falling in love all over again

Most of the reviews i read or listen to about kde4 tend to focus on the "4 3 hour tour" (yes, that's a Gilligan's Island reference ... *cough*) stuff: they open the file manager, open the system settings, play with plasma a bit, try konqueror, call it day and whip up a report. After the first few times, this gets b-o-o-o-ring really fast.

If I were a journalist at this point i'd realize that this has already been done to death and I'd try looking for something that hasn't already been said. Fortunately for this mythical journalist, KDE4 is immensely deep already, thanks in large part to the KDE3 pedigree that we were able to build upon. So they'd find lots of things to write about if they looked.

I was struck by this as I was doing demos at the KDE Open Day table at L.C.A. last week. I was showing people gwenview, marble, how phonon and solid work together to switch audio over to my USB headset when I plug it in without any configuration, games, koffice and so much more. I realized that yes, I was showing dolphin and plasma and kwin and what not .. but it was a small part of the whole story and the other parts are really compelling: people were amazed at the wealth of apps that are already there in 4.0.

(p.s. to the phonon guys: we need to find a way to stop N notifications popping up saying that the audio is being switched to the headset or back to the internal card; one is enough. Maybe we need something in KNotify itself like the kernel has which compresses repeating messages and just notes that it's repeated N times in the last X seconds? anyways... i digress)

So I thought, why don't people know about these things? Why aren't people telling each other about these apps? Ok, I understand it's more rewarding to bonk plasma over the head for the Nth time and watch me jiggle, or to whinge on about whether or not it should've been called 4.0 (personally, I still like the idea of calling it KDE4 v0.1 ;) ... but c'mon. Then it hit me: people talk about what we talk about and I'm an endless chatterbox, while the people working on these apps I love are .. how to say .. quiet. I respect that, but they deserve more attention for their work than they get, even if they are the quiet sort.

So I figured I'd do something about it by sharing with you how using KDE4 on a daily basis has been for me what can best be described as a process of falling in love all over again with various applications.

Instead of talking about my own little world of thoughts, ideas and what not, for the next while I'm going to push some of my favourite KDE4 apps into the little sparkle of light that is my blog. Maybe someone will pick these up as inspiration and write a series of articles or something. Maybe something for theDot even? Perhaps it's just me, but when i get something new and shiny and exciting I just can't help but share it ... I hope some of you might feel the same way.

Anyways ... on to the first app: gwenview.