A new feature release of the KDE Software Compilation has been made, bringing us to version 4.4.0. What a development cycle it has been! I won't bother recapping all the progress made, as you can read all about it in the above links.
With Tokamak 4 coming up in just ten days and the new KDE website up on its feet but still getting lots of love, attention and work done on it, it is certainly a busy time for us all.Things are not going to slow down one bit, though. :)
There are the predictable events, such as "we will be working on the first 4.4 patch level release as well as features and improvements for 4.5 which will appear this summer". There are also the to-be-expected happenings, such as the odd kerfuffle about this or that (today's one was about KAuth and what it means for Linux distributions such as Slackware). There's more afoot this week than just the usual suspects, though ..
For instance, today I'm working on tagging a first alpha release of Plasmate, the Plasma add-on creation tool, as part of an effort to move Plasmate to a regular release cycle with the ultimate aim of it being in fighting form for 4.5.
I'm also hearing rumblings of at least one very cool KDE event coming up in April that I'll be keeping my eyes on. It's exciting to see the number of quality KDE events growing around the world!
The most exciting thing for me today, however, is an announcement I'm working on that will be going out at the end of this week on February 12th. What is it about? We'll have to wait for Friday to find out for sure, but I do have something related to that announcement that I'd like to share with you right now:
KDE SC 4.4 comes with vastly improved and expanded Javascript Plasmoid support, and I'd like to personally introduce them to you. I will therefore be hosting open training sessions on both Friday and Saturday at 18:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net in #plasma-training. I will demonstrate, step-by-step and with examples how to write Javascript Plasmoids from the very basics on up. All you need to do is bring your enthusiasm, a text editor, a web browser, an irc client and hopefully a KDE 4.4 install to test your creations out with. Each session will last 2 hours, including an open Q&A at the end and you will walk away having written your first Javascript Plasmoids and I will be repeating the material on each day to give you the greatest number of opportunities to catch it. I hope to see you all there!
8 comments:
Awesome, look fwd to it.
Should be interesting to see how a flood of javascript components effect plasma stability.
Not trolling - jscript extensions have added a huge amount of usability to Firefox, I hope we get the same effect for kde. Look fwd to some creative and unexpected plasmoids.
"Should be interesting to see how a flood of javascript components effect plasma stability."
hopefully for the better as it relegates any crashes to libplasma alone; once QScript has improved script runtime interupt controls then even scripts that go into infinite loops will be easily dealt with.
this might spark an idea for the activities :)
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/08/locus-os-concept-video-shows-the-future-of-computing-right-no/
and there is a video too
Is there any plan for a plasma-desktop "task manager" or something that could provide a similar utility in the case that you know something is locking up your desktop but you don't know what or why?
p.s. just a minute.... OK, I'm back. Was going to write a question about whether Qt were still considering moving Qtscript to be based on JavaScriptCore or V8 or such but thought I ought to googleit (yes that's a word now :)) - shit (kxcd) - first. To get to the point Qt 4.6 (which KDE44 requires ithink (yes that's a word now :))) - dammit -
Start again Qt 4.6 uses javascriptcore for qtscript and I think users will be interested to see the results.
@SlashDevDsp TBH I don't see a great deal in that video of use that KDE doesn't have (maybe the nicer containment/workspace switcher).
"The explorer is based around real-world interactions to give more natural methods of organisation" what BS. Organising data in the "real world" is a pain in the arse. That's the point of desktop computers. If users find it hard to understand and harness the power of folders, backups, metadata and such then you need a better UI, you don't need to give up and copy a pile of documents on a desk. -ack- sorry for ranting on your blog aaron
Haha, at the first moment I was thinking - is he going to take part in the 2010 Winter Olympics?
I updated Kubuntu to 4.4 and its very nice work.
A bit unstable with a few problems with reboots but the work done really shines thru.
Im still not a huge fan of Oxygen. I love the artwork but the light background even for the widgets, just doesnt work as well with all wallpapers when you have the wallpaper slideshow mode (kudos for making cycling through wallpapers in the slideshow easier).
Notice a lot of small things being fixed left and right but I have to say that once again I am dismayed that the system tray has had its settings expanded but STILL has not gotten around to solving the visibility problem for the icons.
Its pretty simple:
KDE can allow me to set everything bigger: fonts, icons, etc.
The only thing on the desktop that we cant increase in size is the icons in the taskbar (same problem in the widget).
I dont even have that bad eyesight and i have problems seeing the sytem tray.
Older people and those with bad eyesight that I have put on KDE since 4.2 have all told me that its useless to them.
We should have the option if we want to make the panels heigher to either go to two rows of icons or leave one row grow exponentially with the panel for those that want the systray icons larger and easier to see.
Basically, give it the same functionality that the (almost ready) Quicklaunch widget has.
Of all the things people ask me about KDE, the system tray icon size ranks right up there as the most common problem.
But other than that niggling problem, 4.4 really is nice polishing job.
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