Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News) [LWN.net]

KDE.News has a review of Kommander. "So the answer to the question many of you may be asking, "What is Kommander?", really has to be answered from each perspective. A simplified technical description is that Kommander is two programs, an editor and an executor, that produce dialogs that you can execute."

to post comments

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 4:02 UTC (Fri) by guest (guest, #2027) [Link] (10 responses)

Learn the truth about Linux.
http://linspiracy.blogspot.com/

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 5:22 UTC (Fri) by chohman (guest, #5519) [Link]

Hmmm - our guest actually believes Ken Brown from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. I would suggest not wasting your time.

Rule number one

Posted Jun 18, 2004 5:53 UTC (Fri) by NerdlyMcGeek (guest, #8453) [Link] (1 responses)

When trolling the pemiere Linux e-geekazine LWN, never leave a trail that leads to your door.

http://www.switchboard.com/bin/cginbr.dll?ID=15263092&ABS=0&FUNC=MORE&TYPE=1008&F=Dan&MEM=1&L=Cederholm&T=Salem&S=MA&QV=02A4AB7D8292DA4065CF3203O01A81DB4FE92DA4095CF3203O03A7263DD191DA40F6CF3203

/*
Blogger Template Style
Name: TicTac
Author: Dan Cederholm
URL: www.simplebits.com
Date: 1 March 2004
*/
<title>SimpleBits</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="description" content="SimpleBits: the hypertext home of web design consultant and author, Dan Cederholm." />
<meta name="keywords" content="simplebits, simple, bits, dan cederholm, dan, cederholm, web standards, CSS, XHTML, markup, style, freelance, web design, web development, Boston, Salem, MA" />

Rule number one: don't jump to hasty conclusions!

Posted Jun 18, 2004 6:17 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I'm afraid you are jumping to conclusions! The name mentioned in the invisible comments of the page seems to be only the guy who designed the HTML template for the blog system in question, and probably not in charge of the contents. Besides his home page and some googling left me with the impression he is a well-regarded professional web designer, and not one likely to do anonymous anti-Linux trolling.

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 11:42 UTC (Fri) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

OMG! That website is just too funny :D

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 12:29 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Learn the truth about Linux. http://linspiracy.blogspot.com/

Of course, that Web site is powered by Apache on Linux. Must be a conspiracy or something...

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 13:40 UTC (Fri) by penguinwarrior (guest, #20672) [Link]

good eye! yah, go to netcraft and see he is running linux on apache while watching soap operas and sitting in his yugo. it also shows he has wet himself and his personal 'up' time borders on nil....

as my daughter says when IM with her friends,

lol.

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 15:24 UTC (Fri) by dbhost (guest, #3461) [Link]

An anonymous blog, by an anonymous author, thrown out to the public by an anonymous comment. And this is to show us the "truth". As Robin once might have said...
Holy Redmond Batman! The F.U.D. spreader is creeping in again!

OT

Posted Jun 18, 2004 19:04 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

This thread is so wildly off-topic that I think it should be removed from this section. I clicked on the comments to read about Kommander.

Now, to stave off accusations of censorship and conspiracy I'd propose moving this thread to its own story: "Sowing Astroturf on LWN"

I have to wonder if this blog and posting were the work of Ken Brown himself? They don't have to be, any idiot could have done it. However, it would be a simple, low-cost, way to help keep the "Samizdat" slur campaign going. Of course he'd have to spam other sites, too. Have links to "linspiracy" started popping up on slashdot? Linux Today? Groklaw?

Whoever this troll is he's only managed about 160 profile views as I'm looking now. That's pretty lame, but that blog have been their less than a month, too.

The main counter-argument to my "Ken Brown is linspiracy" theory is that I'm not sure Ken Brown has the acumen to post to LWN. The guy couldn't even recognize Salus' name while he was alleging to be researching the history of UNIX. Supporting the argument, however, is the poor spelling ("Minux" and "dedacated" for Minux and dedicated respectively --- probably more that I haven't noticed).

JimD

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 22:15 UTC (Fri) by xorbe (guest, #3165) [Link]

I hope we don't have to suffer this /. style trolling too often. This *is* a pro-Linux site by definition.

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 20, 2004 2:54 UTC (Sun) by freeid (guest, #22401) [Link]

You sir are an idiot. Is that you darly mcLied?
Why do you hide behind an guest acount.
Did you know your site is hosted on Linux and open source Apache server?
A hipicrite as well.
Go suck off darly and bill you loser

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 18, 2004 17:44 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (4 responses)

I've been thinking for a while now that the right way to improve Linux useability is to make the design of user interfaces not require any programming, and make application programming not require any user interface. That is, developers produce functions which are provided to a scripting engine. End-user interfaces are put together by people who are good at that sort of thing, using a simple tool or a simple language to create small files.

The essential thing is that people who like to do useability studies are not, in general, programmers, and therefore are not comfortable modifying anything of sufficient code complexity to implement interesting functionality. So the solution is to separate the functionality-providing code from the interface-providing code, such that the former has nothing that impacts the user interface and the latter is all straightforward and explicit one-liners.

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 20, 2004 18:15 UTC (Sun) by dcoutts (subscriber, #5387) [Link] (3 responses)

A similar solution is glade and libglade. The UI designer builds a nice interface with glade (no programming required). The programmer uses libglade to get references to the objects defined in the glade xml file and add script them together with the main program functionality.

Of course the glade xml file can be changed later after the program has been written (without recompiling) so it is fairly easy for a UI designer to tweak the interface later or for someone to translate it.

A good 'RAD' combination is python, gtk+, liblade and glade.

Kommander Looks to Shake Up the Desktop (KDE.News)

Posted Jun 20, 2004 18:40 UTC (Sun) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

That's a good first step, but I'd actually like to turn it inside out.
That is, the programmer first implements the functionality, without any
reference to the interface, and then the UI designer takes what amounts
to a library of bindings and builds an interface for it.

This is a bit like how emacs works: there are functions implemented in
elisp, and key bindings and such refer to them. The problem with emacs is
that both parts are in elisp, which is difficult for most programmers and
UI designers, and the parts get mixed badly due, in my opinion, to the
parts being in the same language.

I'd like to see a mail program, for example, which consists of functions
which fetch messages and send them; added to this would be a user
interface which arranges the parts of the message on the screen, handles
composition, formulates searches, etc. From the point of view of the
functionality portion, the sender address of an outgoing message is an
argument; it is up to the UI whether this address comes from the OS, a
configuration database, a program-local setting, or a composition window
UI element. It would effectively be a version of mh using an in-process
API with structured data, instead of command-line arguments, stream IO,
and separate processes and executables. The same engine for
IMAP/POP/SMTP/local mail transfer/etc would be useable for an interface
like pine, an interface like mh, and an interface like thunderbird.

Separation problems

Posted Jun 21, 2004 6:13 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

The trouble with attempts to entirely separate the UI and application logic is that to implement some UI features effectively, you may need changes to the application, or get information from it that the application-UI interface did not anticipate.

To take your e-mail application as an example: suppose the UI designer wants to implement a feature that optionally auto-completes addresses on the To-line based on previously received mails (because it is a good bet you want to send mail to someone you have corresponded previously). The application logic provides a way to list old mail headers from what the information can be extracted, but this is unlikely to be fast enough for the user interface, and even then the UI side has to do some programming to extract just the addresses. To maintain the separation, the UI designer would have to talk the programmer to implementing a fast "list the addresses" function. After a few rounds of this, the UI and the application will be so intertwined it is hardly worth talking of them being separately developed...

Separation problems

Posted Jun 22, 2004 2:42 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think that this would be balanced out if there are multiple UI
designers asking the same application team for things. If the application
team has good taste (in the sense in which Linus has good taste), they'll
come up with solutions to fulfill the requirements in ways that make
sense from the point of view of modelling the data. Getting a list of all
of the addresses in a set of email messages (or all of the senders, all
of the recipients, all of the senders with a particular recipient, etc)
is a logical operation, and not particular to a given UI. (A side issue
is an easy API for specifying searches). But it seems likely to me that a
batch program might want a list of all of the addresses in messages sent
within two weeks either to the user or that the user responded to.
Keeping the UI separate from the engine allows name completion and
searches for other reasons to be specializations of the same general
functionality (even beyond the purely UI characteristic of how the user
interacts with name completion).