Faces of KDE4
It’s been close to 2 years since the gargantuan task of porting KDE3 to Qt4 started in May 2005, with SVN commit number 411284 by Stephan Kulow. Many thousands of commits later, we’re still a long way from any kind of user-accessible preview of KDE4 - but that doesn’t mean a lot of work hasn’t gone into the code base as it now stands. In this stage of development it’s a lot of pain for very little glory, re-designing the next generation KDE from the ground up. It’s a task that separates the core developers from the hangers on, and the architects of the new desktop are a pretty dedicated group. There are far too many developers currently active in KDE for me to introduce them all, but here’s a quick glance at what a small handful of them are working on for the next major version of KDE. 
Kevin Ottens is a 25 year old PhD student from Toulouse, France. He is the author of the system:/ and media:/ ioslaves in KDE3, and is working on Solid for KDE4. Solid is a library for hardware discovery, power management and network management for KDE. The framework is now ‘ready for consumption’, Kevin says, and just needs more applications making use of it. Solid is capable of reacting to hardware events, managing power saving modes and provides a high level api for KDE applications. Solid delegates to and integrates well with freedesktop.org’s hardware discovery service, the imaginatively named HAL. It’s easily portable to other UNIX platforms, and while Kevin himself does not plan a win32 port he says it’s a possibility, and one he’d be curious to see evolve. Solid is shaping up to be a rock-steady basis on which to build easy and intuitive hardware management into KDE applications.
Kevin has also joined development on Dolphin, a file manager started by Peter Penz with a focus on usability. Dolphin has an enthusiastic following, and incorporates some interesting ideas. The KDE4 port is ‘running decently’, and is being actively improved. Kevin plans on full support for Solid in Dolphin. Other areas Kevin is working on include the public API of KIO in kdelibs, re-factoring the code to separate the GUI and non-GUI parts of KIO. This would allow for alternative front-ends, which could be an advantage in embedded systems.
Thiago Maciera is a 25 year old MBA student originally from Brazil and now living in France. He is collaborating with Trolltech to improve and optimise D-Bus support in KDE and Qt, the toolkit KDE is written in, as well as being active in development of D-Bus itself. D-Bus is an Inter-Process Communication/Remote Procedure Calling protocol developed at freedesktop.org. It was based on KDE’s own IPC/RPC protocol DCOP, which makes porting KDE to it easier. It’s at the base of many new integration projects at freedesktop.org, notably HAL and the currently in-discussion desktop search engine. Thiago’s plans for KDE4 also include working on KIO. He intends to make communication between applications and kioslaves occur over D-Bus, replacing the simple UNIX socket communication they currently use. As well as making the communication more flexible and robust, this helps makes KIO more portable to win32.
Thiago has been involved in many recent proposals for enhancing the technology at freedesktop.org, which he hopes will positively affect KDE. The proposals are related to integration of D-Bus with desktop services and user settings. While none of these have yet become reality, the discusstions are moving forward. “KDE 4 should be the first major desktop to make use of those new integration technologies”, Thiago says.He is also going to be the KDE administrator for Google’s Summer of Code for the second year running, helping developers and students getting more technologies in shape for KDE4.
Celeste Lyn Paul is a 25 year old student and the senior interaction architect for her company in Maryland. Her project for KDE4 is to develop a set of interface guidelines with fellow usability and design expert Ellen. Celeste is currently studying her MS in interaction design and information architecture, a specialised information design degree. Simply put, her concern is with information and how users interact with it. Her major goal with the interface guidelines is to promote some kind ofconsistency between interfaces. it is also to provide a set of examples for the prescribed way of designing application interfaces and work flows . Celeste hopes to have enough content for developers to be able to get simple interface questions answered. ‘Not necessarily a book of design patterns, but examples of common interface ideas which should be consistent’.
The KDE4 HIG aims to be a far more comprehensive document to the very simple guidelines that existed for KDE3. KDE3’s guidelines, Celeste says, were very high level and really only covered what was fairly well known ‘…which worked ok… until you ran into the edge cases’. Celeste’s ultimate goal for KDE’s new HIG is to make it ‘…. feel like a more unified environment.’
Nuno Pinheiro from Portugal is part of the team or artists working on the KDE4 default theme, Oxygen. Nuno’s main focus so far has been the icon theme and artwork for the next generation of KDE web-sites. Oxygen will be KDE’s first truly open-source icon theme. The author of the current default theme, Crystal, has not made the sources available to the community, mostly due to the difficulty of creating a raster file of each icon. Working in SVG from the start removes this complication for Oxygen. The icon theme is very complete already, with about 40% of the icons complete. This 40% is the most important, Nuno says, and Oxygen is already more complete than most KDE icon themes.
Nuno attributes this success to being able to work in a team. “The team is rocking because we can take care of many different sides and issues that only one guy can’t”. In order to maintain consistency with multiple artists working on the theme, Oxygen has a strict colour palette and an exhaustive set of guidelines. Oxygen is a completely new theme created entirely by the team - it is not based on Crystal. Oxygen already shows great promise, with a crisp professional appearance that conveys the sophisticatedconsistency so lacking from Crystal.
According to his team-mates, much of this success is due to Nuno. “Pinheiro has proven himself to be the fresh air in Oxygen. He has done so much on this project and without him we would not be here we are today.”
Many other developers not mentioned here are working on myriad other projects, slowly but steadily bringing us closer to KDE4. It’s a long journey, but one that promises to lead to a desktop revolution. With excellent frameworks to draw on, a cohesive look and feel designed by our interface experts, and a great flair brought off by our artists, KDE4 will be well worth the wait.