Compiling != Testing

Just a small note, folks, to remind you all that just because your code compiles, it's not guaranteed to work. Writing the code is only 10% of the total effort.

I've neglected this blog for a long time now. Hopefully I'll be back soon, but until then, watch this space!

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).