. it's also a collection of truly great applications (.. and a development platform, and a community of terrific people, and ... ;)
20 comments:
sadly the pictures are not shown here, neither in konqueror (3.5) nor in firefox
I really can't understand why should anybody use KJots instead of Basket ... that is miles away
I can't see the pictures, they give me a timeout error :(
Aaron on the first articel you mentione you showing how phonon works to automatically send sound to headphobnes. How you do that? Maybe you should do a videocast showing phono in action.
re: the pictures .. yeah, something is hammering the server today. i've relocated them to another machine. things should be Better(tm) now.
re: Basket .. as i noted, Basket is a really impressive app. however, KJots shines when it comes to taking simple hierarchies of notes, emphasis on simple. Basket is a very capable, but rather complex app. KJots is a simple utility that does the job of note taking well enough for most needs.
it's not a one-size-fits-all world.
personally, i have no need for launchers or moving blocks around on a page .. so Basket is just extra interface in my way. for those who do want/need those things, Basket is great.
i do with KJots would get quick tagging of pages, though ... it's the one feature in Basket that I do miss.
"re: Basket .. as i noted, Basket is a really impressive app. however, KJots shines when it comes to taking simple hierarchies of notes, emphasis on simple."
Also, there is no basKet port for KDE4 - in fact, it is currently undergoing a full re-write. No big deal since KDE3 apps still run fine under KDE4, but a point in KJots' favour, I think :)
The link to the enlarged image of kcharselect for kde3 points to the kde4 version. You probably meant to point the link to:
http://plasma.kde.org/media/kcharselect.jpg
But you actually pointed it to:
http://plasma.kde.org/media/kcharselect.png
@anonymous: thanks, i missed that one.. it's fixed now =)
Well, there are things in basket that wold be very useful in kjots:
- I'd like to be able to modfy page-icon
- I'like to be able to paste images and HTML copied from websites
- I'd like to have some formatting option ... like the possibility to Hide/Show long lists keeping only titles ... like u can do in basket when u Group 2 objects
Aaron,
You are doing an excellent job of showcasing the reason I love KDE - it's complete. There is an application for freaking EVERYTHING! I'd never heard of KJots before, thanks.
What is the use case for auto-incrementing a date in a filename in KSnapshot? If I save an image to 15.02.08.png and then take another image, why should it save it as 16.02.08.png? Maybe the filename doesn't even represent a date.
Aaron, we miss one great feature in KDE on the desktop....
MOUSE WHEEL OVER DESKTOP BACKGROUND SWTICHES DESKTOP
Any chance of getting it back?
Jaison Lee... he is kind of responsible that I started with the cmake stuff for KDE :-)
Alex
@anonymous: "What is the use case for auto-incrementing a date in a filename in KSnapshot? If I save an image to 15.02.08.png and then take another image, why should it save it as 16.02.08.png? Maybe the filename doesn't even represent a date."
but more often then not, if it is in a date format (which is fairly distinct compared to other patterns) then it is a date. emphasis on "more often". in situations like this you'll never get it right 100% of the time, but you can often get it right 90%+ of the time (rather than not doing anything and getting it wrong 90% of the time)
@anonymous:
> we miss one great feature in KDE on the
> desktop
probably eventually. there are so many more interesting things, though, seriously. i'd rather not spend the next year of my life replicating every feature just to get back to where we were. i'd rather be doing *new* things that provide a *lot* more impact than "mouse wheel over the desktop".
p.s. this is off topic for this blog entry. the next entry would've been more on target, since i at least talk about plasma there. i really don't need to discuss these issues on *Every* *single* *thing* i write. i do have other interests, you know.
@Aaron: Ok, even if it is a date, I still don't think it's very useful. Maybe when one does *exactly* one screen shot each day and wants the file name to have the date of that day. Well, I guess it doesn't hurt, as long as it doesn't increment the date in 2008-02-16_1.png :).
ohhhh, so *that's* where kwalletmanager was hiding!
thank you. between this and the kwallet patch on k-c-d, I think my kwallet troubles may have been solved even though I never got around to explaining them to anyone. :)
So is Kjots aiming to have similar functionality to Tomboy? That sounds appealing. I'm glad that KDE is not as dependent on the controversial Mono as GNOME is - making it less easy for unfriendly entities to beat Konqi over the head with FUD later on.
Also, for some reason I can't see the captcha in Firefox, it only works in IE :(
Hmm, pretty, KJots have now some features like KnowIt has. But others still missing. Btw, does anybody know something about development of KnowIt? It seems dead.
It would be nice to be able to drag and drop Kjot pages to and from the desktop.
Post a Comment