On Monday 13 April 2009 22:36:19 James wrote: > Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon <at> gmail.com> writes: > > It's more than that. It's an experimental approach to a new way of > > thinking about desktops. > > Amen. Brah...... > > What I'm looking to do, is focus on voice interfaces to the desktop.
I'd like to see a working implementation of the interface in the "Minority Report" movie. The tricky bit is how sore the user's arms get :-) > Most of my followers just want linux (naturarrly this means Gentoo > for me) to do mundane management tasks > for all sorts of little embedded devices. > > Kinda like SCADA for controls, only extended to > usb and video and networked devices (avahi/zeroconf...) > > > Also, I'm looking to deploy video from h.264 based > cameras, as the background, whilst various amounts > of detail appear on top of the video, about the operations > of these aforementioned voice controlled devices. I'm thinking aircraft and BMW HUDs... how cool would that be? Or thin, flexible, transparent displays as the middle layer in my helmet visor hooked up to a rearward facing lipstick camera so I can see the twit behind me in his SUV when I'm on my bike. Futuristic perhaps, but when I read the lead KDE dev's blogs where they try to answer the question "What's KDE-4 all about anyway?" I feel that they tried hard to build a base where I could do something as outlandish as that if I choose to. > QT4 is a HUGE enabler for this sort of thing. > > > KDE-4 is scarcely a year old, it's a marvel that it works at all > > considering the deep invasive changes that were necessary. > > Life is a beach, and then you marry one.... > > So long story short, for me, looking to the future, > I have no other choices but QT4 (now LGPL) > and therefore KDE 4 on the desktop.... I dumped KDE-3 four years ago in favour of e17. Something about KDE-4 and Qt4 grabbed my attention - maybe it's just the scope and possibilities of it all, and the sheer size of brass balls it takes to be the first to go that route with a mainstream product. I admire guts and vision like that. So much so that I haven't seriously used e17 for 8 months now and probably only built it twice. > I feel you pain, but the Long_View has pulled me over > to the (dark side) of KDE 4..... It's not all sunshine and roses :-) There's that bloody cashew thing. And the stupid menu - lancelot works smoother and better but is missing functionality. And the taskbar only recently got two rows (better than one) but you can't have three. There's still no obvious plasmoid for a QuickLaunch (I had to search for ages before I found it). And the panel is still any colour you like as long as it's black. But these are small issues and will be fixed in due course. Meanwhile, you can rotate plasmoids on the desktop (my favourite showoff trick - use a digital clock). Sure, it's a gimmick, but a useful one, and one that shows off the kind of vision the KDE-4 lead devs had in mind -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
