just got out of another oxygen meeting, this time specifically about icons. ken will be blogging about it in more detail so i won't steal his thunder, but i do want to note that what's really nice about the oxygen process is that it's one that encompasses developers, artists and usability people.
so something i'm doing today is cataloging the icons used in kdelibs so that we can ensure coverage of them. in the process we'll be using work Riddell (yes, the kubuntu guy =) has done on mapping our icon names to the ones in the freedesktop.org spec.
the idea is that for the next developer release we'll have at least oxygen icon coverage for libs and, hopefully, the workspace apps. this should give some of those visual improvements people are wailing for as well as help get wider testing of the icons. thus, we are prioritizing the work in that direction.
when will that developer release happen? sooner rather than later, i hope. and with the newly forming release team i expect to see plans emerge in the new year once everyone's recovered from xmas and new years partying.
from art to file managers, i thought i'd also post a quick note about the point of dolphin and how it fits into the scheme of things as those of us who work on those bits are concerned. btw, david faure is a huge part of that "us"; i think he occupies three or four complete slots in that line up actually, kind of like that bugs bunny cartoon where he plays every position in the baseball team ;)
so, what is the point of dolphin? first, i think it's obvious to everyone that konqueror kicks some pretty serious ass. the downside is that it's really tuned for a particular category of power users. our plan is therefore to introduce a file manager that is aimed at the rest of the masses and tuned specifically for file management. where does this leave konqueror? as a power user's app and generally useful multi-function tool. i expect we will continue to ship konqueror in its current form, modulo kde4 improvements to the ui and guts.
and its the guts that are really exciting: most of them are being shared between konqueror, dolphin and even the file dialog. so as core features become available they are showing up across all the apps. this limits the concern that everyone focuses on dolphin and konqueror bit rots, or vice versa. sharing code through libraries and loadable components has always been a strategy in kde, and one that has worked well for us in the past. expect to see similar fruits borne from the revamping of our file management core functionality, with konqueror and dolphin being two front ends to it all that are built for two different audiences both of whom are important to us.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
17 comments:
Nice, I think that's a very good stategy!
If Konqueror is a power tool, and Dolphin is Joe Users file manager, the natural question begging for an answer is if there are plans to make a Dolphinesque web browser?
I think Aaron answers this question when he says
so, what is the point of dolphin? first, i think it's obvious to everyone that konqueror kicks some pretty serious ass. the downside is that it's really tuned for a particular category of power users. our plan is therefore to introduce a file manager that is aimed at the rest of the masses and tuned specifically for file management
the web browser question hasn't been settled yet. hopefully soon (e.g. 1-2 months) though.
But why?
I mean, what's wrong with konqueror's profiles? Couldn't a profile be targeted to less techy audience?
Now, that I think of it :-) we could have 4 standard profiles
- Grandmother
- Dad
- Kid
- Hacker
Anyway, my point of view is that overlapping applications tend to confuse users. (Yeah, yeah, I know "freedom rules all")
I don't like the idea...I do hope, I'll be proven wrong though.
> what's wrong with konqueror's
> profiles
a) they aren't comprehensive enough. making them encompass enough functionality would not only be even more work than what we've embarked upon but would leave konqueror's code base in a great state of mess
b) we still have to have a way to expose these profiles in a usable way. which would end up with us actually just showing them as different apps (from the casual user's perspective)
what you suggest is what we first considered and tried.
For me, the many identity of konqueror is a cool feature, I love to have a tab with web page, an other whith my home directory, an other inside of a .tar etc ...
Yesterday, my dad tried a live CD with konqi as web browser, and was very confused whith the fact that searching a thing bring the "local files" mode, and was not able to switch back to internet browser mode.
So yes, I think that a Joe webbroser can be useful. let's name it, going side by side whith dolphin as an easy way to replace Konqi, Kachalo :D
Doplhin still lacks a traditional tree view (hierarchy tree on the left, opened folder on the right). This is a must have for any file browser.
dolphin still lacks a lot of stuff. there's still several months worth or work left.
ok, good to know. I totally understand the nned for something like dolphin, but I personally love konqueror. I love that in one tab I can have a split window with my local files and my sftp and I can just drap an drop, while on the next tab I can be browsing a page. I also love the metabar that I was able to configure so that I can write to my blog or connect to del.icio.s. I also love that I can just put my mouse ver a .oog fiel and I get to her a previe of the song. I was so afraid that KDE would get rid of Konqueror as weknow it.
@sAra: dolphin has a split view, it also has file previews. the metabar is more of a web thing, of course, so probably won't appear in that form in dolphin.
i think of the "dolphin to konqueror relation" as a VERY rough analogy of what the original firefox was to mozilla.
I would like to see a similar concept exploring/focusing on the web browsing of KDE.
And as the most important step (the naming), it can be "Kite", the dolphin of the sky :)
/SC
In layman's terms, this means that should Dolphin work out OK as a file manager, then Konqueror will be getting the heave-ho as the default file manager - which I happen to agree with. Focus on file management, and file managemant alone, and do it well.
Personally, the only 'power feature' that I like in Konqueror (the file manager) is the incredibly cool 'virtual' and transparent CD ripping mechanism that I hope Dolphin will continue with, in some unobtrusive way. It is, afterall, a file management operation, albeit, where the OGG, MP3 and FLAC files don't actually exist ;-).
I mean, what's wrong with konqueror's profiles?
This goes to the heart of the matter really. It's now clear that file, web and other forms of browsing are just separate use cases that necessitate different apps. A web browser, in handling cookies and other settings, is just too different from a file browser. Just take a look at Konqueror's settings dialogue to see what I mean.
Just look at Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. It's clear that they were trying to make them the same app in many ways, but in the end they just had to bite the bullet and separate them - badly.
You try and separate out the above and you simply have a separate application anyway, creating more work. In KDE's case trying to flesh out Konqueror's profiles doesn't make sense, because any separate app can simply use the same inherited components anyway.
I know it's convenient to have file, web and other browsing embedded in the same application sometimes, but that approach tends to give with one hand and take away with the other. A new approach is needed. I suppose it may be entirely possible to do it at some point with separate applications and common components - depends if the complication outweighs the convenience.
Dolphin is very promissing! Even as a power user, I prefer the simple file manager that opens every thing with the correspondent, full featured, aplication. I don't like the crippled "previews" that konqueror shows when I double click a image, for example.
I hope that the "home directory" abstraction is extended in an consistent way in whole KDE.
An specialized web browser is also good. I like having my 60 tabs that were open in my previous session opened again when I re-start the browser. This is better handled when you have an separated aplication.
Also, I agree with every thing that segedunum said! Though, I'd rather use an CD ripper to convert the CD to only one file + cue... or a great matroska audio file if some aplication suported this in a good enought way.... but this feature is handy for quick rips of only one track, for example.
As someone who uses Konq all the time - for all sorts of things let me just say:
Please, Please, Please, Please, do what Mozilla has done with Firefox and T-bird. Break Konq up into dolphin, a web-browser, and a file viewer and ship all of those as separate apps IF PEOPLE WANT. I know that this would help with my quest to get new people to use KDE/Linux.
Some people have trouble with the swiss-army-knife like abilities of konq.
thanks for all your work on KDE
I love the multiple functionality of Konqueror, but an additional file-browsing-only app can't hurt. :)
These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.
Post a Comment