Ho, ho! Finally! The KDE 4.3 Plasma screencast arrives! It's 10:36 in length and covers some of the nice improvements we've in Plasmaland for 4.3, including:
- The new Air theme
- Small panel sizes
- KWin integration
- Stability & performance improvements (over 2300 bugs.kde.org defect reports triaged and closed during the 4.3 alone!)
- New widgets, including social desktop integration, remember the milk and unit converter
- New DataEngines, including Geolocation
- System tray and job notification improvements
- KRunner improvements in looks, speed and usability
The screencast doesn't cover everything new or improved in 4.3 .. that would take at least an hour instead of the ten minutes I spend in that screencast. You can find a more complete changelog here but even that is just the big stuff and doesn't catch the numerous little tweaks and improvements that have ben made.
We're not done, though. Not by a long shot. There are a lot of things the Plasma team still aren't satisfied with and several goals from the original design sketches that we have yet to implement. The good news is that we have plans in place and code underway for the KDE 4.4 release that will address many of these open issues. In my next blog entry on Plasma I'll give an overview of what we're working on, and why, for KDE 4.4.
Until then, you can grab the KDE 4.3 Plasma screencast via BitTorrent.
Update: Please keep seeding the torrent after you've downloaded it if you can. I do have a version of the .ogv on plasma.kde.org and will probably post a link to it eventually via identi.ca, but I'd really like to be kind to the server bandwidth and rely on bittorrent as much as possible.
Update 2: Direct link for those who can't torrent because they have nasty sys admins: plasma_4.3_overview_small.ogv. Over 400 seeders showing up in KTorrent right now for the torrent, though. :)
37 comments:
nice screencast but.... you are using firefox as your preferred browser?!?!?
Nice screencast. Thank you.
Did you work on small vertical panels too? At the moment they don't adjust the icon size in the taskbar properly (they get way too small) and they date and time font size isn't adjusted to fit in vertical.
I'm a KDE user too and i use firefox. @Dass, what's so weird about that?
BTW, Just watched the screencast. I like how 4.3 does. Very nice screencast too, thanks.
@Dass: sadly, yes. konqueror just isn't where it needs to be. look out for a blog entry by Will Stephenson soon that covers that (among other pain points in kde4).
firefox's UI drives me _nuts_ (it's simply gotten worse from release to release recently) but at least it works with enough web sites to be useful to me.
@Tom: small vertical panels are better, yes. not as good as small horizontal ones, though.
@litb: thanks :)
obviously also I use firefox...
my comment was just to point out that i'm very happy with kde4 but i will be more happy with kde4 with a good browser.
Khtml or webkit... who cares? i just want to browse with a good browser fully integrated in my kde
Thanks for a great screencast. I'm looking very much forward to kde4.3.
To chime in on the browser discussion I'm also an unhappy user of firefox on kde. I really wish there was a better browser or better qt integration with firefox, but don't let the laments overshadow the fact that the people working on kde in general is doing an awesome job.
Oh and http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Fr-adieu.ogg ;)
Thank you for all your work, Aaron. I am looking forward to KDE 4.3!
It's sad that Google Chrome decided to use GTK instead of Qt. And I won't use a proprietary web browser (Opera).
What ever happened to the Firefox Qt port? Anyone knows?
KDE 4.3 is the best KDE 4 ever. Excellent look & feel, bugfixs and very good new features and improve.
Plasma improves step to step.
Only one question but about KDM:
when a new look (for coherency with Air) and improve about ergonomy and usability?
Great work.
giuseppe
I agree, Konqueror really needs some work as a browser. It just doesn't "feel" right.
I use konqueror as primary browser for about four years. Can anyone tell me what is wrong with it?
Good work aaron and hearty congrats for the kde team.
(strange that even your gfx card driver is not performing as it should be as the slide in and slide out animations are brilliant in my 4.2.91).
This looks absolutely fantastic! I love that geolocation/social thingy. As far as I can see when the KDE 4.3 comes out I might even switch to it. Great work people!
Cool screencast. Running trunk so I've been seeing the improvements.
BTW Aaron, you look remarkably good for a man over a hundred years of age :) (hint: Your open desktop widget).
@elvis: yeah, i noticed that too. maybe i should enter my bday on opendestop? ;P probably also something fixable in the OCS dataengine, though.
can i post your video on youtube?
@silvio: absolutely; note that it's a bit longer than 10 minutes though .. but i'm cool with people posting it, well .. wherever :) share and enjoy!
here is the link for the video on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9U3SpWmI2c
Your video is on youtube now,and you rederict user to download or to see the video here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9U3SpWmI2c ,i thank you very mach for the great work and i ĺl pubblish it on my site next days,have a nice day..ciao
For some reason I just don't like the design of the calendar. It looks "fat", if that's at all understandable?
Otherwise, it's looking pretty good!
Looking good! Just want to say how much I appreciate everyone's work in making KDE4 rock so hard. Can't wait to try it out later this week (waiting until my new rig shows up from tigerneweggdirect.com)
Really cool screencast. It's awesome how cool and powerful the KDE desktop is now. And beautiful.
Oh, and is good to know that KWin is pronounced "quin". I always said "key win". :-D
just curious why the dolphin windows is minimized before he start recording ?? wait i think i know hwy because it may takes a lifetime to start dolphin !!! hey guys nice work but please please focus on the desktop performance. a beautiful slow desktop will always be useless .
Thanks for that, excellent screencat, I've been using the kubuntu 4.3 beta packages for a while now and loving them, but the screencast revealed features I knew nothing about - now to try them out!
I use konqueror as my main browser, dropping back to firefox when needed (usually banking) but I agree, the web browsing experience needs some serious love.
The screencast won't play on Fedora unless I install gstreamer-ffmpeg from the non-free repositories. Says "Your system requires: MPEG4 Decoder". Without that I can only hear sound, no video.
Is that intended? Seems odd to use the free OGV video format but with a proprietary encoding.
@MohaaX86: "just curious why the dolphin windows is minimized before he start recording ??"
because i had it set up with the directory i wanted it in with a another dir to paste, but i screwed that one up as you can see in the recording. :P
"wait i think i know hwy because it may takes a lifetime to start dolphin !!!"
with another dolphin window open:
aseigo@independence:~/Desktop> time dolphin
real 0m0.229s
user 0m0.024s
sys 0m0.012s
with no dolphin open:
aseigo@independence:~/Desktop> time dolphin
real 0m1.287s
user 0m0.032s
sys 0m0.000s
and that's with all the bells 'n whistles on, default oxygen theme, etc.
"hey guys nice work but please please focus on the desktop performance."
we have been working on performance as well. but as always, patches welcome.
@Jud: blame mencoder i suppose; not the most user friendly piece of kit. :/
Very nice screencast. Great job at KDE 4.3; the look and feel is fantastic!
Nice screencast, thanks so much! Please keep up the pace, Plasma is amazing!
And a big thumbs up for konqui, my default webbrowser for so many years now. It simply looks better than the others, and rarely I need to fire up FF for a weird page which konqui wouldn't display correctly. I hope the konqui team gets some good help and support soon, i think with a little more manpower it can outshine the other browsers again.
This is great stuff! Seems you have done again a huge amount of work!! Really looking forward to 4.3!!
Especially nice to see you worked on the slim panels. Just the too big tray icons look a bit weird in your video.
When playing around with the bespin mac menubar and systray together on a slim panel, I thought it would be nice to have smaller tray icons. With an icon size of 22 plus some margin, so that it doesn't look squeezed, this makes about 26 pixels. Additionally some pixels for the border of the panel, say 2. And a minimum good looking (as far as the systray is concerned) panel size is pretty big, around 28 pixels. With a mac menu font which is itself about 12 pixels high here, this looks not really nice. Now you made it possible to squeeze the panel, but the icons are too big still :) Hope that didn't sound too confusing ...
So, now that you are working on the systray spec anyway, how about adding a smaller icon version as well? ;)
Michael
@redm: the new icons already can scale down to 16px in height. they could go smaller, but i put a minimum size on them otherwise the icons tend to "vanish" they get so small on screens ;)
the reason they don't go smaller now is that we keep all the icons in your tray the same size. so once your xembed based icons are gone, you can have teeny tiny icons in your system tray.
@aaron: Oh that's cool!! :) I think 16 should be small enough. Even for small screens.
The downside is that an xembed icon can ruin the entire experience. It seems hard to tell for the user why it doesn't scale. How about scaling them despite xembed icons? So users can easily spot the "misbehaving" apps and bug the maintainers to switch to the new protocol.
Thanks Aaron, it reminds me when you were doing your cool live screencasts ;)
As I'm still stuck with KDE 3.5 on Gentoo, I plan to try again to change, after 3 or 4 years of Gentoo, to get KDE 4.3.
Keep up the good work. :)
@redm: well, without using composite and a bunch of event hacks, we can't do that with the xembed icons at all. and did you now that they don't even have to be icons? they can be any widget the application wants. there's at least one Gtk app that (used to?) put a text label and a little graph there.
it's a really screwed up mechanism, and that's why we've replaced it. xembed icons will, powers that be willing, fade out and disappear over time.
by version 4.4, the KDE Software Distribution should be shipping no xembed system tray icons and 3rd party apps can start relying on its existence as well.
@Teme: yeah, i wish i could have found a working, quality and Free option for those live casts. :( i'll just have to do more of these pre-recorded screen cast things.
@aaron: I think that was a wrong wording from my side... I didn't mean scaling the xembed widgets, but those following the new spec, while leaving the xembed ones as they are. This way the user can easily spot the "misbehaving" app and complain to the author to switch to the new spec. As user seeing 8 icons in the tray that don't scale has probably no idea why or which one he could remove to make things look nice and scaled. Just a thought ...
Hey, Im Buddha Bob and im a Slim Glow/Keramik guy with a wallpaper that updates every 10mins and a panel three times the normal height. My desktop, the way I want it. Man, I love my KDE4, my way.
(well, I use Keramik because its the only window manager choice that gives me big min/max/close buttons.)
Anyways, love the screencast (what happened to the ustream thing?) and these quick 10mins videos are very useful,
About the system tray... is it possible to make the icons resizable/bigger when we make the panel bar heigher?
I have bad eyesight and I can make everything as big as I need it to be (fonts, icons,etc) on my desktop but when I have Skype, Amarok and Kopete running at the same time in the 4.2 system tray, its one small blur to me because they stay small in size even though the panel is taller.
I can use Kwin zoom features but the system tray is the most used parts of my panel (I'd love to take the tray to the desktop too).
Will give Kubuntu a test run of KDE4.3 any week now....
What application did you use to capture your screencast? I have tried xvidcap, recordMyDesktop, istanbul, cinelerra. All are not as nice as what you have produced.
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