Saturday, February 9. 2008
KDE 4 porting of KMess
A while ago I mentioned briefly KMess would be ported to KDE 4. We weren't sure when to do it yet. Eventually we decided to port it as soon as possible before doing new changes to the codebase. That would only make the porting more difficult, or give SVN a vague status to new contributions. So at 15 January I started a branch for porting the code.
After all automated changes we went through all files one by one (resuling in ~190 commits) before things managed to compile again. For those that are interested, there is a screenshot of the first run. Things crashed at startup, crashed deep in QHttp, froze, and corrupted memory multiple times. Once you manage to open the settings panel again things look really funny. 
We've managed to get these issues fixed in the last 2 weeks and things are starting to get back in shape. This is KMess after ~270 commits since the initial start of the 'kde4porting' branch:
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| Login dialog | Full desktop |
Note that the application is still not usable. Now we've gotten past most crashes we can fix everything we've broken and make it pretty. Some things were broken on purpose to get past all compiling errors, like the contact list, now playing information and saving of settings. In fact, your settings will likely be eaten at this point.
There are some visible benefits for the KDE 4 porting already. Oxygen alone makes apps breathtaking beautiful. The networking code has less dependencies on KDE now, which helps to build a library from it later. The application startups almost instantly. Memory statistics also show some interesting effects (note the size is also affected by the shared libraries).
I'm not really sure what those numbers mean, but for the ignorant among us it makes KDE 4 applications look so much better. 
Love the screenshot of the first run, and the much improved config dialog is really a breathtaking bastillion of usability
And then the memory numbers... Even if it's just a indication, and only half right, the port shaved of a lot of memory
I'm often amazed by how much faster KDE 4 apps start up - from within a KDE 3 session, KDE 4 kwrite starts up like 10 times faster than kwrite 3 - and that one wasn't slow or anything.
Also, do try and get 1.5.1 out soon, having to compile from source just to be able to choose a display pic was annoying.
Thanks for this!
Regarding the name, consider the following. Does Nero tells you it's a burning app? WinAMP is a player? or Excel has anything to do with spreadsheets? It's not the names that matter. The branding does.
Different market, same issue: why do you order a Pasoa, Piña Colada, or Bacardi? Like their names tell you what the product tastes like. You either heard about them, or tried them yourself. A commonly shared opinion makes "Bacardi" sound cool but in reality it is no different then "Pacardi" yet that sounds strange.
So long story short: how important is a descriptive name really? At least KMess can be read as "KDE - MSN Messenger".
The problem, to state it succinctly, is that I think I'm exactly the intended audience -- dedicated KDE user who'd really like a better MSN client than Pidgin (or Kopete) -- but the only reason I now know of it is that I read the Planet and happened upon this blog post. Whenever I had previously heard of it, based on the name, I never even considered that it might be something I was interested in.
Just my two Forint, in case it's any help.
I believe the more important factor isn't a descriptive name. You have Kopete and Pidgin as examples, which are indeed fairly well known. But their names don't say much to me. How do you think they got so well known?
One of the most important things for me is standing out of the other options because you have something unique to offer. Currently people mention KMess because of the interface, winks, offline-im and fast file transfers, but also make a sidenote that we lack webcam support. That has to and will change
How did I find these? Gaim and Kopete was installed by default, and Amsn was fairly easy to find due to its name.
Not sure KMess existed then though.
I was going to suggest the names "Kmsn" or "KMessenger", but I doubt the devs will like it.
Searching for "msn linux" using google.se, KMess' site seems to be ranked higher than for example Amsn. Maybe it isn't a problem for people to find KMess after all.
By the way, I use Kopete now. It's a kind of hate-love, but I've gotten used to it.
It took me a month before I found out about KMess, because it was really hard to find in 2003. That's something I've been trying to change in the years I'm working on KMess.
I'm curious though. If you google for "msn messenger linux", we're hit #2 after amsn nowadays. So I wasn't under the impression we're that hard to find anymore. The ranking is the result of site optimizations and writing proper site contents.
About the aMsn ranking.. there are 1.670.000 hits for amsn, vs 76.600 hits for KMess. That also helps to find amsn faster in google..
Note KMess is KMess because there was a KMsn already, which renamed to KMerlin. Renaming KMess to kmsn is a bad idea since we already have: aMsn, bmsn, cmsn, dMsn (mercury), emsn, fmsn, gmsn, imsn, JMsn, kmsn, qmsn, rmsn, tmsnc, umsn, xmsn and zmsn...
Well, there are still 10 other letters of the alphabet
He always made the transfer to the word-joke "It's a complete [K]mess" when he talked about source-code and development, joking about his own.
That's what I remember, and I always liked it, because when I remember back about the mess that way arround me when Mike wanted to release and I tried to get the translations in time etc. it was very descriptive to everything
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