Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 20th Jan 2008 11:11 UTC
At Google's offices in Mountain View, California, KDE 4.0's release event has ended. Various KDE people have given presentations, and a set of them has been posted online. Among them is Aaron Seigo's keynote presentation, which is very interesting to watch, and gives you a very good idea of what the KDE project is trying to achieve with KDE 4 (I just finished watching). Other presentations have also been put online.
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2005-07-06
It's late here, I've been to the gym and I'm knackered, but I sat through the whole presentation and I'm really impressed. I'm not just impressed with what has already been coded and demonstrated, but I'm impressed with the what hasn't yet been written and their clear ideas on how to get there.
8:00 He actually talks about developers, and catering for them, in a slightly more sane manner than Mr. B. Shock horror.
14:08 Solid. As a developer, you won't have to be a hardware expert to interact with it. Thankfully, this holds out hope that all those stupid distribution specific control centres that looked out of place and had their own ways of changing IP addresses etc. can be dispensed with. It can all be done within the domain of the desktop.
16:40 Phonon. Same thing as Solid, but with multimedia. You can embed multimedia applications and applets with almost trivial amounts of effort without worrying about multimedia specifics. Multimedia becomes much easier to do, and provides a stable and consistent API with the rest of the desktop.
18:55 Decibel. Same thing, but for VoIP and messaging.
19:25 Akonadi. Similar thing, but for e-mail, contacts and personal information stuff like calendars. This stuff is no longer application specific. It's available through an API that is consistent with what is seen in Phonon, Solid etc. Stuff can be reused.
21:00 Kross. Scripting extensions, again for developers, to allow them to script for any application.
23:14 Sonnet. Spell checking in multiple languages, and also in the same document. One paragraph can be in German and another in English, for example.
24:27 DXS, otherwise known as HotNewStuff. Users can use applications, and developers can write applications, that connect to the internet and can get updated stuff like wallpapers, astronomy information etc. Anything you want. You click and install. This is basically Red Hat's much vaunted Online Desktop actually already done today, with applications that use it now and a framework that allows applications to use it. When I tried out the Online Desktop as it is now, this is really what it lacks. This is a part of Freedesktop as well!
26:45 Nepomuk. This is basically what people would know as WinFS, but done in a way that focuses on the right thing - better searching. This searching has to be available to all applications for people to just use. Goodbye Beagle, Windows Search and all those search specific applications. Transparent search is the goal. Nepomuk is about tying together the information relating to the context of something - who sent that document, who altered it and any related information etc.
30:20 Multi-threaded applications and a framework to manage them in a sane manner called ThreadWeaver and QtConcurrent. Solid will tell you how many processors and cores you have, and you can adjust accordingly.
32:46 Symbiotic relationships. I've mentioned this before. Trolltech adopted Phonon as its multimedia library, and is being developed in KDE's SVN. Trolltech develops Qt, KDE gets a great framework to build on, KDE creates some great stuff, Trolltech and others can adopt it and then much more work goes into it. Things snowball.
34:32 Cool desktop effects, with slightly dodgy 90s soundtrack (seem to remember this tune from back then). Somewhat less whooping than Nat Friedman's SLED 10 presentation, and this stuff is actually useful. Zooming, window arrangement and management, useful highlighting that lets you see instantly what you've selected etc.
39:25 Dolphin. Nepomuk integration as well. Interesting.
46:30 Plasma. Resolution independent, and a desktop shell for doing all sorts of things. WebKit stuff is coming etc. Twitter - yet another online desktop thing done now.
51:00 Cross-platform. Linux, BSD, Solaris etc.
53:30 KDE on Mac. Qt 4 and CMAKE has made things much, much easier. KDE 4 and Qt 4 applications actually work well today on the Mac. There isn't some port that will be completed at some unspecified time. Totally native applications as well, and he demonstrates Marble which looks great.
1:02:10 KDE on Windows. Again, rather like on the Mac, you just get cross-platform applications. A surprising amount has just been ported with little effort. For all those who want Kontact of KOffice on Windows, it is all going to be there.
1:10:00 SVG stuff. Resolution independent.
1:11:07 Marble, which is a component for doing spinning Globe 3D Earth things. Cue the Google jokes about that one with street data. They're working with Open Streetmap for streetmap data to work towards this.
There was some stuff in there I didn't know.