thankfully it was a fairly light snow and so there was still less than a foot of the white stuff outside by the time it subsided. winter is certainly here, however.
another e.v. quarterly report is around the corner; props to allen winter for once again heading up the conspiracy of authors.
plunked away some more with dolphin the file manager. i'm really getting to like the breadcrumb widget. it addresses quite nicely various issues such as navigation without a visible tree and hiding "messy details" like "your home is actually /home/$USER". it grants quick access to a fully editable url bar as well as jumping to common points / bookmarks in the system. it needs some work when dealing with loooong paths and network drives (it loses the breadcrumb and goes back to the traditional line edit only). clicking and holding on an entry drops down a menu showing the sub-folders; dropping a url on a crumb does the expected... rather promising little widget that i'm sure could see usage in a number of places.
the upgrade to kubuntu edgy went pretty well. i went the apt-get dist-upgrade route and nothing went awry with that process, but on reboot i'd lost the scrollbars on the laptop's trackpad and audio didn't sync properly with video in kaffeine. the issues seem to be mostly worked out now, though i'm not too happy about konversation now having the channel list on the left which forces my eyes to travel to the top left corner and then back to the center bottom of the window whenever i want to check on channel status. =( and g++ has got tits up a couple times now. erg.
this release was announced on theDot, as was the release of fedora in a me-too! me-too! story. a few opensuse guys blogged about the inappropriateness of this, and i have to say i agree. i understand the editors of theDot really do their best to accommodate people and that's not an easy balance to strike. but it ain't about kde, it don't belong there; it just gets too messy otherwise. oh well ... no animals were harmed in the making of those stories =)
7 comments:
I'm afraid removing those "messy details" (/home/$USER) is the reason the average user has problems with the file hierarchy. In Windows you can get to "My Documents from My Computer, the desktop, C:\Documents and ..., and so on. How is the user supposed to know which one of these he/she put the document in? Hiding information is in my opinion not always a good thing. The hiding of file endings (.exe ...) in windows is one of the worst examples.
If you have more users on one computer you probably want to have shared folders readable and writable by all users, how will they get there if the path is something like /shared or anythin else outside the users home directory? (Without knowing extra stuff about how to get the full path)
Kåre
"though i'm not too happy about konversation now having the channel list on the left which forces my eyes to travel to the top left corner and then back to the center bottom of the window whenever i want to check on channel status. =("
Settings -> Configure Konversation -> Tabs -> Placement. There you can move them from the left Treeview to the bottom or the top.
Hope that Helps
@Kåre: there's a difference between hiding the messy details and completely obliterating them ;)
with the breadcrumb, one button click (or keyboard shortcut) reveals what's really going on.
the messier details derail a lot of people, so being able to abstract them away is good most of the time. but when you need access to them i totally agree with you that they need to be easily findable.
microsoft continues to find new and inventive ways to totally screw this up, i agree. we can do much better.
hell, they have a hard time getting wallpapers to work properly (because scaling jpeg's is soooooo high tech). i really don't like comparing ourselves to them in quality. quantity of applications is another matter, but quality is something we tend to do better at.
@rythan: thanks; the default is bothersome however. i wonder what the thinking was?
>> hell, they have a hard time getting wallpapers to work properly (because scaling jpeg's is soooooo high tech)
Hahaha. Yeah that was great. I like how the guy tried to make it sound like some kind of miracle that they managed to fix this completely stupid bug before release.
The description of that process really cleared up why they had to drop most of the interesting features from Vista though.
Speaking as Konversation developer/maintainer, the default from our end remains the tab bar at the bottom, with the treelist being optional (but widely popular). Kubuntu chose to deviate from our default. When we were somewhat unhappy about that and asked them why they did it, the answer was "consistency with other KDE applications and mIRC", which we found unsatisfying, since tab bars are more prevalent throughout KDE, and mIRC does not default to a treelist, either (though it has added support for one a few weeks ago). Bottom line, this was probably a "I like it better" on the whim decision.
Simon Edwards has a patch to make Konqueror more concise and usable, focusing on intergrating media and network IO slaves into the file system tree view:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2231
But I think to achieve real network transparency, network locations should be mounted into the file system (perhaps using KIO FUSE). Does Dolphin even have a tree view?
Speaking as Konversation developer/maintainer, the default from our end remains the tab bar at the bottom, with the treelist being optional (but widely popular). Kubuntu chose to deviate from our default. When we were somewhat unhappy about that and asked them why they did it, the answer was "consistency with other KDE applications and mIRC", which we found unsatisfying, since tab bars are more prevalent throughout KDE, and mIRC does not default to a treelist, either (though it has added support for one a few weeks ago). Bottom line, this was probably a "I like it better" on the whim decision.
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