Discussing this issue with a blogger who was trying to get clear on the ideas by email, we came to the idea that maybe a screencast would help. More
Without further ado, here is that screencast. Hope it helps, because if it doesn't then the next step is a road show where I pack up my laptop, hit the road and come to your home town. Since that's not particularly realistic, I'm really hoping the screencast does the trick ;)
update: half an hour after i pressed the publish button, Marcel (see comments section in this blog) has uploaded it to youtube. go-go-community-action! you can catch the youtube version of the fullscreen folderview screencast here. thanks, Marcel... =)
46 comments:
Thanks Aaron, this makes things a lot more understandable...
I youtubified it with a reference to your blogpost. Hopefully that's okay for you, Aaron. Putting the link on here once it has finished processing.
On a completely unrelated note: Some time ago you blogged about a media center integration thingy for KDE. Has this died? I hope not so. Because now there would be a much better option than what you suggested back then:
http://xbmc.org/ is available on linux and it's amazing!!! integrating it into KDE somehow would be like the best thing ever...
Some screenshots of the music part. It's xbmc running on KDE 4.1. beta 1:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5190801#post5190801
I love it! (sorry for the off-topic...) :\
Okay, there ya go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhYinDOKbE8
@marcle: "I youtubified it with a reference to your blogpost."
thanks!
"Some time ago you blogged about a media center integration thingy for KDE. Has this died?"
nope, just taking longer than expected. their community is not quite as mobile as ours is atm, so there's lag time that i wasn't made aware i should anticipate.
> http://xbmc.org/
xbmc is cool; the technology behind linuxMCE is still hands down and by a huge margin the best thing going.
It couldn't be clearer! I hope now some people understand that "Yes, We have icons on the desktop!"
Svg Crazy
Dear Aaron
Thx for the screencast. I can hear that you have a problem with the sound/speech in it. It has an effect I would call pumping. (The loudness of your voice comes and goes). This could be your mic or the way you do the sound processing. It could be that it is a tool called "compressor" that is not well adjusted. If you can find it in your soundprocessing tool, take down the "ratio", and make the "attack" a bit shorter. (if that is possible). This could help.
No offense or anything, just something I've heared while watching it. Could make the next cast even better.
Cheers
Here's a prediction...one or both (probably the latter) of these reactions will occur sooner rather than later...
"Well, okay. It's almost like KDE3.x. But we have to wait for 4.2 for something as basic as having both icons and a wallpaper on our desktop? Are you guys stupid or what?"
The next
"Okay, fine. But you forgot that icons should be able to provide a thumbnail."
And both ending with "KDE 4 sucks. I'll switch to Gnome."
Okay, sorry for being rather pessimistic but the negativity is really off-putting and you guys really deserves a medal for putting up with it all!
@anonymous: yes, my other headset, which was *much* better broke recently and while running between places i picked up some cheapy thing in a store.
i think i'll be grabbing a better one now that i'm back at home again so that the audio quality isn't so poor =/
@Jonas: here's hoping you're wrong on this one ... not that i'm overly optimistic about it, per se, but i really don't want to have to do the road show ;)
(if you've seen the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back, then you know what i'm envisioning ;)
Okay, fine. But you forgot that icons should be able to provide a thumbnail.
KDE 4 sucks. I'll switch to Gnome.
Thanks for the screencast. I guess we now can have icons on the desktop!
Would it be possible to have something other than the checkerboard if the folderview is the desktop. Even a plain colour (in a temporary fix) until 4.2?
On a related note, in some other comments there's been mention of a "desktop-drawer" concept, where a traditional desktop can slide in and out from a tab or the corner like Yakuake. I'd also like to see that in 4.2 if you have the time...
Anyway, thanks for the screencast and for communicating the ideas for 4.1.
nice, i like the whole plasma idea.
Now that "handles are not disapearing" bug has to go away ;-) :-D but from what i hard that applet handler code gets replaced anyway?
well, good luck, looking forward to 4.1, and i hope that for 4.2 i can contribute some code (and not just writing stupid blog comments ;-) )
I thought I already understood folderview, and I did understand some things, but the screencast did a great job of clarifying things and I think it was a good idea to do. Keep up the good work Aaron.
Wow, can't you even have wallpapers? KDE sucks, thanks for making the switch to Vista easier...
Are you coming to Stockholm now Aaron? :D
Awesome screencast as usual. Huzzah for context menu! Dragging icons to the picture frame widget looks a little bit weird, but I'm sure you're already aware of it.
Hm. Maybe I should have watched Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back before making the comment.
So will it be possible to have homedir as desktop (in gnome it is desktop_is_homedir setting) so all my ~/ directories and files land as icons on desktop?
@Dentharg: *any* folder. in fact, you could do this in kde3 by setting what your desktop folder path was in the paths control panel; with folderview, you extend that concept with kio (e.g. network resources, nepomuk, etc) urls as well.
even better, with folderview + plasma you can have multiple folderviews.. either as widgets on activities, or as activities themselves.
so if you like the "full screen" method, you can set up two activities, one showing, say $HOME for day-to-day use and one showing $HOME/Pictures or whatever for when you are working on photo albums (to create a use case out of thin air ;)
then you can switch between the activities in plasma.
no mucking about in configuration dialogs. yay.
The lack of a wallpaper (I know there WILL be one, I'm not complaining :P) gets me thinking, how is this going to be implemented?
Some ways I can think of are:
1. You can set a background for the folderview widget, or leave it themed as normal (basically this option could be provided for all widgets, but it'd only ever really work for containments).
2. You can set a desktop background that will work for ALL containments, but also have the option to leave it themed as normal.
3. The plasma theme could set the background in the event no background is selected, this could be done in addition to 1 or 2, and is probably a good idea no matter what you choose, since it means that you'd never have the checkerboard as your background.
Personally I think 2 would be the best, have you guys decided on how this will be implemented?
@HappySmileyMan: "how is this going to be implemented?"
when used as a containment, the folderview no longer uses the Plasma::Theme for its background.
wallpaper will work as it does right now: you select "desktop settings" and then pick your wallpaper. it is per-containment.
in 4.2 you'll be able to pick your containment (activity container) as well in that same dialog, so you can pick whichever containment you want and whichever wallpaper you want to go with it.
Great work. Can't get enough of such news. Keep up the good work, Aaron. It seems like KDE 4.2 is gonna rock.
Two questions, though. First, are there any plans to make a plasmoid which would display the links from KFilePlaces? I think it would be extremely handy. Secondly, will it be possible to display kickoff/simplelauncher when you right click the desktop, as is currently possible in KDE3? As a past fluxbox user, I'm kind of attached to this particular feature.
@Anonymous:
"any plans to make a plasmoid which would display the links from KFilePlaces"
it's not specifically on the roadmap right now, but it wouldn't be hard to do.
"will it be possible to display kickoff/simplelauncher when you right click the desktop"
i thought i mentioned context menu plugins briefly in the screencast? maybe not; and i don't feel like watching it again to find out for sure. in any case:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156136
great scteencast! I think that you shoulddo more of these. I really enjoyed watching the screencasts you did for the commit-digest, and this is more of a good thing :).
I think this kind of screencasts would be an excellent tool to educate users. In addition of having documentation, how about having a video-tutorial(s) as well?
What software do you use in making these casts btw?
@Janne: recordmydesktop, using the qt-recordMyDesktop front end.
No cheesy outro music, no props for the screencast from me... :)
Folderview FTW!!!
hi :)
I just love this folder view but I wonder how the "change desktop with scrollwheel" could be implemented if the users can change the desktop containment with what he wants. Does the code for this must go in all containments or is there a more generic way to do that ?
Not having a configuration for folder view full desktop sucks!
KDE 4 sucks. I'll switch to Gnome
Heh. It seems most people here decided to follow your lead and make jokes about how people whine and make threats or whatever over 1 missing feature. ;-)
"go-go-community-action!" - You're a Power Rangers fan!? I hate Power Rangers. They're the reason Biker Mice from Mars was taken off the air, AND Power Rangers gets old very quickly, with each episode being basically the same. In Biker Mice from Mars they at least have all the funny jokes and plays on words.
power rangers?! ugh, no.
inspector gadget, baby. =)
go go gadget community action!
Looks great! Thanks for the screencast, it was very clear.
I've not started using KDE 4 yet, but I look forward to trying it out!
You KDE guys simply rock the world. It looks like KDE4 + satellite technologies will be the best thing under the Sun since sliced bread!
The film on youtube has vanished. WTF?
Youtube sucks. I´ll switch to Google-Video.... oh, wait.
I think nowadays it's "go go widget", not "go go gadget". You especially don't want to get entangled with someone's trademark, right?
Just an off-topic question Aaron:
Which distribution do you use?
Thanks.
You said "I hope you enjoy the upcoming release." I'm going to LOVE it. 4.0.0 was a bit limited for me, I admit it, but 4.1 is a huge improvement. I'm building from trunk, and it's great. Just because one has to do some small sacrifice initially (and not all people: i don't use desktop icons at all), doesn't mean the rest isn't awesome.
Maybe it was needed one small step back, but now we can see a lot more from our new perspective.
Thanks for your work, and for the nice screencast!
Please forgive my ignorance if it's already been discussed before.
Is there another way to resize a plasmoid other than dragging the resize icon? Because if the resize icon is on the screen edge, it's size is bounded by how much room I have from the screen edge. This makes resizing it bigger a 2 step action: move then resize.
It would be nicer if I can resize a plasmoid the way I resize a window. Or perhaps, just an idea, make those resize/move/configure icons follow the mouse cursor when the plasmoid frame is triggered.
Another question, is it possible to assign a virtual desktop or a containment to a second screen in a dual screen set up? The reason for that is you can unplug the second screen without worrying losing access to all the windows on the second screen. You simply switch the virtual desktop or containment to see it. Another side benefit is you can have the screens in "clone mode" simply by showing the same virtual desktop or containment on both screens (even at different resolutions if possible).
@Simon: "Because if the resize icon is on the screen edge, it's size is bounded by how much room I have from the screen edge. This makes resizing it bigger a 2 step action: move then resize."
we put the growth icons on the horizontal edge closest to the center, but we have been discussing ways to make it nicer/more natural.
"It would be nicer if I can resize a plasmoid the way I resize a window."
this causes problems for other functionality, while we're also trying to keep it a little simple (not trying to recreate a windowing system or a full fledged "drawing" application like karbon/inkscape)
we'll probably be working on this in the 4.2 time frame though.
"is it possible to assign a virtual desktop or a containment to a second screen in a dual screen set up?"
plasma doesn't handle windows (though we're interested in working on integration with the window manager in the future; we'll still not handle the windows directly)
but for containments, yes, you get a containment per screen; and when you unplug a screen, that containment continues to exist and you can switch to it on the remaining screen(s).
losing access to desktop contents just because you unplug a screen or a projector was long a (small) pet peeve of mine =)
It would be cool if there was such a thing as a KDE theme, which would be a package (or file) that contains custom configuration for every aspect of the KDE environment.
I would also like to be able to separately choose a theme for each type of Plasma widget, as well as choose a separate theme for each instance of a Plasma widget. What if I want to use the default clock in the Elegance theme? I don't want to have to create my own theme just for that. Also, for choosing themes I think it would be better to have a scrollable are in the window than a drop-down list.
I am going to use this opportunity for a big thank you to all people working on KDE. The way in which you are going forward with it is really aspiring and I am already looking forward to using it as my main desktop environment - svn snapshots aren't that stable. ;)
Also thanks to all the guys and gals still working on 3.5.9.
As a side note, I am really happy that my desktop finally has some useful applets to display, despite of the 2 TODO-text files that are currently on my 3.5.9 desktop.
Hello,
thanks for the screencast, it is very clear to me now too, and things are indeed falling into place.
However i chime in with other people a bit: please consider delaying KDE4.1 so you have this functionality ready for 4.1 not 4.2. I think the "falling into place" of plasma is very important and crucial for plasma and KDE, so that a stable basis in 4.1 can serve as a basis for ideas even newer than your original plasma idea in 4.2
delaying releases does not speed up development, it actually tends to slow it down.
delaying 4.1 would also short change everyone else who would like to use 4.1 apps (e.g. kontact on linux/unix/win/mac) or who doesn't care about this particular feature in 4.1.
somewhere along the way in Free software the user base forgot (or wasn't taught anymore?) the concept of release early, release often.
\o/ YAOUUUUUUHHHHH \o/
That's exactly what I was waiting for :D
Thanks a lot for everything you do.
Every time I see a video about KDE 4, I think: "Waouh! That's it! That's what I want!".
I became a linux evangelist because of Kde, and now I'm sure I did the good choice :D
Thanks and keep up the good work.
@Anonymous:
I think if a important feature like the background thing won't make it into 4.1.0 it will prolly be added by distributors or in minor updates.
Distros start shiping at the end of september so there is enough time to patch or add it in 4.1.1 or 4.1.2.
Release early and release often!
@kragil:
No, actually distros release tomorrow (well, at least one) - and with an impressive plasma-desktop imo
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3516
@anon:
_One_ distro.
Most distroS release in spring and autum ( Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora etc. )
OpenSuse 11 is more like a late spring release.
@Anon:
from that post it's apparent that openSUSE will be shipping with 4.0, thus development in 4.1 is quite irrelevant to them beyond the point in which computability is broken, and that, according to the post, was in April.
The position in which Plasma is poised seems to be almost as scary as it is exciting.
In particular, and as some of your replies hint Aaron, it's relationship with windowing and the established elements of the desktop environment.
The Plasma/window dichotomy slightly worries me but I also think that's a sign of it's success. This isn't just dashboard widgets, it's something that is finding its place amongst the 'grown-up' stuff like applications.
I'm sure that I don't quite understand this so feel free to set me straight.
:=)
"'grown-up' stuff like applications."
I meant to say "binary application". Or something, I'm not quite sure to be honest.
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