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So there has been a lot of confusion about the KDE 4 desktop and FolderView lately and some nasty stuff I don’t want to go into right now. In the comments to Aaron’s blog someone said they don’t see how exactly it will be better and help them be more productive. So let me show you it
One of the most innovative and simultaneously controversial features of KDE 4 is the Plasma widget, Folderview. Simply put, it allows a user to display the contents of a file system folder within a widget on the desktop.
"In the future, you could possibly have an adaptive FolderView instance, which uses Nepomuk to show files relevant to what you are doing with your computer at that time."
For a long time desktop widgets have been a way to provide useful, although usually simple, applications that sit on the desktop and out of the way. KDE has taken these desktop widgets to a whole new level with Plasma. In this tutorial we will look at how to get a simple Plasmoid created using Python.
Aaron J. Seigo presents new graphical effects for KDE 4 desktop Plasma. He shows fade-in and fade-out effects on icons. Aaron also talks about how easy these animations can be implemented by using the Phase/Animator framework. It also makes animations consistent across the desktop and makes them easy to change.
Okay, before I begin writing about plasmoids, we have to get one thing straight – what on Earth is a plasmoid? A plasmoid is an applet developed with KDE’s new Plasma application development environment. More information about Plasma can be found at its Web site.
No one is better qualified to talk about the state of the KDE desktop than Aaron Seigo. A former member of the board of KDE e.V, the German non-profit that oversees the project, Seigo is a lead developer on the desktop. Last weekend, I interviewed him at the Calgary Open Source Systems Festival, COSSFest, in front of an audience, on where KDE is today and where it is heading.
Avant Window Navigator (AWN/Awn) is a dock-like navigation bar for the linux desktop that positions itself at the bottom of the screen. It can be used to keep track of open windows and behaves like a normal window list.
