Occasional Thoughts

Aaron Seigo said it all the time... KDE 4.0 will rock, KDE 4.0.1 will rocks... 'rock' is surely one of this favourite words. But KDE 4.0.x never was able to convince me. Too unstable and no real must-have features.

"KDE 4.1 will rock" said Aaron on his twitter. And this time he was absolutely right.

So if you have hesitated to switch to KDE 4 yet... KDE 4.1 is an entirely different world. Give it a try!

My favorite feature is the great folderview: Now I can have several folders visible all the time from the desktop: My desktop folder, my current projects folder and the Firefox download folder.

Well, not exactly - in fact they have just announced their support for Python and Jython. I am just asking myself how long it takes for Sun until they are no longer able to ignore Groovy. The last thing I would like to do is to do Ruby or Python bashing... both are great languages and have proven their usefulness. Ruby/JRuby gained pretty much interest at JAX 2008 - there was a dedicated Ruby day. Python has itself proven as scripting language for various KDE applications and Jython can be found in some commercial Java products for scripting.

However it is also a fact that Groovy became very popular in a very short time and I find it very astonishing that Sun seems to ignore it. It's even more astonishing since Groovy as way closer to Java than any other of the scripting languages and therefore more natural to Java programmers. This makes Groovy an ideal choice for the fluid glue layer in projects, where most developers are Java experts with little knowledge of other scripting languages.

Just seen this demo below on YouTube about a prototype of a real 3D desktop. Using mouse gestures you can stack your files on a 3D Desktop, move them around and when hitting other files they adhere to physics and also move like real object on your desk that you hit with your coffee cup. At least this desktop does not make it possible to spill coffee over the desktop.

The demo looks cool - really cool. But one thing came to my mind pretty early: Do I want to work with something like that? Just because it looks cool it does not mean that it is efficient. And efficient file management is essential. And this desktop looks more like a bouncing balls game, where you don't have balls, but files. Oh... and there seems to be something the developers forgot: Working with applications on these files. How do I manage and start applications?

Hm... ok... it's just a prototype and maybe they already have an idea how to actually accomplish doing work with that. But judge yourself...