So today I was reading the Polish Linux article, part of a series that is periodically covered KDE from SVN (to the delight and occasional flaming of many fans) and it reminded me of how I ended up with this Marketing thing in the first place. It's been just under a year since my last Road to KDE 4 articles went live, and for shits and giggles, I thought I'd revisit them to see what has held together through the last year, what ended up as vapour, and so forth -- For my amusement more than anything else, although it might be interesting to some. So I present...
The Road [From] KDE 4[.0]
My very first article published about KDE (in any media) was: The Road to KDE 4: SVG Rendering in Applications. It covered the (then) new SVG capabilities that were beginning to be exploited in various parts of KDE. I think I like the current KRunner graphics much better :) This has been a forward march since those days, with many apps taking advantage of the scalable graphics in many places. Now if only it didn't take so long to render the things when you first load an app :) Improvements for the future, both code and artwork, are surely on their way.
Next, there was The Road to KDE 4: New KOffice Technologies. KOffice 2.0 development was barely underway at the time, and the flake library was brand-spankin'-new. The Flake system is definitely cool, and can be seen in the recent KOffice Alphas. Additionally, Kross was discussed in this article, relative to KOffice, but it's since found its way into a number of other parts of KDE. I've experimented with it myself, and find it pretty neat. :)
I ruined a few people's day on the KDE Promo list when I published The Road to KDE 4: Full Mac OS X Support while they were working on an official press release. However, as you can tell from the KDE/Mac Website, RangerRick and a few friends are still trucking along. Additionally, KDE on windows was pretty much in its infancy then, but now I have it installed on my work computer, if for no other reason than to play Konquest during lunch :)
The article The Road to KDE 4: Job Progress Reimagined is one of the few disappointments among the list. I know that a lot of the underlying libraries were changed to permit this one to work, but the end result for the user has never materialized in the fashion it was imagined. Maybe it's time for an intrepid plasma hacker to actually write this applet as it was imagined!
I took a look a Kalzium and KmPlot in this one, which showed off two excelled KDE EDU apps - these EDU apps have been pretty quite recently, although there's been almost continuous improvements happening to them.
My article on Phonon The Road to KDE 4: Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier caused a bit of an uproar, with some flamers coming out of the woodwork (not necessarily on the dot, but on those other websites where the story was picked up...) It's nice to see how successful Phonon has been in KDE 4.x already, plus the uptake in Qt. :) Very cool.
I covered Okular and Ligature in the next article, two (then) competing document viewers within the KDE space. While competition is usually a good thing, Ligature is now all-but-dead. Okular is quite nice :)
I spent some time talking about CMake and it's implications to KDE. These days, Alex is even employed by Kitware (last I checked), and the cmake website features KDE prominently as a success story. On a side note, I've recently started to play with one of Kitware's other products, known as Paraview. It's a 3D visualization program for random things, written in Qt and VTK, and scripted in python... it's quite nice for me to load geological information for display, versus some rather bad tools that exist to do the same in the commercial world.
This one caused an uproar (to the flamers: was it worth it?). The Road to KDE 4: Dolphin and Konqueror. In retrospect, Dolphin rules, and Konq still rules, although I (like many others) do not use konq for file management any more, it's nice to know that the promises then of ensuring that Konq would live on have indeed come true.
Remember when Oxygen was just a whisper? The Road to KDE 4: Oxygen Artwork and IconsI did this article the week that the Oxygen icons were first turned on as the KDE default icon set. At the time, the styles and so forth weren't done yet, but it showed off some of the changes from 3.x to 4.x. Oxygen has come a long way since then, infiltrating every part of KDE, and making it a much more distinct visual experience than 3.x. Keep up the good work, artists of KDE!
Well, Amarok 2.0 is not yet released, and probably won't be for several more months yet, but that's okay. When I had written this article (The Road to KDE 4: Amarok 2 Development is Underway) SVN had just branched for 2.0, and the first attempt at porting was compiling. Of course, Amarok now looks quite a lot different, but the vision remains the same as a year ago...
The Road to KDE 4: Strigi and File Information Extraction: Well, strigi has gotten smaller and faster, and is just as invisible as ever (which is exactly as it should be...) However, the article mentioned NEPOMUK, which was still very young at the time. Nepomuk has become more and more interesting to KDE developers since that time, being integrated into a few places in KDE, and showing great potential for future development.
The Road to KDE 4: Solid Brings Hardware Configuration and Control to KDE: Well, Solid is very successful, and still growing. Most visible in 4.0.x was the removable device support that got built into KDE everywhere. Underneath though, Solid continues to improve, with support being implemented for non-HAL based backends (Windows), and networking user interfaces in the works (see the plasma playground).
Konsole Gets and Overhaul, and that's become Konsole for 4.x, plus a few other improvements. Robert's been busy :)
I got to show one of the first KWin Composite articles to the world (although word had definitely already gotten around)... I am particularly proud of this article, as a Marketing guy, as I managed at the time to write it in such as way as to avoid the almost unavoidable flame war from the Compiz community, even after the article hit digg and other high traffic websites.
My very last article as about KDE PIM technologies. In this article, I talked about a lot of future PIM technologies that would be arriving with (or post) 4.0. One of the features there was Akonadi, which is only now seeing the light of day for most real users. Well, it still promises to be as good as the original article claims. :) Some of the other libs never fully arrived, and I guess I've got another few items for the vapour list. At the end, I said "The next article will be on either Krita or Kate (haven't decided which one will go first)."
Well, I never got around to another article in that series (sorry), as I started to write for Ars Technica (but even that was short-lived), got involved in the Release Event planning, and generally got too busy. Ah well, this reminds me of how thankful I am to see the Polish Linux reviews, which fill much the same void that my articles did a year ago, for those users that are starved for KDE information. :)
Be Free! :)
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