My KDE Holiday Wish List
December 18th, 2006
| Categories: Design, General, Humor, KDE/Kubuntu
This holiday season, I though I would take a few minutes to list some of the things I’d love to get from KDE in the next year:
- Kivio to become so kick ass I can replace Visio, but right now I’d be happy with improved stencil placement and line drawing
- Someone to help me create web and KDE4 UI stencil sets after I switch to Kivio
- Krita to become a little more comfortable to use so I can use it to do simple image manipulation rather than Photoshop
- Konqueror to support/migrate my Firefox extensions
- AmaroK to see the err of their ways and work towards a more KDE-consisten UI
- SpeedCrunch add an option to display number pad so people stop thinking Kubuntu doesn’t provide a calculator
Other random things I want:
- The projector or monitor to work from my laptop on the first try
- Blizzard to fully forgive application “wrappers” so I can play World of Warcraft in Linux without risk to my account
- Second Life to get with the program and use first-person-shooter affordances for avatar control, and stop reinventing the wheel and use things like the Quake engine and Alice modeling environment
- Adobe to support their products on Linux until OSS catches up
- More opportunities to do OSS work during my day job
- A pony and a Wii
Luckily I have a lot of friends (or so I think :) so maybe I’ll see some of these things in the next year!
I just saw a Wii for sale in Reston, Virginia on craigslist. Make your boy buy it for you!
“SpeedCrunch add an option to display number pad so people stop thinking Kubuntu doesn’t provide a calculator” — is it me or does SpeedCrunch actually indeed have a keypad on my screen? ^^;
“AmaroK to see the err of their ways and work towards a more KDE-consisten UI” — I’d be more than curious about this one; as it feels pretty KDE to me (and I’m lovin’ me some amaroK).
“Second Life to get with the program and use first-person-shooter affordances for avatar control, and stop reinventing the wheel and use things like the Quake engine and Alice modeling environment” — And to run more than 6 friggin FPS on an average graphics card like the Radeon 9600 and to stop eating 500 megs of RAM right from start-up… :)
@Henrik
Your SpeedCrunch has a number pad?! The one I’m using is 0.6-beta2 which was included in the Kubuntu packages. I havn’t found any way to turn on a number pad :’(.
My problem with AmaroK is although they have a kickass app, they have to learn how to play on the K team and not do whatever they damn well please. They get away with it now because AmaroK is such a great app, but there really is no excuse for something like interface inconsistency. If they feel they do something better and it should be incorporated in to the rest of the environment, then they need to bring it up with the HCI working group or the Usability Project.
Kivio could really rock, it’s a fine application. It just makes too horrible looking drawings, the stencils look like 80s and the canvas does not support stuff like proper radients. You get laughed out of every meeting you use those drawings at, they are so ugly.
hmmm 0.7-snapshot-060204 is what I have, then again, I’m masochistic enough to use Feisty :))) It can be turned on in Settings->Show Key Pad.
There seem to be only 3 versions in the pool, and I’m not quite sure which one belongs to what release, from just looking at the deb files, but I have my guesses.
As for amarok, I still don’t know what you personally find un-KDE on it, or uncomfortable :) I know that I’d personally love to be able to queue/unqueue with my middlebutton (but that’s very un-UNIXy, and I know!), and I’d love to have an option that says “Never, ever clean my darn playlist, except when I click that button” — but neither of these are related to the UI too closely ^^; As far as I can see, they have a very Konqueroresque (*coins!*) sidebar going on, and the playlist is… how else would one do a playlist? ^^;
Amarok certainly has it’s own character, but i give the developers points for being innovative. I just wish it supported streaming audio better. I want it to have a directory browser like Streamtuner.
As for Amarok: Maybe you shouldn’t make Amarok more consistent with KDE, but rather KDE more consistent with Amarok :) Nah, well, maybe not. I haven’t really given it a deep thought, but I think the Amarok UI works pretty well…
> * Kivio to become so kick ass I can replace Visio, but right now I’d be happy with improved stencil placement and line drawing
“kick ass” is more than a little vague
the work being done for KOffice 2 and the flake shape library will certainly help and I think it will be very cool but it might not exactly be the same “kick ass” you are looking for.
KOffice has lots of great features but flake will make it much easier for both Kivio and Karbon to benefit and show off all those features.
> * Someone to help me create web and KDE4 UI stencil sets after I switch to Kivio
People really use the GUI stencils in Visio? Always seemed like the worst case of creeping featurism in a diagram application to me in an attempt to justify the high price. Wouldn’t the ideal be to make better RAD tools that allowed you to demonstrate a live user interface or easily create mockups?
I suppose I get why web stencils might be useful and I could be persuaded to create a set for Dia, which could then be reused by Kivio.
> * Krita to become a little more comfortable to use so I can use it to do simple image manipulation rather than Photoshop
I’ve made a few small tweaks to make Krita a little more familiar to Photoshop users and my changes were welcomed. (”Copy selection to New Layer” is equivalent to “New Layer via Copy” in Photoshop, amongst other things.) Please do make sure to send mail to the Krita developers and let them know there really are users who want help directly replacing things from Photoshop, especially coming from someone actively involved in KDE like yourself. Bug reports and feature requests are worthwhile too, these things do take time but I’ve been quite pleased by how often the Krita and KOffice developers have been willing and able to respond to requests.
> * Konqueror to support/migrate my Firefox extensions
Why waste time messing around with extensions, if the features are good Konqueror might want to include the features by default?
> A pony and a Wii
me too. the pony not so much. ;)
@Alan
“Kick ass” is vague because I didn’t want to turn the post in to an expert review of KOffice :-)
The GUI stencils *are* for creating mockups, I’m not sure why you’re confused why I’d want them. Sometimes I need higher fidelity mockups than just line drawings and GUI stencils are easier in a tool I’m used to than building an empty UI in an IDE.
There are a bazillion extensions out there, and it would be unreasonable to include them all in Konqueror as “features”. I know Konq has some kind of system to integrate custom plugins, but an easier system to load things like extensions is much more powerful.
The nicest thing about Visio, imo, is the amazing SVG icons, which I assume you are referring to. Would be nice to get The Icon King on them :D
Which Firefox extensions do you need? I doubt Konqueror will ever fully support them, as they would need (iirc) an XUL implementation, but some of the plugins could provide similar functionality.
WINE seems to be supported fine for WOW, just Cedega has had a few problems, and Cedega are thieving bitches anyway ;)
@Mike
I can’t live without Web Developer and del.icio.us. Getting WOW to run isn’t the problem, Blizzard has a policy to terminate accounts using any kind of software wrapper (due to problems with cheating and farming).
@seele
I’m sure the KOffice developers would appreciate even a cursory review and few choice bug reports but perhaps another time.
I understand what the stencils were for but I’d always prefer an easier RAD tool (especially if it had easy export of screenshots and a good demo mode) over the ability to draw a totally non-functional user interface. I looked at creating a GUI stencil set for Dia but disregarded the idea not wanting to encourage drawing when it seems like a much better idea to just use RAD tools or even simple form builders.
Having created HTML forms and various rough graphical user interfaces in both code and RAD tools idea of drawing a user interface seems painfully limited. I honestly find it hard to believe drawing is really easier or even provides adequate results but maybe I’m better at using RAD tools than I think or you are a much better artist than I am. I suppose we may have radically different ideas of what is easy.
feel free to mail me an explanation of what exactly you are looking for in the Web stencil and I’ll try and get something done over the holidays (or during my ongoing unemployment).
> There are a bazillion extensions out there
and frankly most of them are total crap
the best extensions stand a good chance of being added as properly integrated features. bloat is a bit of a red herring when you consider how small Opera is and yet it seems to cram in so many neat little features Firefox lacks (not a frequent Opera user myself but they do good work and they include a whole mail client while still being smaller than Firefox)
the simplest extensions ones can be reimplemented as bookmarklets, tiny bits of javascript crammed into a bookmark and less likely to be browser specific
forcibly applying a custom stylesheets can be suprisingly powerful too, radically changing a page in interesting ways
quick access to a html editor can be used to produce interesting results too
I never found the Opera bookmarklets that do the same as my Firefox extensions. I never found anything really equivalent for Konqueror either.
The first one is Linky. It allows me to select a huge part of a page and right click and open all the links from my selection on new tabs. I’ve been quite honestly always baffled why this behaviour is not a standard feature on browsers. It’s imho quite naive to think all the users want is to open single links at the same time. (When I for instance bump into a nice link collection, I just open them all and browse through everything. 300 open tabs simultaenously is common for me.) The bookmarklets I found for the task kind of worked but had usability issues. They either required extra steps/clicks or did something crazy as popping the new tabs on top.
The second is Adblock Plus. I tested the new Opera’s ad blocking feature and it is unable to block many types of content. Konqueror was slightly better but it didn’t support task oriented approach (”hey, get me list of every element, allow me to click->refine new filter->block”) and it required more steps to do again the same thing. (For example I had to import my old rules manually by editing files.) Umm, bookmarklet’s can’t by nature handle this feature well.
The third one is DownThemAll. It’s a silly and quite buggy piece of code tbh. It however is great for leeching the content of whole sites. Automatic renaming of files if collisions occur, selection of the types you want to leech, monitoring of the downloads and many many advanced features. It’s good for ripping sites like irc-urls.net (lol) and watching all the funny pictures of day with a more usable image browser. DownThemAll could be implemented as bookmarklet but many features would be hard to keep as usable.