dolphin gets a treeview, krunner gets prettier

peter penz committed a treeview for dolphin to svn today. it really angers me to watch people piss and moan about that whole situation when 4.0 is months away and when they aren't going to be losing a damn thing since konqueror is still there and still maintained. the attitude some of these people are demonstrating is the perfect way to chase away enthusiastic new developers like peter. making kde an enjoyable place to work on code something we in the development community try pretty hard to realize; when the beneficiaries of that start sabotaging it with ill-informed whinging, it's pretty disheartening. i have no issue with constructive criticism, but i'm seeing very little of that.

in more happy news, krunner is getting prettier with transparency on the widgets, pretty buttons and the listview soon to be replaced by the "icon parade". the latter is something of an interface experiment, and i'm hopping to receive some of the artwork i need for it tomorrow. if it pans out i'll post a screenshot or three.

it's also getting more functional as the feature set comes together. matt broadstone has also got the start of a qgraphicsview based implementation for the desktop going that we'll be building the visual elements on plasma on top of, and wirr has started bringing over some of the widgets he'd ported from superkaramba to graphics view. so, bit by bit things are coming together.

konqueror not vanishing. news at 11.

i really didn't want to blog again today, but then i read that "we may see konqueror vanish" due to dolphin being in kdebase. some other sites picked this up, of course, because it's sensational. like many sensational headlines, it's also wrong.

i blogged about this once already a while back, but let me state it again really clearly:

konqueror is a power user's application that can not be fully replaced by something like dolphin (and vice versa). they have different use cases and different target audiences. both are valid concepts and both will be sharing the vast majority of their code, sort of like how kwrite is little more than a shell around katepart.

what is on the plan right now is for dolphin to become the file manager that gets launched from the default panel buttons and by apps requesting to launch a file manager. and just like in kde3 you will be able to configure all of this quite easily so that it uses konqueror (or whatever other tool you prefer, e.g. krusader) instead.

moral of the story: if you have a question try asking the people involved and you'll probably get an informed answer.