Just two days ago the last “Release Candidate” for KDE3 was released with major bug fixes. There are source and RPM packages for Slackware 8, SuSE, Connectiva, Tru64, RedHat and Mandrake. One of the interesting new features that KDE developer Nikolas “WildFox” Zimmermann was working the last few months, was to add SVG support to KDE (screenshot 1 and 2 – the icons shown are just test icons borrowed from Nautilus). SVG is a vector graphics format, similar to Flash, but more standardised as it is recommended by the W3C Consortium. While the code is completed, Nikolas will not see his work integrated to KDE, at least not before KDE 3.1, simply because no one has created some original artwork, SVG graphics for KDE (this iconset in SVG format should look good). If you own tools that can export to SVG (free tools like Kontour and Sketch should do the trick too, in addition to Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand, etc), and you are a graphics artist, you may want to join the KDE team and contribute your icons to be used by millions of users worldwide.
KDE 3-RC3 Out, SVG Support On Hold
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Where is William Bull? He is the man for this job.
XML sucks because it is slow, also just because it sucks
therefore SVG sucks
Some icons are identically to BeOS Icons.
The Deskbar is similar to SUN Solaris or XFCE XWindow.
“XML sucks because it is slow, also just because it sucks
therefore SVG sucks”
Very intelligent comment. It would be remarkable if you even know what XML is and what it’s for. SVG is great because you can scale an image with no loss of quality not because it’s supposed to be faster than a raster image.
My biggest complaint if KDE has always been the ugly icons. The defaults are awful and although some of the sets at http://www.kde-look.org are alright, IMO they still don’t cut it. I’m currently used the slick icons but they are too dark and have too much green. I’d rather have Mac OS X icons or even Win XP icons, both of which are better. Hopefully with SVG support graphic artists will be able to create better icons faster (not editing for each icon size).
AFAIK, MacOS X uses standard bitmaps in 16, 32, 64, & 128 pixel sizes, and scales them if you want an in-between size (like when icons ‘zoom’ in the dock). It uses Aqua’s hi-quality scaling to do so, & the icons generally look great.
From what I’ve read, SVG slows down the UI greatly (at least the SVG icons for GNOME, not sure about KDE+SVG… has anyone tried it?). Then again, OS X’s UI is no speed demon either. I’m curious… which is faster – an optimized scaling algorithm, or a full SVG implementation?
…Anonymous posters suck.
Has anyone tried the new konqueror yet? How is it coming along?
It would be really nice if people would simply post intelligent, meaningfull, and interesting points to their arguments. If you’re truly posting to make a point that is.
the people like the one who posted the above comment are called trolls and should be ignored
>Has anyone tried the new konqueror yet? How is it coming along?
I am posting this from the new Konqueror. Copy/paste does not work correctly at all.
I copied/pasted your message text and whatever else I tried to copy/paste, it is just “locked” to my first clipboard copy. I tried with the keyboard, from the menu and the X 3-button paste, no joy. It seems that its clipboard does not refresh or something…
Also, the fixed font used in the forms is unreadable on my PC (AA enabled).
Another thing I noticed is that it is extremely slow. For example, click on “News Archive” on our menu on osnews and then roll your mouse over all these links. The “mouse over” underlying style is rendered seconds after you mouseovered and it only does it for some of the links!! This is a dual Celeron 533 Mhz with 256 MB of RAM and IE or even mozilla never had such a problem on this PC.
I am under KDE 3 RC3 right now, on Mandrake. I installed it just a few minutes ago. Everything is loaded ok (and yes, KDE3 is as slow as it used to, if not more), except three reported crashes on startup. Kicker does not load at all here… 😮
So, I am without a taskbar, but thank Konsole and the command line.
If you have the time, implement some sort of threaded comments. I can’t stand this flat comment setup much more! 😉 Moderation would be cool too. Maybe you should consider a PHP version of Slash or something.
KDE is one of the most successful open-source projects (if not the best). Yet, I really do think they need to do a new UI design. The step from KDE 1 to KDE 2 was excellent, but now it’s time to move on to something even better.
Now, I am not talking about MacOS X and Windows XP eye candy. IMHO, I think Windows XP Luna is about the ugliest UI I have ever seen… on a modern OS. How can people stand the huge task bar and titlebars? It makes 1024×768 seem like 800×600. OS X is not bad, but I can see why long-time Mac users don’t like it. Enough said on that.
One UI aspect I love is context menus. Nothing goes far enough with them except for Blackbox. If an OS put a dynamic “start menu” in a universal context menu, that would be excellent.
Whoever knows what causes this, please come forward.
kdecore (KLocale): message catalogue not found: kicker
kdecore (KLocale): message catalogue not found: kicker
kicker: KActionCollection::KActionCollection( [PanelKMenu pointer (0x8121178) to widget KMenu, geometry=640×409+320+307], ): this = 0x8121948
KCrash: crashing…. crashRecursionCounter = 2
KCrash: Application Name = kicker path = <unknown> pid = 4586
ERROR: KUniqueApplication: DCOP communication error!
kdecore (KLocale): message catalogue not found: drkonqi
kdecore (KLocale): message catalogue not found: drkonqi
Backtrace Debug symbols:
[New Thread 1024 (LWP 4605)]
0x412001d9 in wait4 () from /lib/libc.so.6
#0 0x412001d9 in wait4 () from /lib/libc.so.6
#1 0x4126ff2c in __check_rhosts_file () from /lib/libc.so.6
#2 0x4109d716 in waitpid (pid=4606, stat_loc=0x0, options=0)
at wrapsyscall.c:172
For icons, it shouldn’t matter. You only have to scale them a couple of times (only when you need a new size) and cache the bitmaps after that. From there, it’s a simple blit to the screen. I certainly hope that GNOME and KDE don’t redraw the SVG each time (and MacOS-X doesn’t rescale each time), as that’s a basic flaw (and rather easy to correct) flaw in the design. Of course, knowing developers these days…
An update… hehe… I restarted X and this time I did beforehand:
export KDEDIR=/opt/kde3
export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt3
Now I have Kicker 3. But I don’t have Konqueror anymore (and in fact, KDE3 started with the old splash screen KDE2 graphic).
Eugenia,
Maybe you should send the crash info to the KDE Team? Should help make things better. BTW, are you running the new Mandrake?
Eric wrote:
> Yet, I really do think they
> need to do a new UI design.
If I remember correctly, one of the kdedevelopers gave an Interview in which he suggested that they may not be replacing X. It isn’t the best decison in my opinion, but considering how many X apps you have out there, it is certainly understandable. Apple has a lot more money to build a new UI than the KDE organisation does. Not that OS X does any much better.
>Maybe you should send the crash info to the KDE Team?
Yeah, maybe… as long as they don’t want me to register on their bug system…
>BTW, are you running the new Mandrake?
No, I am running Mandrake 8.0 (I will be upgrading to the new Mandrake in the next week after I install a new 80 GB hdd
. I upgraded some libs, like the libdb and libpng, as KDE3 is depended on these, but still I can either have Kicker or Konqueror. 
Eugenia, have you tried either ‘startx -e /opt/kde3/bin/startkde3’, or alternatively editing /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to read ‘exec /opt/kde3/bin/startkde3’?
That worked for me in Mandrake 8.2b1.
I just executed your suggestion. Now I have neither Kicker or Konqueror.
To Linux_baby: In response to your reponse to Eric Murphy.
UI Design necassarily mean replacing X but sitting down, thinking how the UI works, think of ways to improve it, test to see what works, etc.
This is one thing Ive been working on and have been meaning to post to maybe OS Dev forum? for opinions. I mostly look at other GUI’s and see what works in them, and take them. There is some innovation besides the Microsoft style.
ps Sorry Mac people, in regards to placement of application menus, who cares about Fitts law (edges of screen are faster to use due to “infinite space”) if it causes conceptual problems with the UI. having the menu bar in the application window visually associates the two in teh users mind. Using a Mac you have to mentally associate the application with the menu. I have dealt with a person in a Windows enviroment that wont give up her Mac, yet she still hasnt made the mental connection and is really annoying for the techs.
I agree with you about the mental context switching that is involved the unified main menu of the Mac OS. But, keep in mind that Fitts’ law is valid, has value and uses. For example, when an application is maximized all of its’ edge bordering controls (toolbars, menus, scrollbars, whatever) should take advantage of Fitts’ law and provide infinite depth. For a typical MS Windows application this is not the case, there is still a title bar and a few pixel border along each edge. However, with MS Explorer in full screen mode (press the F11 key), there is no border and the scrollbar is easier to grab. So keep in mind, as you craft away at your super GUI of the future, that Fitts’ law is your friend.
Yeah, I understand that Fitts law has it uses. I love being able to throw my mosue in a corner and click to close (but for some reason IE and my beloved Gobe having been opening unmaximized but stretched to teh edges, not letting me take advaantage of fitts law). That reminds me, I need to play with the idea of snap to edge for programs. The only problem is an easy way to make it not snap to edge if it would be worthwhile except maybe some flag to disable it..
I just think that the Mac Engineers went “See, Fitts law makes things better, so lets apply it to as much as we can”
Oh, and if any of you want to look at my design, email me and I will send it to you. I dont have a webpage for it yet. Thoughtful comments/suggestions would be great.
Hi there,
we plan to generate PNG’s from the SVG’s
in all standard sizes (16,32,48…) on
compile time, so kde looks good and is fast
For any non standard size, rerendering is needed
Ie. one gnome svg icon takes 20-30 ms here
(they include several gradients) so it’s not that
slow…
Bye
Bye
Niko
>>How can people stand the huge task bar and titlebars? It makes 1024×768 seem like 800×600.<<
>>How can people stand the huge task bar and titlebars? It makes 1024×768 seem like 800×600.<<
I would say the inverse, how can you stand them if they were smaller? The new scalling of them in XP makes it so i can be in 1024×768, other wise i would be still in 800×600. Before 1024 just made things painfully small. And no it’s not my eyes. This is why most people run at 800×600 on a typical 15-17″ monitor, unless they have XP. Personaly, I think the XP interface is one of the best looking ever, but many people disagree , though the factory color theme needs some work.
far as kde3 i think it deffinantly is looking better. My one thing I can never figure out is what is with hidious deskbars? KDE , Gnome and seams like any others that might be out there that have a deskbar for linux have just plain ugly deskbars. There’s all sorts of crap in them and the monster clock, always with the monster clock. I’m not to familure with them as to if you can change this but I will never understand how you can begin to get something right and then make it so ugly. Part of this I asume is that those who tend to run linux seam to have monitors at insane high resolution. Maybe this makes things smaller for them. I guess I will stick to blackbox when I install linux again.
Do you know that you can convert your windows icons to use in X Windows. I belive the program was called ICO2XPM
Has been out for at while. Now RC4 is out 🙂
Considering how stable RC3 was, RC4 is supposed to be final.
How can people stand the huge task bar and titlebars? It makes 1024×768 seem like 800×600.
Are you serious? Look at KDE’s double height bar at the bottom. Now THAT is a ridiculous taskbar. Thankfully, you can change that.
In the old days icons were only 16×16 but they were on a low resolution screen (320×200 – or perhaps twice that). I use the largest icon size relatively speaking – on screen – they’re the same size. The same goes for toolbars.
Have there been any usability studies to show what size icon is best?
if ms picked a size, it is the best, they never fail at user friendliness