Troy Unrau (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} troy_at_kde) wrote,@ 2008-06-24 14:30:00 |
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A quick survey of KDE 4 Apps
So I spent the last few days rebuilding trunk and playing with some of the applications that don't ship on the same release cycles as KDE itself. Things like Amarok, KOffice, KTorrent, K3b, and more. So I figured I'd give a few comments on how the development of these things are going, especially KOffice 2. So, some thoughts on those applications that make the KDE environment the integrated, wonderful thing that a only full desktop environment can give.
Amarok 2 gets enough press, they don't need me to talk up how the cover downloading works now, or how I actually have to come up with new ways of crashing it because the old ones don't work... anyway, they're in bug-fixing/stabilizing mode now it seems, which is good news for all the amarok junkies out there.
KOffice 2 is moving along with the limited but highly talented manpower that they have, releasing alpha after alpha showing where the suite is heading. Unlike MS, which released Office XP before Win XP, KOffice has usually lagged behind the schedule of major KDE releases on account of the limited resources they have. However, if the irc channel today was any indication, there's some new bloody in there that's helping to speed things up.
I tried a few KOffice apps to see if they'd blow up. KPresenter fared worse than the rest, but even that is looking like it'll be quite a good program when finished. I only triggered one crash in KWord the whole time, although I wasn't using any of the advanced features. KSpread and Krita are both looking like they're ahead of the pack, both in terms of features, and stability. Fortunately, due to the highly shared nature of KOffice, improvements in one application usually simultaneously improve all applications.
Where ODF formats exist, KOffice is using them as the default, which is lovely. I can still load the old kwd, kpr files (although, at least in kpresenter, it wasn't rendered correctly). Switching to ODF is really important though, and the support for the format is ever improving. They've got some automated testing stuff going on too which helps ensure that there's few regressions in their support. I'll let them blog about it :)
When I first loaded KWord, I found two bugs. I brought one up on irc, and it's now fixed. The other is a little more bizarre, and I've been reading through the code trying to find a way to fix it myself. The bug: PgUp/PgDn are interpreted as the Home key. As I've been reading through the code, I'm impressed at how easy it is to understand, even for the likes of myself whose C++-fu is not so strong. Still haven't fixed the bug, but I've got a pretty good idea of where in the stack it comes from... KoPAView.cpp is the likely culprit...
The KOffice team has a Release Plan up on the website that doesn't go any farther than Alpha 9. There is the soft feature freeze on the schedule though, which means that a more formal release plan is likely not too far away. That's good, because I love KOffice, and I'm impatiently waiting for trunk to be ready to go... maybe they can get a beta (or alpha 10) ready for Akademy to really get some bug hammering sessions going.
I didn't have any blank disks to test k3b with, but it compiles, installs and runs. I don't know what their schedule is, but it's one of the missing links for a pure KDE 4.x environment right now, so I'm happy to see them progressing.
Additionally, I played with KTorrent, which works just as great as always, despite being unreleased. Hrmm, I wonder if it'll be ready for KDE 4.1 next month.
One of the very few apps that I'm still missing is a KDE4 IRC client. I don't know if konversation porting is yet underway, but xchat is driving me up the wall in the meantime.
Also on that list is a network manager applet for 4.x. I know there's a plasmoid in development, and I know that it's missed the freeze for 4.1. I think that this might be one showstopper for KDE 4.1 getting get press. (I know that we can use the one from KDE 3.x, but 4.1 will see a lot of people nuking KDE 3.x)
Anyway, if you're looking for things to work on for KDE, KOffice 2 has plenty of bugs that live only a few lines below the surface :)
Cheers folks, and happy hacking.
So I spent the last few days rebuilding trunk and playing with some of the applications that don't ship on the same release cycles as KDE itself. Things like Amarok, KOffice, KTorrent, K3b, and more. So I figured I'd give a few comments on how the development of these things are going, especially KOffice 2. So, some thoughts on those applications that make the KDE environment the integrated, wonderful thing that a only full desktop environment can give.
Amarok 2 gets enough press, they don't need me to talk up how the cover downloading works now, or how I actually have to come up with new ways of crashing it because the old ones don't work... anyway, they're in bug-fixing/stabilizing mode now it seems, which is good news for all the amarok junkies out there.
KOffice 2 is moving along with the limited but highly talented manpower that they have, releasing alpha after alpha showing where the suite is heading. Unlike MS, which released Office XP before Win XP, KOffice has usually lagged behind the schedule of major KDE releases on account of the limited resources they have. However, if the irc channel today was any indication, there's some new bloody in there that's helping to speed things up.
I tried a few KOffice apps to see if they'd blow up. KPresenter fared worse than the rest, but even that is looking like it'll be quite a good program when finished. I only triggered one crash in KWord the whole time, although I wasn't using any of the advanced features. KSpread and Krita are both looking like they're ahead of the pack, both in terms of features, and stability. Fortunately, due to the highly shared nature of KOffice, improvements in one application usually simultaneously improve all applications.
Where ODF formats exist, KOffice is using them as the default, which is lovely. I can still load the old kwd, kpr files (although, at least in kpresenter, it wasn't rendered correctly). Switching to ODF is really important though, and the support for the format is ever improving. They've got some automated testing stuff going on too which helps ensure that there's few regressions in their support. I'll let them blog about it :)
When I first loaded KWord, I found two bugs. I brought one up on irc, and it's now fixed. The other is a little more bizarre, and I've been reading through the code trying to find a way to fix it myself. The bug: PgUp/PgDn are interpreted as the Home key. As I've been reading through the code, I'm impressed at how easy it is to understand, even for the likes of myself whose C++-fu is not so strong. Still haven't fixed the bug, but I've got a pretty good idea of where in the stack it comes from... KoPAView.cpp is the likely culprit...
The KOffice team has a Release Plan up on the website that doesn't go any farther than Alpha 9. There is the soft feature freeze on the schedule though, which means that a more formal release plan is likely not too far away. That's good, because I love KOffice, and I'm impatiently waiting for trunk to be ready to go... maybe they can get a beta (or alpha 10) ready for Akademy to really get some bug hammering sessions going.
I didn't have any blank disks to test k3b with, but it compiles, installs and runs. I don't know what their schedule is, but it's one of the missing links for a pure KDE 4.x environment right now, so I'm happy to see them progressing.
Additionally, I played with KTorrent, which works just as great as always, despite being unreleased. Hrmm, I wonder if it'll be ready for KDE 4.1 next month.
One of the very few apps that I'm still missing is a KDE4 IRC client. I don't know if konversation porting is yet underway, but xchat is driving me up the wall in the meantime.
Also on that list is a network manager applet for 4.x. I know there's a plasmoid in development, and I know that it's missed the freeze for 4.1. I think that this might be one showstopper for KDE 4.1 getting get press. (I know that we can use the one from KDE 3.x, but 4.1 will see a lot of people nuking KDE 3.x)
Anyway, if you're looking for things to work on for KDE, KOffice 2 has plenty of bugs that live only a few lines below the surface :)
Cheers folks, and happy hacking.
