it’s been a long road
getting from there to here
it’s been a long time
but our time is finally near…

I never really got into the show (probably something to do with moving out and not having a TV) but I loved the theme song for Enterprise. it popped up on my playlist today, and got me thinking… with kde 4.2, our time is finallly near. :) time for us to no longer look to the past, but to the future instead. Plasma now has just about all the features kickoff had in kde 3.5, plus a bunch of stuff kicker could never do. I’m sure there are a few odds and ends to round up still (the biggest being contextmenu plugins, iirc) but those will come easily, and we can shift our focus to plasma’s future. finally, we can return to reinventing the desktop, pulling it out of its decade-long slumber and creating new, better ways of interacting with our computers. we’ve provided a classic experience for people who are fine with that (if they’re not happy now they never will be), now we can get back to making something awesome for all the people the classic desktop does *not* work well for. :)

So, what will the future bring? In february we’ll be meeting again to make some plans. aaron emailed plasma-devel the other day with some of the things he plans to work on – a design studio, jolie stuff, media centre stuff, security, js binding improvements and more. I’m hoping to help with the javascript and security myself, but there are plenty of other things I’d like to see happen.

I’m hoping for more use of Activities, with plasmoids that are aware of what activity they’re in and become more useful… maybe some openid coolness, which will open up more doors to who-knows-what… export and import of containments, so that you can have stuff you don’t always want running but don’t want the hassle of setting up from scratch repeatedly (I can see that making testing a lot less painful)… a smarter taskbar… another wave of useful little plasmoids…

and we’ll see plenty of cooler things that i can’t imagine, I’m sure ;)

on the less-shiny side of things, I hope to see some work on a dbus interface and keyboard interaction. imagine pulling up krunner and resizing a plasmoid (or panel) to be exactly 42 pixels tall… most people don’t care, but I know there’s an OCD minority that would love such control. ;) and there are more practical applications of keyboard interaction – imagine binding a keyboard shortcut to a specific containment, so that you could view it instantly (either a desktop or a panel containment – think autohidden panels and “ohshitthebossiscoming” activities ;) ).

of course, remember that none of these are promises. they’re just the ideas and hopes of one developer – a developer spending far too much time on homework instead of kde these days. :/ so I really can’t say how many of these things will happen for 4.3, or even 4.4 – we’ll have to wait until a more concrete feature plan appears.

still, with the crazy pace of plasma development, you can be sure that lots of stuff is going to happen, and it’s going to keep getting better and better. :) whatever 4.3 brings, it’s going to be fucking awesome. :)

when a project has one person who is significantly more visible than other contributors, speaking often and well, trying to make things happen by communicating outside the project, blogging on important issues, speaking at conferences… a funny thing happens. people seem to assume that person IS the project. they take his opinions as that of the project as a whole, believe that he somehow controls the project (a crazy notion when the project is as big and open as KDE), and some even seem to blame him personally for anything they dislike.

this isn’t good. not for the project, not for the individual. we should discourage people from treating anyone this way. we should try and keep anyone from falling into this position again. we don’t want celebrities.

after the recent drama, I imagine many contributors might want to hide away and make very very sure that they never get this kind of publicity. however, I think that would be bad. I think the problem isn’t exposure per se; it’s the relative levels of exposure for different contributors. when one person gets far more exposure than others, we run into trouble – so what we should try to do is have *lots* of people getting more exposure, such that no individual finds themselves out there alone. :)

we were discussing this on irc, and joked about creating an imaginary person to be the “king” of KDE, and have different people blog for it. then we realised that we’ve already got a place for news that isn’t from one single human being: the dot. apparently the dot editors would really like more articles. :) I think it’d be a good thing for the community if more people were to submit stories to the dot. they’d have to be a little more polished than a blog entry, but we have editors to help with that. the submission form looks a little, uhm, old – but hopefully kyle’s planned software updates will address that eventually. :)

Perhaps you’ve already written a good blog entry that could be transformed into a dot story easily (there was a nice folderview blog recently, maybe something like that should be on the dot). perhaps you’ve got something to say that’d interest the KDE community as a whole. don’t be shy, submit something! :) I’m going to try my hand at it soon… once I get caught up on soc. :P