After a few months of quiet activity, the Appeal desktop project has rolled out a new project website that documents what everyone has been up to and discussing. Since the the last public announcement many things have occurred, including another Appeal meeting being held in Germany. The project is looking forward to sharing its experiences and gathering input from the general KDE developer community at aKademy 2005 later this month.
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this is an interesting stuff
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/tenor/
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2005-07-28
http://icon-king.com/appeal/pr3view.png
New icom theme is looking good.
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2005-07-14
I do expect this to turn out slightly better than beagle. That said, even though it is a step in a much needed direction, I realy don't expect great things to come out of this endeavour. Just look at the website. It doesn't exactly spell out "grace", now does it? KDE's an elephant. Teaching it to become graceful and elegant will take an enormous feat.
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Member since:2005-07-06
The equivalent to Beagle is more something like Kat, Tenor has a quite different overall goal.
Yes. Tenor isn't just about searching stuff from what I've read, and would be on top of something like Beagle or Kat.
Kat seems quite good, and should prove to be better at what it does than Beagle. I've never been convinced of Beagle's structure and its reliance on Mono, and when I've used it its performance and reliability haven't been usable at all.
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2005-07-06
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Yeah, totally I want both desktops to be as good as they possibly can be so that new users are not left with a bad taste in their mouths when they try Linux. I think Topaz and Plasma are going to be the pinacles of desktop computing as a whole, and not just desktop computing on Linux, or BSD.
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Member since:2005-07-07
> What is Topaz?
The GNOME3-to-be. See http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero
They're talking about a two-year project there...
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2005-06-29
Is it just me or do their goals seem awfully broad given that KDE 4 should be less then 2 years away?
Anyway, I hope they do something very cool! The KDE shell as a whole could use some major work: Not because it's over-complex, or because it's broke; but simply because it's so ... boring and ordinary. I suppose I expect boring and ordinary from Gnome. But from KDE I expect flashy and innovative.
Maybe one of these days they'll come up with a shell to rival the amazing sense that my windowmaker shell makes! Or maybe I just think different from everyone else? And they can add onto that some options, because windowmaker doesn't have any....
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2005-07-06
Is it just me or do their goals seem awfully broad given that KDE 4 should be less then 2 years away?
It's perhaps you, I don't think it sounds overly broad. Most of the code and infrastructure are already in place, and are not going to be replaced. Some restructuring and porting of the libs to Qt4 have to be done, but it's not like rewriting from scratch. Thanks to modular object oriented design. The biggest changes are planed in the desktop and kicker, and those two components are not that big. Much work has already been done on Tenor and indexing, and process of intergrating it into KDE will also benefit from the modularity of the framework. And then there are lots of artwork to be done, by the look of it the numbers of that team are constantly increasing.
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2005-07-06
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2005-07-06
The appeal site looks nice, and the idea seems neat. But, most of the concept videos are from OS X! Don't they realise that most of those things are patented or copyrighted anyway?
I'm just not interested in using a clone desktop environment. Open Source Desktops need to become compelling to use to motivate people to switch. Copying features like this will always leave Open Source desktops in a game of catch-up, where they will never be as good as what they're copying because they'll always be behind the mark.
I realise there are people out there that want this, and ok, great I'm glad this will help some people. But, real long term success of Open Source desktops is going to depend on compelling alternative designs, not just cheap copies of existing designs. As long as Open Source desktops or alternative desktops continue to exist only by primarily copying others, they will always be compared to what they're copying and will always be looked down upon because they don't work the same while trying to act like it.
RE: KDE - Where's the original ideas?
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2005-07-06
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2005-07-06
> equivalent to Beagle is more something like Kat,
> Tenor has a quite different overall goal.
indeed. and what's quite exciting is that we've recently brought the two projects together. this means less duplication of effort on the one hand, and the ability to take advantage of kat's file system indexer and full text indexing in compliment to the contextual linkage of tenor.
it's going to be a killer little system. personally i'm invested in it for several reasons. not only do i think contextual linkage has the possibility to fundamentally improve the desktop experience, but i need it for several features i have planned for plasma =)
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2005-07-27
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2005-07-07
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So what? It does show KDE's almost non-objective of OS X - nevermind many of the things they're thinking of copying were worse than their prior implementations in OpenStep and OS 9.
So much attention is placed in replicating the good parts of OS X - yet they seem to be ignoring better ideas and different ideas from elsewhere, especially from OS X's predecessors, as well as other stuff like BeOS.
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I don't get it: is it possible to make KDE look and act like an OSX clone? yes. Is it possible to make KDE look and act like a windows clone? yes. Is it possible to make KDE look and act like any other way you want? yes. It's not just copying, it's adding things from the competition as well as adding things of its own. That the default look is a rip-of, ok, that might be true, but it is so versatile that you can make it look like whatever you want it to be. That's the power of KDE. All the comparisons are just a part of it.
Member since:2005-07-07
> It does show KDE's almost non-objective of OS X
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Does that sentence parse for you?
> ...they're thinking of copying...
I think it's unfair and disrespectful to label the work of these KDE devs as mere copying (and I don't mean just you, you haven't been the first).
* Appeal is a very young project. Currently they're tossing around a lot of ideas. I don't think everything that's been discussed is already represented on that web site and, vice-versa, not everything on the site will be realised. Are you really basing your criticism on this handful of mockups and flash movies? How much time have you spent on that site anyway? Do you know about Tenor and Plasma?
* Appeal is not only about features but also about usability and artwork. Where do you see concrete copies of MacOS?
* Apple did it, MS did it, Be did it, but no one constantly whined about it. It's called evolution of GUIs and common desktop metaphors. It's good practice to integrate good ideas.
* And last but not least: Complaining is cheap. Where is your revolutionary contribution? If you know all these implementations of great desktop concepts (I don't, for example), why don't you get involved? Maybe the people already working on it just don't know the even better concepts.
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2005-07-06
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2005-07-12
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2005-07-07
its mostly a gathering of some developers to develop a coherent plan for KDE4. they focus on some new technologie, but also the 'way' to it - how to attract developers, or on how to develop KDE in a better way. aaron once proposed to have another 'freeze' in the development cycle, this time for usabillity changes, to allow a usability team to check the applications... also tenor and plasma will be mostly developed in the warm arms of appeal 
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I think Tenor compares more to the Gnome Storage project. Personally I am using Gnome, but I have to say i was a bit dissapointed of Beagle, so far i think it does not live up to all the hype around it and it is a real shame that Storage does not receive more attention from the community (I don't know if it is still alive even). I really hope the Tenor stuff takes off, maybe it could work as a general framework for all Linux Desktops ... one will have to wait and see.
Member since:2005-07-06
> I think Tenor compares more to the Gnome Storage
> project
there are certainly points of crossover, yes.
> it is a real shame that Storage does not receive
> more attention
the biggest problem is that Storage aims to reinvent everything at the beginning. with Tenor we're taking a more pragmatic, measured approach where a Storage like solution is a generation or two down the roadmap.
the inertia from application development and user expectations is just too large to try and switch everything on day 1 successfully.
sometimes you have to ease the revolution in 
