i'm stuck working on 3.5 stuff (knowing i'll feel like crap if 3.5 ships with obvious brokenness) whilst pining for getting going on kde4 if for no other reason than we'll have proper argb visuals. that means proper transparency support with these horrible, fragile, non-efficient hacks.
if you haven't seen zack's videos showing the rather nice graphics capabilities in qt4 (here and here) you've been missing out. and without saying more than i ought to: this is just the beginning. i'll simply note that at dev days matthias said something about scene based rendering in his presentation.
now, i'd really like to simply `rm -rf` the transparency support in kicker 3.5 and tell people to deal with it until there is proper support in X and Qt for these things. really, i would. but my survival instincts tell me that i'd prefer to live a few more years rather than be lynched by the hordes of users who just can't live without such important things as a kicker that paints the same background as the desktop. this from the guy who removed icon zooming.
anyways ... after my recent blog entry detailing some of the announcements made at trolltech dev days, people were asking about the upcoming qt4 java bindings and i figured i may as well try and answer some of those questions.
no, richard dale wasn't/isn't involved with these bindings. but as richard noted in a recent blog entry of his own he's happy to have these moved off his plate so he can concentrate on more bindings work that is more interesting to him.
yes, these are (AFAIK anyways) full java bindings to qt4. what they'll end up looking like exactly is still forthcoming. Q1 '06 was the time given, though the hacker working on it spoke up during the presentation and said he was actually shooting for december. but hackers are crazy like that. never listen to them. ;)
speaking of crazy hackers, i got a couple pics from adriaane of the karaoke night. but no video, and conspicuously none of adriaane. i'll have to harass him about it until he coughs up the whole batch:
 american idol has nothing on kde. well, unless you count musical talent. and coolness... and... |  jasmin (who appeared in the qt4 dance video as jean claude) shows off his stylings while i do my best disco party dancing for the camera |
7 comments:
The videos look nice, but what about the performance? Maybe it's just the video, but it looks like when he's dragging the window around he's getting around 1 FPS. Hope that doesn't reflect reality!
(yes I'm too lazy to register for zacks blog comments)
Leo said: The videos look nice, but what about the performance? Maybe it's just the video, but it looks like when he's dragging the window around he's getting around 1 FPS.
I think that is the result of the X session to Flash SWF capturing utility Which does not represent a real world frame rate.
Also, i still would like to know how qt's svg support plays with ksvg2 and other efforts? Are they exclusive or just orthoganal?
transparency
Imo, "fake" transparency is useless. So, I would give my (worthless) vote to have it go, just to save the devs some time to code the real transparency in.
On the other hand, kicking a feature because it's a "hack" may lead to big chunk of the code gone. Some of it is useful to someone. If it is, just leave it unmaintained. :)
So it was you that removed the icon zooming...
(Rings Acme-rent-an-angry-mob)
i find it interesting what brings somepeople to Linux/KDE. One friend asked me to help him install Linux because he wanted 'that cool menu bar, you know like in Mac OSX...'
you know... i love your blogs :D
and i think you wouldn't survive the removal of the transparancy long. yeah, i wouldn't do it. being lynched by an angry mob is certainly not nice, i'm sure about that. and you save yourself the hassle of defending the choice, which would almost take as much time as maintaining it as you do now...
full java bindings to qt4
I think full Python bindings would be a lot more useful, given the fact that Python is open source and just as cross-platform as Java. Python has a cleaner syntax and a lower learning curve than Java, making it easier for new developers to write pyQT and pyKDE applets.
There already many critical apps written in Python, including the Guidance KControl modules (http://www.simonzone.com/software/guidance), the BkSys compilation framework, Redhat's Anaconda installer, and Gentoo Portage to name a few. In fact, I think Python is becoming as essential to Linux and Free Software as Visual Basic is to W$.
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