On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:50:21 +0000, loki harfagr wrote:
> Now I'll suppose that the eye-candy is just eye-candy and the
> functions behind will be sharp and useful, unlike most the Longhorn
> sequels ;-)
Tried to answer this last night but I was having trouble getting all the
facts and it got too late. Anyway it looks like I might have to eat my
hat here.
On the surface plasma just looks like a silly toy. SuperKaramba on
steroids right? But if you look deeper into the issues behind some of the
design changes made in KDE 4 you will see the ingenious bit of it.
Why isn't KDE 4 just KDE 3.99 + 0.01? Why chuck out all the old code and
write the new stuff? The reason for doing so was to rebuild the system on
a better base. Here is a quote about why Kicker is replaced by plasma.
"So why was kicker dropped and something new created instead of just
improving kicker?
The reason is that kicker was already broken years ago: the code was
hardly readable, and new introduced features often introduced bugs and
problems at other places. Also, kicker was as flexible as a mountain:
several projects which aimed at adding a cool new feature to kicker in
the end copied the code base and started to rework it on their own - they
forked kicker. And that would not have been necessary when kicker would
have a better design for such improvements. But kicker was created for
KDE 2.0 (!), at a time when no one would have thought that some years
later applets would be embedded in the panel as well as in the desktop.
Or that there are indeed several ways to provide panel functions and not
just the 90s like static attempt (think of MacOS like approaches, etc.).
In contrast, KDE 4 will have a long life cycle, and therefore all code
must be maintainable for a long time - and for other developers."
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/1...ns-for-design-
decisions/
So as we can see, Kicker is old, it is hard to add new functionality to
it. In fact the trio of the Desktop, Kicker and Kmenu are things that
have just been slapped together. By rebuilding them on a single platform
"plasma" it increases customisability and ensures that code is more
maintainable. If you don't like the Kmenu in 3.5 what can you do? Write a
new one? In KDE 4 you could probably download several different versions
and plug them into the panel as you wished. The first few plasma widgets
don't make much sense because they are just tools to show other
developers how to do things. Later widgets will be more powerful. You
will get things like a lot better system process monitors, because with
plasma those things are easier to write and easier to modify. So if you
have something you are monitoring like web site traffic (on another
server) you can make a plasma widget that displays the stats, you can
then stick that on your desktop or in a panel/bar.
Also plasma has other uses, Amarok being a example of this. Developers
are able to leverage some of the functionality of plasma into their own
applications.
"we've decided that for amarok 2.0 we want to emphasize what used to be
called the "context browser" in amarok 1.x speak. we decided to break out
the context browser into its own central widget... and have re-used
libplasma to implement it. this allows us to use all the goodness from
plasma with minimal effort (there is of course some tweaking required).
as we do not depend on kdebase, we are currently svn:externing libplasma
in our amarok tree and linking to it internally. I understand that
post-4.0 (4.1 maybe?) libplasma will be broken out into its own separate
library, and we will be able to depend on that.
using plasma we get to use gorgeous svg-themed applets, the clean and
flexible applet/data engine architecture, plus many smaller but no less
important features."
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/...ification.html
Of course that is just plasma there are many other changes in KDE 4.
Strigi, Phonon, Akondai, Decibel, Solid, Sonnet and WebKit.
Richard James
--
If you find yourself suddenly facing a GUI because you accidentally ran
startx, don't panic. Just press the CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE key combo and
you'll quick as a flash be back in your cosy command line where you
belong.