Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

As I am getting used to KDE 4 more and more, I am enjoying it more and more.  It delivers plenty of visual pleasure while being quite fast and user friendly.  However, there this one tiny little thing which annoyed the heck out of me since ancient times.   It’s the delete files confirmation dialogue.  Every time I select one or more files to delete, here is what I get.

KDE delete files dialogue

The more files I have to delete and the longer their paths, the uglier it looks.  And you know what annoys me the most?  It’s that fixing this ugliness is pretty simple.  Just collapse and hide the list of files which are about to be deleted, and give a “Details…” button or link to expand the list for those who really care or want to double check.  This way, the popup will be much smaller, providing enough of necessary information (“delete” vs. “move to Trash”, and “3 items” vs. “all these items”).

I don’t know how this managed to stay in for so long.  Am I the only one who cares about this?  Or are there so few KDE developers that nobody has the time to fix this?  Do I really need to this myself?  I hope not …

Last time I wrote about KDE 4, I said that it wasn’t very usable for me.  Recenlty, the much praised upgrade to KDE 4.2 became available via Fedora updates.  So I got it and switched to KDE for a couple of days.

What can I say?  Quite an improvement indeed.  Mostly stable, with only a few issues, which are nicely balanced out by nice desktop effects, overall graphics, and plasmoids.  A few things moved around and I had to look for them (such as keyboard shortcuts for switching between desktops), but overall it was a pleasant experience.

Why am I back to Gnome for now?  Because of the following:

• couldn’t manage to make KDE 4.2 work properly with two monitors (major issue)
• got a bit annoyed by KDE 4.2 not waking up properly from suspend  (not always, but often enough)
• also got annoyed by it not always coming back properly from screensaver mode
• couldn’t find graphical configuration for power managment (my laptop kept suspending when idle for 5 minutes with no power plugged in)
• a few other minor things here and there

I’m sure I’ll be back to KDE very soon.  The progress between KDE 4 and KDE 4.2 is huge and if it goes like this, then I won’t have to wait long.

Here is the story about openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4 in KDE.news.  Do you want to know what I thought was so special about it?  I’ll tell you.  It features screenshots of the KDE desktop with some icons.  Yes, this is the first bunch of KDE 4 screenshots with desktop icons that I saw.

Sounds surprising?  Well… imagine how surprised I was, when after seeing dozens upon dozens of KDE 4 screen shots and then trying it out myself I realized that one part of it that was totally unusable was the desktop and its icons.  After I tried it, I was trying to remember any screenshots that had icons on the desktop, and I could not.  There was everything from the “amazing” new menu and lighter file browser to configuration tools and updated tools.  But there were no desktop icons.  And now they are there.  So, I guess, there is still hope for KDE 4.

Today I was really impressed by a piece of software. I have to say that it has been a while since I felt so excited about software the last time.

I came across the link to these videos that show KimDaBa in action. KimDaBa, by the way, stands for KDE Image Database. Basically, this is a program that allows you to manage a collection of images in a very effective way. By managing I mean organize, tag, search, and do all sorts of processing.

So, what is so exciting about this particular program?

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I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.

I’ve been rather silent in bookmark department over the last few days. For today though, I’ll give a you long list.

Firstly, a few sites about parenting. There are some funny and cool bits too, so even if you don’t have any kids, you might want to check them out.

• Babycage.net — Cages for babies. LOL.
  Tagged as: animals cages children cool fun humor kids parenting products shopping
• Videos on emergency baby-wearing — Videos that show how to use common stuff – pants, shirts, or towels – to tie baby to parent’s body.
  Tagged as: children cool disaster emergency kids parenting safety security videos
• Harry Potter isn’t the only kids’ book I read
  Tagged as: authors blog books children kids literature parenting reading
• MomOrDad — Great site for finding out who your baby looks like – mom or dad. Fun!
  Tagged as: children kids parenting photos pictures voting

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Some random stuff for today.

• Quanta as a Docbook Editor
  Tagged as: docbook documentation kde linux quanta writing
• JENS BOLDT
  Tagged as: design flash images photography photos pictures portfolio
• London Cyprus Information Centre
  Tagged as: cyprus london news uk

These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-26.

I was thinking about how cool tags are. They truly help finding bookmarked or themed information faster. Keeping up with important issues is much easier too.

But are there any good uses for tags in system applications? Sure, there are. One particular area that springs to mind is font management.

After I have installed about 6,000 fonts on my computer I realized that it is extremely difficult for me to efficiently use them. There are no categories or bookmarks of any kind. There are not subfolders. There are no comments or descriptions. I would be willing to sort out and tag all these fonts once to be able to find the most appropriate font later.

KDE people? Anyone?

Gnome users might be a bit luckier than KDE users when it comes to image viewers and browsers. Gnome features an excellent application – Eye of Gnome (eog). Another good alternative that many people find satisfying is GQview (gqview).

KDE also ships a couple of image viewing and browsing applications, but they need some work.

Firstly, one could always use KDE’s file manager Konqueror (konqueror). It can browse through the directories nicely, generating thumbnails for preview, and even editing EXIF comments via the Properties dialogue. Scaling image to fit window is not trivial, but can be achieved. And it is somewhat slow. I wouldn’t spit on better keyboard navigation too.

Secondly, KView (kview). This is a pure image viewer. All it knows about browsing is “Previous image” and “Next image”. For a simple program that it is, I can’t stand its startup times. It takes ages to start and load the image. If I have to go through a collection of pictures, I am reading to kill myself by the time I reach the third image.

Thirdly, Kuickshow (kuickshow). This one is both a browser and a viewer. It shares the slow start up time with KView. It also has a rather limited functionality and poor keyboard navigation. My biggest problem with this one is absense of “Delete” in the viewer. Which means, I have to switch back to the browser to delete an image and than go back to the viewer to see the next picture. That’s simply annoying.

I have asked for suggestions in #kde today and some people pointed me towards Gwenview. I looked through the website and decided to try it. Luckily, it is also in Fedora Extras, so all I had to do to install it was to run yum install gwenview.

Gwenview (gwenview) is a really nice application. It works fast. Navigation is extensive, flexible, and natural. It also has all the usual functionality for simple image manipulation (rotating and flippig) as well as configurable menu of external tools (edit in Gimp, set as wallpaper, open in Konqueror, etc). EXIF comments can be edited via same old “Properties” dialogue. Image viewing is avaiable in a number of forms (thumbnail, small preview, full size, full screen) with an easy keyboard-oriented switch between them. Bookmarks are available as in most of KDE applications that deal with file browsing.

Gwenview also has support for Kipi plugins. Kipi, in case you don’t know, is the KDE Image Plugin Interface. It is an effort to create a base for exchange of plugins between several graphical KDE applications (Digikam, KimDaBa, Showimg, and Gwenview).

With all those nice plugins available I am still missing the historgram preview.

During the last few days I’ve been trying out Sim. Sim is yet another open source Instant Messaging (IM) client that supports a variety of protocols (ICQ, Jabber, AIM, and MSN). I am currently interested only in ICQ though.

Before Sim I’ve been using Licq for a long time and centericq before that.

I switched from centericq to Licq because I wanted to have annoying notifications on new messages while in graphical mode. Otherwise I was constantly forgetting that centericq was running in one my konsoles and it stayed there abandoned for weeks.

Licq is almost perfect for my needs. And I wasn’t looking forward to jumping of off it. It’s just that a few people suggested that Sim is a better client in general, and that is solves a few of those issues that I have with Licq.

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