Guys, I'm starting to be really happy using KDE 4 for real work. Except for the fact that the system tray is now broken again (it was working a short while back), all the things I'm seeing are forward progress. So in the last few days I've been playing around looking for little bugs that can be fixed by applying just a bit of polish.
The first problem I bumped into was in one of the oldest KDE programs, KTip! Well, not really a bug, but a bunch of tips in the database happened to be referring to KDesktop, Kicker, etc. and were no longer relevant. So I spent an hour cleaning out all the cruft. Since we're in string freeze apparently, I could really rewrite the entire tips database (I would like to do that for 4.0.1), so I just nuked a lot of now irrelevant tips.
One of the things that people often complain about for KDE 4 is the default appearance- hopefully most of these people are simply gnome users who are unaccustomed to the level of flexibility that you have within KDE to create your own unique appearance. Today, after looking at the defaults for a while, I decided it was time to play with the appearance somewhat, and this helped to unearth a whole bunch of little bugs.
For example, I wanted to changed the desktop background. So I go ALT-F2->"Background" and up pops the background configuration control panel module that everyone knows and loves from KDE 3.x -- the only problem is that this module was designed to configure KDesktop which no longer exists. So why does the Control Panel module still exist then? Well, it turns out that the background rendering code is shared between KDesktop and KDM, so it still exists since KDM depends on that code. Well, the least I can do is stop that module from popping up in the Run Dialog and causing confusion! So I edit the CMakeLists.txt file to stop the appropriate .desktop file from being installed. Turns out that it's likely that kdm will use libplasma in the future anyway making the old code obsolete.
So I still want to change my plasma background. Well, Plasma now lets you change the desktop background from it's own little configure dialog. This dialog crashed once for me, but worked the rest of the time. One of the problems with this dialog is that it has a "browse" button on it, which lets you select your background image. Well, when the file dialog came up, I discovered a whole handful of intriguing new bugs, some of which we solved today.
- The file dialog is blocking, causing all of plasma (including the taskbar, etc.) to be unusable while the file dialog is open. I talked to the people in #plasma, and they know of the bug, and are going to tackle it shortly.
- Inside the file dialog, it automatically generated previews - only the previews didn't work for svgz files. With a pointer in the right direction from dfaure, I got this one fixed today, so now svgz files show previews.
- Additionally, in this dialog, the preview pane was updating when you mouse-over other files in the list, but not if you moved about the list using the keyboard. This accessibility bug was beyond my C++ skills, but I recalled from earlier that ereslibre was poking around in the file preview code before. I tracked him down on IRC and he had a fix in 10 minutes.
So in that little bit of poking around, we managed to fix two small bugs, plus one larger one is now on the agenda to be taken care of...
So I can now change my backgruond in plasma to something that I like better than the still-very-nice macro shot of a flower. Sweet! Hopefully the configuration dialog gets into System Settings where it can be navigated to using the keyboard, instead of having to use the mouse to right-click on plasma.
Speaking of System Settings - I was poking through the default menus and discovered a bit of a confusing noggin-scratcher. In the applications menu, there was a System submenu, a Settings submenu, and a System Settings entry all at the same menu level. Talk about ridiculous! Anyway, after a quick consult in #kde4-devel, and no major objections, I moved System Settings into the Settings submenu for the time being. This is really just a temporary fix for 4.0 to get rid of some confusion. Where it lives in the rest of the 4.x series is yet to be seen.
So I get into the System Settings and start poking around to change the Appearance. The confusion between applying themes, styles, windeco, colour schemes, etc. is still there from 3.x sadly, but at least some dialogs have been improved. I like the default Oxygen windeco and style, but I figured I'd take a look at how some alternative colour schemes would look, so I started to play with that. The new colours dialog is nice (good job jpwhiting and mwoehlke) but is still missing a "Default" and a "Current" entry in the list of colour themes. They know about this, so I won't spend too much time on it. Setting up a new scheme was pretty nice with the new preview pane though, and after some playing, I developed a colour scheme that nicely complements that oxygen style, icons and windeco, and looks good with the Plasma themes as well. Of course, having been around computers for a very long time, I decided to go for a retro colour-set that is a bit of a throwback to the EGA colour palette used in my BBS days. 16-colour glory! Of course, it's not really 16-colours since the Oxygen style is producing a lot of gradients and bevels and such which happen to look quite nice when the contrast slider is set to its maximum.
Here's a screenshot so you can see how good (or bad, depending on your point of view) this colour scheme works with the Oxygen style and plasma.
Since there are only about 5 colour schemes in SVN right now, I may just upload this one once I figure out how to fix the colouration of the listviews, which right now are broken for this theme due to the alternating row colouring stuff... We don't have a quality control mechanism in place yet for colour themes in SVN, so I'm going to use it for a few more days first to make sure I work out the bugs on my own.
The other thing you'll notice in that image is that I have a few composite effects happening. I'm using the Blur effect along with tranlucency to create the frosted-glass look that has been recently made popular by some popular "proprietary distro" (*cough*) but I think looks really nice in KDE 4 when using dark colours. I found a few small glitches with the particular combination of effects that I'm using which I sent off to rivo to see what he can do about them. Additionally, I was struggling with very slow window painting while using composite effects on my system, but discovered an option within KDE to "Cache window thumbnails" or something similar which when enabled sped up almost everything that gets drawn on screen! Yay! Maybe this option will help those out with some of the small performance issues you've been having with Composite.
Additionally, to whoever it was that was claiming that Intel cards do not work with Composite? As far as I knew, the intel cards are the best supported cards for the Composite effects, which means it was likely a driver problem on your machine.
Cheers folks - hope you don't mind my screenshot spam :P
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