Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 5th Jun 2008 22:18 UTC
"Google has announced the official release of Desktop Gadgets for Linux and is distributing the source code under the open-source Apache software license. Although there are still bugs and the implementation is not yet entirely complete, it works well enough for day-to-day use."
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Member since:2005-09-27
Member since:2005-10-13
Hiev, you seem to be completely missing the point here.
GG is not bad for plasma. If you tie in more available widgets to the framework with the full desktop integration, how can that be anything but a positive?
Plasma != Plasmoid
What you're focused on is the Plasmoid API, a very small part of the larger Plasma project. Perhaps it's a bit less important, but I think it still has some advantages if you are only concerned about KDE. If you want a cross-platform widget, then it certainly isn't the way to go and it never was.
You should be thinking of it as an alternative Plasmoid API that happens to be cross-platform (while loosing some of the niceness the original API had). How would that have been a negative if the Plasma developers had added it and given developers the choice?
Edited 2008-06-06 18:01 UTC
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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2007-08-03
I'd summarise the situation as follows:
1) Google Gadgets get integrated into Plasma. This is a win for *Plasma*, as it now has a much richer array of widgets that it can host, in a nice, integrated fashion (maybe even via KHotNewStuff!), some of which might be "must-haves" for people currently using $OTHER_PLATFORM
2) The open-sourcing of Google Gadgets may or may not be a loss for *Plasmoids* (that is, widgets that are inherently tied to the Plasma framework), in that Google Gadgets might prove more enticing to widget writers (although if this is the case, said widgets will still run under Plasma).
Whether or not this is indeed a "kick in the nuts" for Plasma depends on whether or not the Plasma devs are more interested in Plasmoids or ... well ... in Plasma
I'd also re-iterate what aseigo said about the nature of Plasmoids: we've been conditioned to think of widgets are pretty little displays and meters that sit on the desktop (and the desktop only) and offer only basic and rather superficial interactivity, but the fact is that in Plasma, really core functionality is given by Plasmoids - your menu, your taskbar, your system tray, your panels, your desktop itself - all Plasmoids, that will (eventually) be able to be downloaded and swapped around as you please.
A speculative but wholly plausible scenario: you like most of KDE, but prefer the GNOME splitting of menus into System, Apps etc - that's OK, as there is a Plasmoid that mimics this functionality in KHotNewStuff! You want your desktop to look and - critically - *behave* - like this mockup:
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/New+desktop+(mockup)?content=66984
with that neat "last files used with this app from this group" functionality that KDE doesn't support? No problem - there's a little bundle of these Plasmoids - a Plasma Total Conversion, if you will - that mimic all of this functionality, or let you pick and choose the aspects that you want!
When thinking of Plasmoids, we shouldn't necessarily be thinking of stock tickers or weather displays, but of Firefox extensions which actually add very non-trivial functionality like mouse gestures or more configurable tab behaviour for control freaks, etc.