Dreaming of the future...

(Prompted by this blog post on Nepomuk.)

I love envisioning the future; it makes me feel like Leonardo Da Vinci, sometimes. It's one of those areas where I know I can't be much worse than even experts. Plus, since I'm not actually predicting, just dreaming, it's OK if my predictions don't come true.

dream of KDE 4.5 with Nepomuk+Strigi power!!!
*There's a new Contact application that brings together all your email, IM, VoIP, and Facebook contacts.

*Amarok uses Last.fm to find all the similarities between your music collection and your Facebook friend's music. When playing songs, it shows a little note, saying "Your [friend / co-worker / brother] Joe likes this song too." With a right-click, you can suggest a track to any of your contacts.

*When I type someone's name in a search box, it gives me options to send an IM (if they are online), email, message their Facebook directly.... That might be in a "Contact" pane. In another pane, it might show pictures of Joe, emails/IM logs from Joe, Joe's Facebook/Twitter status, and files on my computer from Joe. Another pane provides suggestions of files I might want to send to Joe such as recent pictures of Joe I took, or something I've sent to many of Joe's friends.

*I can type "old english essay politics" in the search box, and it will find it even though the words "old", "english" and "essay" are not in the filename or the document itself. It found the word "politics" (and associated words like "democracy") in the file, detected the name of my English teacher, knew which years I was her student, and thus knew it was "old" even though I updated the file it last week.

*Bob sends me an email asking when the Block Party and ice-skating event is. Since the Block Party is scheduled on Facebook and the ice-skating event on my co-worker's Google Calendar, KMail asks "Do you want to tell Bob that the Block Party is this Tuesday and the ice-skating is Mar 23?" and will write a template email for me. In KDE's internal calendar, Bob is marked as "possibly attending" those events. If he later replies, "Great! See you there" KDE marks him as attending, and updates my grocery list accordingly. (Earlier I got an email saying I was responsible for bringing punch to the block party.)

*Haha, and now we're getting to where the fridge orders more food... I always end up there somehow. :-)

Those last few examples bordered on AI, but regardless, this is going to be a great leap. Using an ontology and marking the relationships between files will help computers finally understand what files are. I might have a scan of piano music, a photo I took on vacation, a drawing my brother made in the GIMP, and a screenshot of my desktop, and all the computer sees is four JPEG images. Once that limitation is breached, I think computers will become much more helpful to people.

KDE 4.0.0

The long awaited and much anticipated 4.0 release of KDE has arrived!  Due to the KWin release notes - the COMPOSITE_HOWTO, to be precise - I got KWin OpenGL effects working!  They're fairly smooth on my Nvidia card, although they don't seem quite as smooth as I remember Compiz being.  Hopefully it, or X, or the Nvidia drivers, will improve to make KWin 4 w/composite snappy.  (It's not really "snappy" at this point like KWin 3 is.)  I haven't managed to install the KDE Edu or KDE Multimedia modules yet, and I am stuck with the Plasmoids that aren't in extragear, but hopefully Ubuntu will get those re-packaged for 4.0 soon.  (The current packages for those things depend on RC2, I think.)

KDE 4.0 is not perfect.  I wish I could put the panel at the top of the screen, for instance.  But I could certainly live with it (although I probably won't). I may stick with KDE 3.8 for a few more months, until I start writing plasmoids, or some other killer feature drags me into the new millenium. By the time Amarok 2 is released, and Decibal is added, etc, I'll probably convert.  At the moment, GTK apps look really bad, probably because I don't have the appropriate qt-theming-for-gtk-apps thing installed.  I'm sure Kubuntu will figure that out for Hardy at the latest.  I may insist on making it work sooner by doing the appropriate Google or IRC dance.  We'll see. I'm proud to have helped the KDE project, albeit in very small ways.  (One or two bug reports and a miniscule excursion in bug triage, which I plan to continue, time allowing.)  Mostly, just because KDE is the darn best collection of applications for the free desktop.  But also, because of the enormous vision of the project, encompassing everything from Windows and Mac ports to integrating Plasma with Linux MCE.  It's a bright future.  The present is bright too, obviously.

(If your wondering, why on earth I'm polluting the world with yet another random-user-posts-his-KDE4-experience, it's mostly because it's past midnight, and I get confused and ramble/waste time after 12:00.)

The thing about Desktops

November 16th, 2006

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that today’s desktop paradigm is no good. I’ll list my reasons and justify them in a minute.

<Windows specific rant>

First, let me get this out of the way – it doesn’t have to do with the modern desktop paradigm, but SHARED DESKTOP ICONS SUCK!!! Reason: There’s no way to distinguish between shared and non-shared desktop shortcuts! When person A installs software X, software X almost always sticks a single shortcut in the shared desktop folder. Each person can place the shared icon in a different position on the screen, which makes users oblivious that it’s shared until person B says “I’m tired of this icon” and deletes it. Then person A wonders what happened, and has to dig around in the Start Menu to find the program, create a new shortcut, and put it on his desktop. Shared desktop shortcuts are a STUPID idea. They just cause extra work, by eventually needing to be replaced with multiple non-shared shortcuts. Software X should just install a separate shortcut for each user in the first place. In my experience, this is the dumbest idea Microsoft incorporated into XP.

</Windows specific rant>

I fell better now. Onto my essay!

What is the Desktop?

The Desktop is a “special” folder. What are you supposed to do with it? Well, it’s like a real desk: you set whatever you want on it. It is not organized in any way. Currently the desktop serves two main functions: Application/file Launcher, and File Folder. (It also has some strange miscellaneous functions in Windows, such as possessing the Recycling Bin, which is neither in the Desktop folder, nor is it a shortcut, and if you install Microsoft Outlook, a mysterious Outlook icon that has unique and powerful properties, yet is neither a shortcut, nor a file.) On all operating systems I’ve encountered, Desktops perform essentially these two functions, and do both only crudely.

Why is the Desktop an application launcher? Windows already presents two other paradigms, the Start Menu and the Quick Launch bar, for that purpose, and Linux has even more (such as Katapult). (In Windows, I use an auto-hiding Custom Toolbar on the left side of the screen as a third paradigm.)

Why is it a file folder? It is not a very good one, because placing files on the Desktop means they can’t be organized into other folders. The only files that make sense belonging on the Desktop are miscellaneous or temporary files.

(On Mac and Linux): The desktop is a place where mounted drives appear (cameras, USB drives, CD-ROMs, etc.) That is convenient, but somehow it doesn’t make sense to me. That is simply assigning a third, magical property to the Desktop. The drives are not files or shortcuts, and the fact that they appear and disappear seems out of line with the normally “fixed” nature of other desktop icons. However, it may be the only thing the Desktop does well.

What should the Desktop be?

So today’s desktops are crummy, but what should tomorrow’s desktop be like? How could the desktop become useful again? (I try not to rant about something without first having some idea about how it could be better.)

Should the Desktop be a place for temporary files? Keeping temporary files on the Desktop looks messy - and we want our computers to be beautiful. Besides, Windows has another folder called “Temp”, and Linux had “lost+found” and “tmp”. A separate tool that specialized in dealing with temporary files, by letting you assign notes to files or automatically cleaned out old files for instance, would be better.

Should the Desktop be an Application launcher? It could be a good one, if it allowed labels, grouping, and organizing. However, it has some disadvantages. One, the desktop takes longer to get to than the Start Menu. Two, it takes up an awful lot of space. It would be convenient for those programs you use rarely, though, because it probably has enough space to list all the programs on your computer. I think an improved start menu, or an enhanced version of KDE’s Katapult launcher could perform the task of launching applications and files equally well.

The Desktop should be a portal for information. That’s the concept I’m favoring right now. I think the trend towards “widgets” and “gadgets” that display weather, pictures, new emails, and so on seems to indicate that other people agree this is a better use for the desktop.

As a final note, I wrote this essay before reading about the plans for the KDE 4 Desktop (Plasma). Plasma shows signs of being very useful. It will integrate a widget platform (SuperKaramba) into the desktop applet system, so that applets can live in system panels (bars), the desktop, or float freely. Plasma also plans to give the desktop the “bring to front” on a hot key power that is popular among widget engines, making the Desktop a useful tool for display information. But chances are, it will still work as a crappy folder and application launcher.

Edit: Either I'm a brilliant visionary, or A. Seigo and I are crazy in the same way... for KDE 4.1, Aaron is removing the desktop's ability to be a crappy folder and application launcher! Instead, he's delegating that responsibility to a new Folder View plasmoid (which can be made full screen to please old farts) that brings the new ability to show several folders (including remote folders!) on the desktop in an orderly fashion. Good for him!

My Take: why KDE is better than GNOME

November 16th, 2006

I tried both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I have both installed, but have come to prefer Kubuntu so much that I only boot Ubuntu to perform rescue operations on my Kubuntu partition. (As a newbie, I did a lot of those the first month, lol.) Arguing that one desktop environment is better than the other is generally flame-bait and leads to pointless arguing over differing philosophies, so instead of some high, philosophical argument, I thought I’d just share my personal experiences, and explain why I like KDE.

I use KDE for a few reasons.

• I find KDE is more responsive: e.g. my mouse NEVER FREEZES! (Except when the whole computer freezes…. ) That’s what had me hooked. It felt snappier running from the live CD than Ubuntu did running off my hard disk. For instance, I get a noticeable delay (a quarter or half second) between when the Gnome “Applications” menu drops down and when it gets populated with icons.

• I like the default “look” (shiny and blue) for Kubuntu much more than the default “look” for Ubuntu (flat and brown). I know some people don’t care about eye candy, but it really does matter to me. Little things, like how the close button in KDE windows fades to red when you hover over it, just makes KDE a more pleasent asthetic experience. If you use a computer for hours on end like I do, it helps if you’re staring at something beautiful. (Although I found customizing the theme and window decorations much easier in Gnome than in KDE.)
  

• I’m a customizing freak. I change everything. KDE has more options to change. A lot more options. I’m a very capable person, and Gnome sacrifices capability just to make things “simple”. For instance, compare Gnome’s and KDE’s handling of removable mass storage devices. On Gnome, I only found one option: “Mount devices automatically” or not. On KDE, you get an XP style pop-up with customizable options based on the type of content (CD, flash drive), and you can define commands to run automatically when certain types of media are inserted (e.g. “Play Audio CD’s with Kaffeine”), and what options to present when different media is inserted.
  

Lastly and most importantly, I like KDE software better than their Gnome counterparts. Konqueror is superior to Nautilus, for instance, and I think Amarok is cooler than the default Gnome music player (Rhythmbox). Also KDE has killer apps, like Yakuake, a console that drops down at the touch of F12, and Katapult, which lets you launch programs by typing Alt+Space and the first few letters of the program’s name.

These are just my opinions of course. Both Gnome and KDE are good desktops and should both be developed further, because competition will help encourage them both to improve. I can easily see a future where I use Gnome at work and KDE at home.

Postscript 6-19-07:
As I've delved deeper into the inner workings of Linux, I'm impressed by the technology inside KDE, particularly DCOP.  (Although I'm looking forward to when all applications adopt the new DBUS standard.)  I've also been impressed by the level of integration among applications and consistency.  I'm really looking forward to KDE4, which has lots of exciting libraries to make life easier for developers.