Richard Dawson posted on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:17:09 -0700 as excerpted: > I remember 2009.1 hype to the effect that addresses would be available > for all programs, but when I installed (from powerpak DVD), neither the > addressbook nor some replacement was present , even in Kontact, the most > obvious place one would would expect to find it. I had some trepidation > about installing Kaddressbook, since I thought there might be some new > KDE approach to storing addresses. After all, Konquerer was replaced by > Dolphin (Why?), so perhaps there was a new place or way to store > addresses.. > > Failing to find any alternative, I installed Kaddressbook. Three things to mention. 1) kde4 printing is now based on qt4's printing. It's not (yet) as advanced as kde3's printing was. That's an acknowledged issue, in fact, one I happened across on kde techbase the other day. Improvements are coming, but expect it to gradually improve over the next few minor (4.2 > 4.3 > 4.4 > 4.5) releases, as the functionality is added and debugged either in qt4 itself or in kde extensions. BTW, this also can affect the seamless kde interoperability 3.5 had. Remember, it took several years for kde3 to get to the 3.5 level. My personal prediction is that in general, 4.5 will be roughly comparable, and with minor releases every six months, that'll be a year from now. Note however that even then, with the same minor numbers, kde4 will have taken 2.5 years to get to that point while kde3 took 3.5 years to get there, so kde4 /is/ coming along faster. It's just that kde3.5 was so polished and functional that getting /anything/ that close to working perfection takes awhile, and while I have my quibbles with dropping 3.5 support until 4.x, say 4.5, is there, the coders do IMO deserve commendation for the giant work they are doing, /and/, judging by progress so far, bringing it off, when 3.5 was for its time, /so/ close to perfection, that they have HUGE shoes to fill. 2) As Anne mentioned, it seems kaddressbook is still needed, but apparently not installed by default with Kontact on many distributions. She covered that well enough so I won't go into it further. 3) The dolphin/konqueror thing: If you're interested, you can find a lot written on this elsewhere, but (not so) briefly, there seem to be two factors involved, here. One, usability and security. It seems some people got confused with konqueror filling both the file manager and Internet browser roles. To some extent, that's an idea Microsoft tried in a far larger venue, and pretty much everyone agrees that at least for some users, it's a bad idea, security-wise, because it merges browsing the possibly unsafe web with browsing what one hopes is a much safer local filesystem in people's minds. Many Linux users criticized MS for it, yet KDE was doing it too (if arguably with a safer implementation). Two, related to that, but more from an implementation perspective, many people thought that konqueror didn't separate the roles as well as it could have, and thus didn't/couldn't implement either one as well as it could have. Menus and menu items that were most appropriate in one role were present in both, the browser home page got confused with the filemanager homepage, Internet bookmarks got confused with filesystem bookmarks, the single set of profiles for both roles was confusing, and as mentioned, the roles weren't really separated very well so no matter the profile, it still had menu items etc from the other role, etc. Also, one of the biggest complaints I've seen about konqueror over the years is the "overabundance" of toolbar buttons it defaults to every time someone upgrades. Most power users at least, very quickly reconfigured their toolbars to remove the ones they didn't use, and perhaps add a few more. While the different toolbars and konqueror profiles did allow some management, this too was very confusing to new users. Having konqueror only in the browser role by default allows choosing rather more sane browsing toolbars and buttons in the default config, without the profusion of file browsing buttons even in web browsing mode, while still allowing power users to adjust them as they wish. Plus, dolphin had come up with some of its own innovations, like the breadcrumbs style location bar that many found very useful once they understood how it worked (and with ease of switching between it and the old style typed text location entry). So, somewhere along the line, the kde folks made the decision to make dolphin the /default/ filemanager. Do note, however, that I italicized /default/ in ordered to emphasize it. Those who wish to can configure konqueror as their filemanager, or (at least with 4.3) even qwenview. There's also quite a number of krusader fans, and while I don't have it installed, I understand it can be configured as the system filemanager as well, when it's installed. It should also be noted that with kparts, the difference between dolphin and konqueror as a filemanager is blurring. Personally, I appreciate the new defaults, but perhaps not for the reasons most would. That's because I prefer the text/ncurses based mc, aka midnight commander, for system management tasks, where the GUI focus on icons isn't particularly useful, but file information like dates, ownership and permissions, is very useful. mc is just more efficient for that, especially since it's bash script extensible. Without that, what remains of my file management tasks is more GUI based, and dolphin (or for still images, gwenview, which is fast growing on me) simply works better at that than konqueror, or at least, it does for me. Plus, unlike a lot of people, I do use konqueror (as opposed to firefox) as my primary browser, tho I do use firefox with its more advanced extensions for some things. But, the combined effect is that with kde3, I used konqueor more for browsing and less for file management than most people, and where I did use it for file management, dolphin is more effective already, so I don't mind that konqueror's defaults now more emphasize browsing, at all. =:^) But as I mentioned, it's configurable, so those who prefer konqueror (or gwenview or krusader) to dolphin as their file manager, can easily set it so, thus continuing kde's emphasis on great user configurability. And, I do agree that the new defaults are probably best for users that don't do a lot of reconfiguring /of/ the defaults, so all around, I believe kde did the right thing, choosing dolphin as the new default filemanager, thus allowing konqueror to be better configured by default for its remaining default role, web browsing. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.