Distractions

I've been very distracted lately - I haven't written any code outside work hours for several weeks now. What's kept me so busy? mainly it's been my guitar(s). I've just added a new guitar to the growing collection. If you're interested, you can see some pictures here.

Microsoft's unpaid testers

I just discovered this charming little quote in the winows 7 blog:

To date, with the wide usage of the Windows 7 Beta we have received a hundreds [sic] of Connect (the MSDN/Technet enrolled beta customers) bug reports and have fixes in the pipeline for the highest percentage of those reported bugs than in any previous Windows development cycle.

So you're publically advertising the fact that your product was very buggy when you launched the beta test phase, and you're scrambling to fix all the bugs at the last minute? Whatever happened to internal testing? Who will test all the bugs introduced with your bug fixes?


Bah, my dislike of the Microsoft software mill continues! Hooray for uninformed opinion!

Webkit / Konqueror issue raised again

Just thought I'd point out that I'm not the only one who would like Konqueror to use webkit rather than KHTML:

WebKit in Konqueror


...It's a pity the comments are 90% flame, and 10% content.

Product Branding Critical to User Expectations

A recent post on kdevelopers.org caught my attention. In a post tagged "rant" (I love rants), "tstaerk" outlines his situation:

I am in a small team where we provide a Linux Terminal Server (LTS) for a company. It is based on NX. Every employee in this company can use the service, however, we provide it free of charge and out of enthusiasm. That means, we are not paid for setting it up nor for giving phone-support. We sometimes have 70 concurrent users on the server, that may mean we reach 500 users on the whole. The server is running KDE 3.5 as desktop environment. Recently, we evaluated - no, let me keep this understandable - we sat together and discussed the possibility of upgrading to KDE 4.

Everyone including me was against the upgrade. This is especially ashaming for me as I am spending every weekend to develop KDE. So what were the reasons?

KDE4 seems to have suffered a lot from people complaining that it's not an easy upgrade from KDE3, and to a certain extent, the complaint is justified. When KDE4 first arrives on the scene, it was really little more than a tech demo, and certainly not usable by normal users (I use the term "normal" users with all due respect - "normal" in this context means users not in the KDE development scene, and perhaps not as technically literate as the developers). However, the hype surrounding it's release meant that lots of normal users upgraded and were subsequently disappointed. With KDE4.2, we're finally getting to a stage where the KDE 4 series is actually usable as a desktop environment.

However, that's still not answering the original concern: KDE4 is still not a replacement for KDE3. Tstaerk goes on to list some of the shortcomings he sees in KDE4:

If you install a KDE 4 desktop by default, you do not have the possibility to add icons to your desktop by right-clicking onto the desktop. That would mean to us: Take 500 phone calls, explain users why it is no longer possible, explain 500 times why we do a change if it is a change to the worse... You got it, 500 times an ENOTAMUSED.

If you install a KDE 4 desktop by default, you do not have the possibility to move the clock in the panel. For me, the clock is ticking constantly on the left where I do not want it. Our users will be upset seeing another change to the worse. Yes, there is a work-around but it is so complicated that I do not want to tell it 500 times on the phone

If you install a KDE 4 desktop by default, you get a strange icon in the upper right corner. No one could explain to me what it is called, but everybody said it was something about Plasma. Users will click on it and eventually hit "Zoom out". Then, their screen is filled with strange gray squares. Just imagine you have to sit on a phone and answer 500 phone calls (for no money) from users who all tell you something about "squares" not knowing they should call it "activities".

Does he have a point? Perhaps.

In some ways, calling the new product KDE4 implies an easy upgrade path from KDE3, which is misleading, since many aspects of the product have been written from scratch, and behave in a totally different manner. It would have been a better decision, I think to brand KDE4 in such a way that it was obvious that it was a new product, that would not work in the same way. This in turn might have saved a considerable amount of grief when developers found that their snazzy new technologies were being ignored, since users could not use the product like they were used to.

So, the moral of the story?

Be careful how you brand your product, especially when a newer version breaks compatibility with an older version. Is it an upgrade, or a new entity in it's own right?

KDE 4.2: First Impressions

As you may already know, KDE4.2 was released a few days ago. I was interested in writing a plasmoid in python (more on that in a future post), which meant that I had to upgrade.

So what did I think of KDE4.2 after experiencing KDE4.1?

In a word: Brilliant!

KDE4.2 is a breath of fresh air after 4.1. Many of the crashes I experienced in KDE4.1 have been fixed. For example, in 4.1, every time I opened the "Display" configuration dialog my laptop would freeze, and needed to be hard rebooted in order to get it working again. Every time I launched a full-screen application (like a game) my laptop would freeze. I couldn't kill the X server with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace without my laptop freezing... there's a whole list.

KDE4.2 fixes almost all these bugs, and even throws in some nice performance tweaks at the same time. Things feel more responsive - menus are faster to open, and some applications seem faster to load (although I haven't done any actual timing tests - so this is all subjective). Finally, it looks very nice:


It looks good, and it's responsive on my three year old laptop!

A big congratulations to all the KDE developers that made this happen. I believe I've committed a whopping 10 lines of code to KDE4, so I'm glad that other people have more commitment than I do ;)

Henry lives on

After complaining about the poor state of the web browser in a KDE platform, I have to report with mixed emotions that I've bitten the bullet and installed firefox. I'm not a huge fan of firefox - yes, it's open source, and seems to work fairly well, but it's also slow and a huge resource hog.

Who here remembers when firefox first came out? It was supposed to be a stripped down version of the mozilla web browser. The idea was that by removing the mail client, IRC chat application, and god knows how many other applications we'd end up with a smaller, faster, lighter browser. To some extent it worked. However, I'm starting to wonder if they'd have been better starting from scratch.

I challenge anyone reading this to use Chrome for windows for a week and then switch back to Firefox for good - I guarantee you you'll be pulling your hair out within a week; firefox is slow! I always assumed that the reason my browsing experience was so poor was down to my slow Internet connection, but it turns out that a fair amount of the delay is the browser.

So I have firefox - the GTK theme KDE installs looks awful, and several web sites look rubbish, but at least I can check my email...

Well, that's it for now. More to come soon (and this time I'll lose the shakespearean titles).

My Kingdom for a Browser!

This post is set to be one of the most painful entries I have ever written on this weblog. Not because the subject matter is particularly difficult, but because the technology has let me down.

The story starts with me upgrading my laptop to Kubuntu 8.10. It's been out for a while, and I'm a big fan of KDE 4, but I hadn't had a sufficiently quiet weekend in which to take the plunge. I was previously running Kubuntu 8.04, so I could have just downloaded the latest packages, but I wanted to start from scratch, for a couple of reasons.:

1. I wanted to remove all the rubbish that I had installed over the last six months. I frequently download and install applications, only to find that they're not quite what I want. I rarely uninstall them, so over time my lhard disk fills with cruft.
   
   
2. I wanted to wipe away all the stale config, especially as my window manager would be changing from KDE 3.x to KDE4. Besides, there's a certain pleasure to be derived from configuring a brand new KDE installation.
   

The install was a breeze, and for the first time ever all my laptop hardware was detected and configured correctly without any hacking on my part - even the weird web-cam, which doesn't even work in Windows XP. Life was good, until I went to browse the Internet.

KDE ships with Konqueror as it's default web browser. As far as web browsers go it's fairly nice - It lacks the large "Add-Ons" repository that Firefox has, but many of the plugins I can't live without when using Firefox are included as standard in Konqueror.



Konqueror is more than just a web browser though - the integration between konqueror and the rest of KDE is truly stunning (as an aside: this is why I prefer KDE over other desktops. Technologies like KPart and DBus are the future of desktop applications, and KDE is leading the charge in this area). As an example, if you want to search google for something, but don't have your browser window open, what can you do? Easy! just press Alt + F2 to open the "Run Command" dialog, and type "gg: " followed by your desired keywords. Hit enter and you'll launch Konqueror with the google results right there waiting for you.


Konqueror also has extensive protocol support. For example, SCP and SFTP are supported by default. Try typing something like "fish://user@host" - konqueror will as for the user password, and will then behave like a file browser for the remote machine.

These two examples hardly scratch the surface of what Konqueror can do. However - there are some very serious problems with it. Using GMail with Konqueror is torturous. First Google will give you the plain-old-HTML-only mode, since Konqueror isn't officially supported. Then, if you ask for the full version anyway you get all sorts of weirdness - and a completely unusable inbox. The solution seems to be to set the user agent to Safari 2.0, but even then my inbox seems to be incredibly slow.

Members of the KDE community have pointed out that GMail plays fast-and-loose with web standards, so it's understandable that Konqueror misses a few tricks. The Google engineers must have tested the javascript enhanced version of GMail with the most popular browsers, and left Konqueror out in the cold - and fair enough. However, the KDE developers are missing the point: no matter how good their browser is technically - no matter how standards compliant it is, it simply does not work for me - the user. I now have a browser that I cannot use to check my email (no, using the HTML-only version is not an option).

So what are the alternatives?

Before I upgraded Kubuntu I had Firefox installed. However, when I went to install it, I nearly had a heart attack. In order to install Firefox, I had to install 63 other packages - most of them gnome or GTK packages. The reason for this is simple: Firefox uses the GTK toolkit to provide a UI. I knew this already, but this early on in my new Kubuntu install I wasn't about to pollute my OS install with GTK packages.


What can I do? There are a few other options available to me:

There's been talk of a Firefox port to Qt. However, nothing usable has materialised yet, so that's off the cards.

There's the Arora browser - this is a Qt browser running the Webkit engine (which is included as standard in later Qt distributions). A quick install told me what I needed to know: also not really usable as my default browser.

Finally there's Google's offering: Chromium. However, this has not yet been ported to Linux.

So what's the underlying cause of my troubles? Without hacking the code directly, I have no idea. Perhaps this is part of the KHTML vs Webkit debacle - There's a good article outlining the whole issue here, but I'd like to quote a couple of paragraphs:

So, what's the situation? Well, it appears that KHTML will remain the web rendering engine for Konqueror going into KDE 4.0, and that it could be changed to qtWebkit as of KDE 4.1. That does not seem to be officially settled, so much as the most likely scenario. It appears that the KHTML team seems hesitant about the proposition, while many KDE developers and users alike have expressed a very receptive attitude toward seeing Konqueror user qtWebkit. And Rusin made clear to a reader that he believes the KHTML team should continue their work as long as they like.

The challenge is that Webkit, which comes from Apple, is widely tested, and is thus known to work well with a large number of websites. KHTML is not as widely tested, and, for example, GMail doesn't work well with Konqueror. Many Konqueror fans have expressed regret at having to keep Firefox around just for sites like GMail, that don't recognize KHTML. Using Webkit would solve these problems, enabling many users to stick to one browser.

In other words: "The developers are dragging their feet to implement a fix that would arguably make Konqueror a better browser". Of course, the developers involved are free to do as they please with their code, but they're dragging down the rest of the KDE platform - I now have to have multiple browsers installed to do the most basic of day-to-day tasks.

While the situation is frustrating in itself, the unfortunate fact is that similar things are happening all over the open source scene. Frequently developers get too caught up in making sure that their code is "right" (that may mean designed correctly, stable, cool, standards compliant, well integrated, or anything else the developer feels is important), and not enough time is spent making sure that the product is usable. I suppose this is one of the draw backs to a development methodology where there is no external pressure to develop your product.

Usability is king, and trumps all other concerns in a product. If it's not usable, it's no good.