As you can see in the chart above, the blue is 14%, red 33.5% and the yellow is the staggering 52.5%. This means that blue represents 14% of all computer users. And in this case it is not only 14% of the surfers, but of all computer users in the world. In the chart below, you can see that 14% separated from the red and blue parts, which represent 100 – 14 = 86% of the whole e-world’s population.

Trends

Obviously, the current statistics are not as important as the trends. In the following few charts, you can see the trends over the past few years. Naturally the data for the current year had to be extrapolated since 2009 is not yet over.

You can see that, although the blue had the largest share in 2006 with 1250 tested users (which was almost 70%), and the yellow had only 128 users, the yellow grew exponentially, and the blue grew insignificantly. Yellow had 512 in 2007, 1024 in 2008, and 2048 is predicted for 2009.

You can see the percentage chart during the past few years, which I think speaks for itself.

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time lately to do anything serious, so I’ve tackled the multi-process web browser that I have mentioned last time.

It received some standard web-browsing features such as loading a page when you type the address in the address bar, and similar

But that’s not the reason behind writing this this post. You know how Firefox and Konqueror ask you whether you want to restore your last session after a crash? Well, it is a good feature, but I’ve got one even better.

When a site makes an illegal move, and induces a crash in QtWebKit, instead of crashing the whole application (like in most other browsers), it only closes the tab it belongs to. OK, that’s not new. The new thing is that I’ve ported a notification system that I made some time ago for another application, so that when a tab is lost, it can be recovered very easily – just click ‘Reopen’ (see the screenshot).

I haven’t used KDE’s system wide notifications since I wanted to make them local (there’s no point in bogging the system notifications with things like these).

The next step will be to implement more advanced, but still standard browsing features. The smart address bar will be one of the first. It could probably end up in Konqueror and Rekonq eventually. (Nepomuk tags for bookmarks…)

I was wondering how hard would it be to create a web-browser that is, like Google’s Chrome, separated in different processes for different tabs. You know, the whole “security problems and crashing are restrained to single tab” thing.

As it turned out, it is not all that difficult. Create the main window, start the WebKit (QWebView) in another program, then X-Embed the later in the former, and communicate via D-Bus. (I got the idea to do this from Embed Window plasmoid )

If the child crashes, only one tab is gone. If the main application crashes, tabs become independent windows.

I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to work on this, but if I find the time, you could see a Rekonq-based (http://rekonq.sourceforge.net/) browser that is similar to Chrome someday.

then there is kde bluetooth stack. Again awesome, cell-to-laptop-to-main-computer…

KWin is fast, plasma also, everything is just… awesome!

BTW, this is the first time I don’t use self-compiled KDE4 packages, and it’s not bad at all. Debian’s KDE team made very good packages of 4.2, and even though 4.2 is in experimental repo (I’m using Sid on this eee), it behaves better than kubuntu installations on my familie’s computers.

So three times “hurray” to all mentioned above!

The KDE 4.2 has been released today. Although in the image below, and in this post’s title it says “Breathe”, the official code name is “The Answer” since it is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything [link]

The release announcement can be found here, but for more information you should head straight to the visual guide which was nicely prepared for all of us by the KDE Promo team.

Introducing Lancelot

It is a peculiar feeling, although most of you who read my blog know what Lancelot is, and possibly using it already, KDE 4.2 is the first version that ships it. So, it is like Lancelot didn’t exist before, it is a new KDE application. Therefore, I’ll post here a small introduction of what it is.

Lancelot is an application launcher menu (or ALI) for KDE 4 designed to provide a place from which all your jobs begin. It provides quick access to applications, places, documents, contacts and system information.

For detailed info and documentation, visit the website.

For those of you who know what Lancelot is, here are the improvements since the 1.0 version:

• Full keyboard support
• New lists with scrollbars
• Themes that match Plasma themes from kdeplasma-addons kdeartwork module
• Even less bugs

KRunner integration

The most elusive feature in Lancelot is its KRunner integration. There are two reasons for that, the other menus (I speak mostly of Kickoff, as it is the default menu) tend to search only through the applications they navigate. The second reason is that the users are so accustomed to Alt+F2 to start commands, that they can’t be bothered to try something new.

As you probably know, KRunner now comes with two different interfaces which you can set in its configuration dialogue. Lancelot is the third. It integrates the menu and the usual application (and whatnot) browsing with the power of the /Run/ dialogue. Everything that you can do with the default KRunner interface, you can with Lancelot also (yes, the calculator also works ).

It is not my intention to say that you should ditch KRunner, it is an awesome application, but if you are really accustomed to L’s interface, you don’t need to use two different applications for basically the same task – starting applications. Before KDE 4.2, this was a bit tricky since you had to click on the search result in order to start it, but now, you can just press “Enter” to start the first match, or you could navigate with your arrow keys. The keyboard is a wonder, I say!

Dot

One of the great things that followed 4.2 is the new Dot (dot.kde.org). It looks fantastic! (I’m even thinking of changing the theme of my blog to something like the new dot interface).

In the other news, there were a couple of KDE bashing news lately which I really don’t care for. So, here’s just one quote for them (when I say “them”, I don’t think of poor Linus who doesn’t enjoy the bliss of KDE anymore, but of all others who made it a big deal, and started flames all over the net):

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

One of the reasons for justifying the claim was that the sentence Nikolaj wrote “The truth is that we are aiming squarely at ourselves, as we are some of the biggest music fans out there…” was found to be “extremely arrogant” by one of the visitors.

It reminded me of when I said something similar on my blog – that I develop Lancelot for myself. And I am aware that this type of comment sounds strange, and a bit arrogant, but it is not. So, I’m passing what I wrote as a reply on Nikolaj’s blog here:

I’m sorry if I was the one who started the ‘I develop for myself’ wave of responses (some time ago concerning Lancelot) but you have to understand the developers to understand what that means.

What would you feel if someone, without specifying any specific reason, starts bashing something you have been dedicated to for a couple of years? You could ignore it. You could ignore it a couple or more times. But, eventually, you will have to snap and vent yourself through a reply.

So, be happy, be polite and with a smile in your heart and on your face, and the world will be a much nicer place to live in. (yes, that’s an order )

Why just now? Well, first I saw the new list view in KMail which is rather awesome, and makes KMail even better than the former best* mail application – KMail without the new list view.

Beside that, I saw one of the tiny changes in Plasma related to the taskbar/icon tooltips. You’ll know what I’m talking about by moving your mouse from one icon to another.

Every now and then, KDE gets some, at first glance, totally insignificant feature (like this tooltip effect), but to be honest these little things really make a big difference. And such things really make me say “Wow, how neat!”.

So, everybody, rock on!

* Personal opinion, not a flamebait

I will not write about the Qt Creator vs KDevelop relationship since KDevelop was never my scene. Tried the KDE3 edition once (a long time ago), and it just didn’t work for me (not only because of all the crashes). After that, I turned to Eclipse for C++ development because of its plugins, mainly the Subversion browser. I even set it to work with CMake properly, and to run KDE4 applications in their own environment. But, after awhile, I got tired of the slowness and of compilation errors related to ‘:w’ everywhere in the code, so I decided to return to Vim and to make an IDE out of it, but that is another story.

Qt Creator

At first I just downloaded it, started, and closed it almost immediately. Why? It looks too fancy for a real developer’s tool. Shiny run, debug and build buttons, etc. and a large Nokia logo. Why do I need that, I really don’t know.

Then, I decided to give it a second chance and start a small, but real project. The interface, although too fancy for me (remember, I use Vim) isn’t all that bad at all. It is pleasant and fast (unlike most IDEs today). I will not repeat Aaron’s stances on the subject – I mostly agree with him – I’ll just point a few other things that I did or did not like.

Pros

Well, I have nothing to add what was not already said – UI is clean, it is fast, it has a quite a few nifty features…

Cons

If this sounds too harsh or rude, I apologize, it wasn’t my intention, just trying to say what I find peculiar about the IDE.

I like keeping my code organized. I like having subdirectories, and subdirectories of those subdirectories etc. How to do that in Qt Creator? Well, to be honest, there is no way (at least not yet). You can organize your files the way you want, but Qt Creator will show all of them in a list. So, what is the point of organizing them? And what is the point of the Project browser if you get a list of a (potentially) few hundred files?

Then, you want to add a class to your project. You right-click the project in the project browser, and get an option to add a new file. OK, lets go for that. Here you get to create a ‘C++ Header file’ and ‘C++ Source file’ (amongst other non-relevant options for this task). OK, so we need to create them separately… but I know I saw somewhere an option to create a C++ Class… huh… let’s try this: File > New… Oh we get the SAME dialogue as the one we had earlier, only now we get to create a C++ Class as well. Strange.

Epilogue

I don’t want to sound like I hate the software, because I don’t – it is really cool, but I wanted to take it a bit more seriously than just ‘uh, a new toy, I must try it’. It has a potential to become a really good development environment, but has a really long way to go before it does.

And for the end, Trolls*, good job so far, now just finish it .

* Hmmm, since it is no more Trolltech but Qt Software, should we start calling them Qties (Cuties) instead of Trolls?

So stop yelling your comrades to start to “sharpen the forks”.

So, what is this all about?

Well, for a long time now, I keep my system mostly clean of Gnome/GTK programs. Only a few remain (and probably will for both foreseeable and unforeseeable future), and those are GVim, Gimp (big kudos for the last version goes to the developers), Inkscape and Synaptic. Apart from those, whenever I need a program for something, I first search for KDE or Qt based applications, and only if those are non-existent, I consider installing something else.

So, what the hell is this title all about?

It’s about the fact that I have realized that now I’m avoiding KDE/Qt 3 programs as well. For example, I have lived without Digikam and K3B until the KDE 4 ports started to become usable. I still use Akregator from the “three” series, but that is due to the fact that new Akregator crashes a lot for me and I am too busy to investigate why.

So, that’s it.

If you are asking why I’m not writing something useful, that is mostly because I have had no time lately to do anything useful to write about. You can see that Lancelot commits were silent for the past 10 days, but I plan to change that very soon… See you later!

BTW, I’ve switched to use the 4.1 branch for all modules. Obviously, I’ve set a trunk setup as well, but this time only Plasma is from the trunk. For the next few months, Lancelot will be developed for both 4.1 and trunk (The separation was needed since there already is an API breakage).

Move along, nothing (more) to see here