The fact that day by day, new people try to use free software or free operating systems (like GNU/Linux) is a good thing, and we all know that.
Something is supposed to help in the process is also the set of the various communities: GNU/linux distributions, applications, etc. Though, this is also something really delicate, where everybody invloved should (IMHO) be careful in what is shown towards the new comers.

Nowadays, you can basically do most (if not all) of the basic operations without even caring about what a terminal is. That is something really nice! KDE, GNOME, whatever graphical interface does not matter, as long it's there and works.
What I cannot really, really, really stand is when you read on user forums, blogs, and other help support dedicated to users, instructions like (emphasys by myself):

Today the application Foobar v2.1 was released.
You can update your previous Foobar version by opening a terminal and doing the following:

$ wget 
$ cd /opt/whatever
$ tar xvzf foobaris-x.y.z.tar.gz
$ chown $USER:$USER -R foobar..
$ chmod -R ugo+rwx foobar...
$ cd foobar...
$ ./foobar

What the hell is that, for a normal user???

Leaving aside the fact that distros (especially the most "user-oriented" ones) try to have all the updated versions available (even the same day of the release!), why the hell do we have GUIs for unpacking archives, file managers for managing files and their permissions, package managers to install packages even out of the distro official update channels, etc???
I feel all the work for doing these interfaces seems "lost", if the user channels just propose this attitude.

Communities, STOP IT!! The only effect is loosing and discourage new users!

Important note: this does NOT mean this is something that all the communities or all the people in each communitiy do, but still it's something sadly not so unusal to see. Sigh...

One of the mottos of Ubuntu is "Linux for humans". And sometimes the "humans" could even not bother about the terminal, especially for easy operations.

Taking the idea of this entry from this album of Queen, I am going to show you some of the new stuff you will see in Okular for KDE 4.1.
The development is pretty active, also on other parts that bring benefits to Okular.

Another day, another set of interesting talks out of the over 200 here at FOSDEM.

First, I had a look at what the KDE guys at OpenSuSE are doing for KDE 4: plans to ship KDE 4.0.1 (or better, .2 as soon as it is released), whith some concerns about eg KDE PIM. Was also nice to know that they are working on porting the KDE 3 applications developed by their developers to KDE 4: KNetworkManager (using NetworkManager 0.7), Kerry (using a Xesam interface, thus more generic), KPowerSave, etc.

So, as I said previously, I'm at FOSDEM right now, sitting in the KDE boot, with some Amarok guys, Joos demo'ing all around, Marijn working on KDE and Adriaan hacking on the KDE4-branded SOLARIS thin client.

One of the objective we (as Okular[1] team) had for KDE 4 was bringing a public API for developers to expand the Okular formats easily, with no need to add new stuff into a single application. The result (obviously not perfect) is what we hope to be a good base for people to have their document formats shown in a single application, without caring about writing code for the user interface. As usual, just let us know if there is any need or problem

This is what I was able to see this morning, out of the window in my new Dutch apartment.
As ERASMUS student, two weeks ago I moved to Leiden for my studies, and here I am, facing myself with the Dutch environment. And its weather as well, that today kindly remember that we are still in winter. (Although last weekend was really nice, sunny and warm.)

Like many other things, okular used the sidebar KPDF had, adding tabs with new stuff (like the Review pane and the Bookmarks panel).

Now, the problem is that the implementation for these sidebars was all but a real solution. In the past, and especially yesterday, our usability expert Florian pointed me the issues of it.

For example...

Here it is, KDE 4.0 beta 1. Finally. I won't describe all the new features this beta comes with, as there are better people (random example) able to speak at least 10 times than what i would be able to do

So, going straight to the topic, the version of okular you find in the beta1 will have some (few, but interesting) improvements (other than the usual bugfixes), taking the alpha 2 as base version.

Time, going fast with no way to be stopped, relentlessly going on and on over our existences...
Ok ok, stopping the philosophy now

The fact is that my last blog entry is about 5 (!, yeah) months ago, and of course many things happened during these months.

... many things happens, uhm... the start of support of PDF forms.
But let's start explaining piece by piece.

Thanks to the work of Bradh Hards and Jiri Klement, the [w:XML_Paper_Specification|XPS] backend of okular has been improved a lot. It can now render pages in a way that starts to match to the expected behaviour, and get some information from the documents.