Configuring Views in Konqueror

In Konqueror for KDE 4.0 it was not possible configuring the views within the settings dialog. As Konqueror uses the Dolphin KPart, it was required to start Dolphin for this task. Well this nasty issue will be a thing of the past on Monday:


I'm relatively new to the KDE development and still I'm amazed over and over again about the great capabilities of the KDE framework. Guess how many lines I had to change in Konqueror for getting in the settings? It was exactly one line of code :-)

For sure I had to do some minor adjustments in Dolphin for making it possible to export the settings, but also here we speak about quite few lines of code. It's really fun developing applications with such a great framework as base. Kudos to all KDE people that made this possible during the last 10 years...

Pictures have Frames

When comparing Dolphin with other file managers like the Vista Explorer or Finder I always was jealous because of the nice frames they provided for picture previews. I initially thought providing frames for pictures in Dolphin can wait until KDE 4.2, as there are more important issues to solve.

But as soon I've added this feature to my TODO-list, I could not get this task out of my head... I recognized that obviously all nice pictures of this world seem to have frames: whether you go to an exhibition or take a look on a newspaper - nearly everywhere pictures have frames.

So Dolphin has now frames for picture previews too:


By the way: in Dolphin for KDE 4.1 the generating of previews is done more clever (or let's say: less stupid) than in the 4.0 version. Now the previews are generated for all visible items first like in KDE 3, not "randomly" like in KDE 4.0. This improves the felt performance a lot, as from the users point of view the previews are generated now immediately.

Please note that when you try SVN trunk that previews in general take a lot time in the debug version. Still there seems to be room for improvements when the previews are in the cache. KDE 3 is still faster in this regard, but we are working on it; I hope we can provide a faster solution for KDE 4.1.

Tree View

One goal of KDE 4 was that Konqueror stays as the army swiss knife for power users (Dolphin never was intended to replace Konqueror). Konqueror uses the Dolphin KPart for the file management and this implies that the Dolphin KPart must provide the same features as Konqueror in the KDE 3 series to keep our promise.

For KDE 4.0 we could not implement all those features. This is mainly because especially the view parts had to be completely rewritten due to Qt 4's interview. But we are working hard to fill at least some gaps until KDE 4.1. One often requested feature was the missing tree view. Well it's back again:


It is turned off per default in Dolphin, but I think it is no problem for Konqueror users to turn it on :-) There are still some minor issues when reloading views (e. g. the folders get collapsed again), but they will be fixed until the KDE 4.1 release.

Hello Planet KDE

Until now I was very reluctant for maintaining an own blog. I'm not good in writing thrilling stories and answering questions in the comments section is not always a straight forward task.

But during the development of Dolphin-features for KDE 4.1 I faced the situation that I don't get enough feedback. There are not that many people who work regularly on SVN trunk, so I thought that I use this blog to present some new features in Dolphin. Any feedback is welcome!

I should be subscribed to Planet KDE now, well let's see whether it works :-)