Saturday, August 26. 2006Re: the kay, the dee, the ee on the tee veeSo, Aaron asked in first of his latest tripple-blog-post-mode-action (?) for visitor bump on march 15, 2005.
As we didn't use Urchin analytics back then (as we usually only use Google services if KDE doesn't offer them  - and only Google services in that case) I can't show lovely graphics and big load of background information, but I guess Webalizer also does a good job   In particular:  Thursday, August 24. 2006Monday, August 21. 2006Inconsistent GUIs on LinuxIt’s a commonly repeated opinion, that on Linux all application GUIs look different, but on Windows all/most applications feel like Windows applications. Now obviously people mean the difference between, for instance, KDE and Gnome apps, and they mostly also refer to even more horrible toolkits like whatever it is that xine-ui uses. But if you actually looked closely at Windows applications, you’d notice that every major MS application uses different toolkits and “skins”, and so do all the other applications from other companies. In fact Win32 only offers a few basic controls, namely:
The menus that win32 offers are so basic that nobody uses them, they implement their own so they can add things like icons, and menu-separators. In my opinion, the reasons that Windows applications are consistent are:
Absolutely the number one reason is fonts. Windows offers a default font that GUI controls like menus, buttons and text widgets use. Apparently, the API for drawing text is different on Windows compared to X11 in that it developers end up using the right font when they roll their own widgets. On Windows, all text looks consistent. Colours are almost as important. On Windows the colorscheme is a globally accesible property, on Linux schemes are toolkit/desktop specific. If toolkits just used the same colours, people wouldn’t notice small, or even larger differences in the widget styling. So in conclusion, if Linux just standardised fonts and colors I think applications would feel consistent, just like they do on Windows. If toolkits did just these two things, their other differences would not be nearly as noticeable in general use. Frankly I feel if Linux could do these things, we’d be more consistent, since if you use mostly KDE apps, they have far more internal consistency than the Microsoft port-folio. Disclaimers It is also true that Windows appliations copy whatever is the latest MS-app appearance. MS Office 2003 has a neat style that has rapidly been copied and emulated in all other major toolkits, ie check out the latest version of Delphi, it looks similar to Office 2003, but the similarity is subtely different, eg. menus are narrower and more compact. And this makes sense since MS didn’t release any API or DLL to allow you to use the Office 2003 style, so Borland implemented their own clone. Trolltech even claimed to considering emulating it when I attended their roadshow in Cambridge. My point in this paragraph is that Windows apps emulate a general “Windows” consensus that is defined by MS, so this helps somewhat. And yes, I’m just ranting an opinion here, maybe someone who reads this would like to do something about it, as I’m not the man for that job. Monday, August 21. 2006Inconsistent GUIs on LinuxIt’s a commonly repeated opinion, that on Linux all application GUIs look different, but on Windows all/most applications feel like Windows applications. Now obviously people mean the difference between, for instance, KDE and Gnome apps, and they mostly also refer to even more horrible toolkits like whatever it is that xine-ui uses. But if you actually looked closely at Windows applications, you’d notice that every major MS application uses different toolkits and “skins”, and so do all the other applications from other companies. In fact Win32 only offers a few basic controls, namely:
The menus that win32 offers are so basic that nobody uses them, they implement their own so they can add things like icons, and menu-separators. In my opinion, the reasons that Windows applications are consistent are:
Absolutely the number one reason is fonts. Windows offers a default font that GUI controls like menus, buttons and text widgets use. Apparently, the API for drawing text is different on Windows compared to X11 in that it developers end up using the right font when they roll their own widgets. On Windows, all text looks consistent. Colours are almost as important. On Windows the colorscheme is a globally accesible property, on Linux schemes are toolkit/desktop specific. If toolkits just used the same colours, people wouldn’t notice small, or even larger differences in the widget styling. So in conclusion, if Linux just standardised fonts and colors I think applications would feel consistent, just like they do on Windows. If toolkits did just these two things, their other differences would not be nearly as noticeable in general use. Frankly I feel if Linux could do these things, we’d be more consistent, since if you use mostly KDE apps, they have far more internal consistency than the Microsoft port-folio. Disclaimers It is also true that Windows appliations copy whatever is the latest MS-app appearance. MS Office 2003 has a neat style that has rapidly been copied and emulated in all other major toolkits, ie check out the latest version of Delphi, it looks similar to Office 2003, but the similarity is subtely different, eg. menus are narrower and more compact. And this makes sense since MS didn’t release any API or DLL to allow you to use the Office 2003 style, so Borland implemented their own clone. Trolltech even claimed to considering emulating it when I attended their roadshow in Cambridge. My point in this paragraph is that Windows apps emulate a general “Windows” consensus that is defined by MS, so this helps somewhat. And yes, I’m just ranting an opinion here, maybe someone who reads this would like to do something about it, as I’m not the man for that job. Monday, August 21. 2006Inconsistent GUIs on LinuxIt’s a commonly repeated opinion, that on Linux all application GUIs look different, but on Windows all/most applications feel like Windows applications. Now obviously people mean the difference between, for instance, KDE and Gnome apps, and they mostly also refer to even more horrible toolkits like whatever it is that xine-ui uses. But if you actually looked closely at Windows applications, you’d notice that every major MS application uses different toolkits and “skins”, and so do all the other applications from other companies. In fact Win32 only offers a few basic controls, namely:
The menus that win32 offers are so basic that nobody uses them, they implement their own so they can add things like icons, and menu-separators. In my opinion, the reasons that Windows applications are consistent are:
Absolutely the number one reason is fonts. Windows offers a default font that GUI controls like menus, buttons and text widgets use. Apparently, the API for drawing text is different on Windows compared to X11 in that it developers end up using the right font when they roll their own widgets. On Windows, all text looks consistent. Colours are almost as important. On Windows the colorscheme is a globally accesible property, on Linux schemes are toolkit/desktop specific. If toolkits just used the same colours, people wouldn’t notice small, or even larger differences in the widget styling. So in conclusion, if Linux just standardised fonts and colors I think applications would feel consistent, just like they do on Windows. If toolkits did just these two things, their other differences would not be nearly as noticeable in general use. Frankly I feel if Linux could do these things, we’d be more consistent, since if you use mostly KDE apps, they have far more internal consistency than the Microsoft port-folio. Disclaimers It is also true that Windows appliations copy whatever is the latest MS-app appearance. MS Office 2003 has a neat style that has rapidly been copied and emulated in all other major toolkits, ie check out the latest version of Delphi, it looks similar to Office 2003, but the similarity is subtely different, eg. menus are narrower and more compact. And this makes sense since MS didn’t release any API or DLL to allow you to use the Office 2003 style, so Borland implemented their own clone. Trolltech even claimed to considering emulating it when I attended their roadshow in Cambridge. My point in this paragraph is that Windows apps emulate a general “Windows” consensus that is defined by MS, so this helps somewhat. And yes, I’m just ranting an opinion here, maybe someone who reads this would like to do something about it, as I’m not the man for that job. Monday, August 21. 2006Dublin - something to look fwd... A friend recently went to Dublin for some days, and he brought interessting information with him.  As we can see here, MS Windows wants to welcome everybody with a well known look, which just reminds on home. In fact, this is a research done by the government, to find out whether it is possible to control the amount of visitors with such welcome messages. I can tell you, since they started to welcome visitors like this, the amount of visitors got unhalved.Now, I, as an free desktop enthusiast, think we should prepare for the worst when entering the plain/train to Dublin. So, don't forget your Kubuntu CD's, your Kay-Shirts and last but not least the Kay's. Also make sure you know every single detail about KDE, people usually take you more serious, if they notice you know what you're talking about Sunday, August 20. 2006Banshee Doesn't Like Me$ ./SimpleDaapClient.rb 3689 "GO AWAY"  There should be some news on the Ruby DAAP server soon. Hopefully tonight. Saturday, August 19. 2006Filelight 1.0-rc1
 I fixed up all the bugs that I’ve been alerted to, and added some polish. 1.0 will follow provided I managed to fix the bug where non latin1 files/directories don’t get displayed properly for the label texts. Can someone please check this! Thanks Downloads and more info here. Saturday, August 19. 2006Friday, August 18. 2006Tuesday, August 15. 2006Sunday, August 13. 2006The KDE Ruby Corner
As my fellow KDE developer Carsten wrote yesterday, we have lately observed an increased interest in Ruby in the KDE community. There's a lot of buzz everywhere, and we often see Ruby related questions on IRC. Being Ruby fans ourselves, we've decided it's a good time to bring KDE-Ruby folks together, and start a little "Ruby Corner". For now, this means blogging, and our new IRC channel #kde-ruby on freenode.
Everyone interested in Ruby is invited to join #kde-ruby, both newbies and experienced hackers. We're happy to help with Ruby related questions, and we also use this channel to plan further activities. The channel is also home to insanity, our powerful Ruby bot, that can be programmed directly from IRC - a nice tool for quickly checking out some code. Hope to meet you in #kde-ruby  PS: Did you know that Ruby is currently one of the fastest growing programming languages? Wednesday, August 9. 2006 |
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1.0 will be a few weeks away since I have to allow translation time, I had to change a few strings. Many thanks to the people at kde-i18n.
