This weekends Commit Digest, Issue 60, was already mentioned last week to become a big one: the first real Plasma screenshots were announced. But even without the Plasma news there are enough interesting news and changes - and it also feature two videos, something I never saw before in a Commit Digest. Here is an overview about the most important and notable news.
Plasma&SuperKaramba
First of all, here is a Video showing Plasma in action (a mpeg version is linked at the Commit Digest):
Speaking about SuperKaramba, the Digest also explained the realtion between SuperKaramba and Plasma:
SuperKaramba themes can now live within the Plasma space and will help fill the initial void till real Plasmoids appear.
Sounds to me like the merge will take more time than expected, but that is ok: Plasma is not complete at the moment and we will even see huge improvements in the step from KDE 4.0 to KDE 4.1 In the meantime SuperKaramba might deliver everything which is still missing until both finally merge.
Kalzium
One of Kalzium’s main new features will be the molecular viewer:
Kwin
The new composite extension of Kwin develops quite well- but had to be enabled by command line in the past. This changed now: kwin gets a kcontrol modul. Atm it does not really do anything and kwin doesn’t care about the module, but that will change soon. I’m really looking forward to the next KDE Four Live release where I can test this feature and have a look at the new kwin composite features.
Speaking about the composite extension several application developers were faced with the problem that they wanted to support such features in their applications, but needed to know if the composite extension was activated. Therefore the applications developers started to implement their own solutions for each application, which of course is unnecessary duplicated work. Therefore, a common function to check if the composite extension is enabled was introduced:bool KWindowSystem::compositingActive();
Nothing revolutionary, but as said necessary. Now the applications developers need to get aware of that function.
WebKit
Work started to have the option to integrate WebKit as a kpart in the future. This means that users can choose if they want to have KHTML or WebKit displaying their web pages. If this work is finished it might also inspirate other people to start a stand alone browser for KDE based on WebKit.
Of course this does not mean that konqueror or even KHTML are replaced or anything like that - it simply adds another possibility.
From my point of view this is great since I have great hopes in WebKit and the fact that several parties are involved with the development: Apple, Nokia, Adobe, many KDE developers, and so on. Still, I would prefer to see that all KDE/KHMTL developers would be fine with WebKit, atm there are still some strong emotions among some developers.
Krita
The Krita development is pretty strong - as usual. And I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to the new Krita 2: I was used to Gimp in the past but started to play around with Krita in the last days and weeks whenever I had to modify images - and I was impressed! It works reliable, fast and just smooth.
And this will hopefully be better: with the last week Krita got an OpenGL interface for display of HDR image exposures. The print support was implemented, new layers and transparency features were added, etc.
But the Krita developers are also faced with a current problem: they want to improve the usage of tablets (think of Wacom here), but to achieve this goal they need money to buy them. Therefore they asked the community to donate money. All over all they need several hundred Euros, which is quite a lot, but you know the math: if each user donates 1 Euro…
Stae of KDE 4 in general
There are many more changes and improvements making this Commit Digest worth a read. It also shows pretty well how active and alive the current development and the community around KDE 4 is.
Also, with Plasma now getting into shape there are hardly any base technologies left which you have to worry about if they will make it into KDE 4. The only things I’m missing are news about kicker and kmenu replacements.
However, the current state of KDE 4 itself is best described by hints found in to other posts: in recent posts both Annma and Troy mentioned that they currently use KDE 4 to accomplish their daily work! Annma mentioned that she was pretty impressed seeing KDE 4 in such a good state already, while Troy pointed out that the state of KDE 4 is enough to write his famous articles inside of KDE 4.
Or course it does not mean that it is ready for normal users yet - base desktop applications like the menu and the taskbar will be replaced before the final release - but it is on a good track! And there is still a month left till the first Beta release…
0 comments:
Post a Comment