As of now [*], I hereby declare that KDE4 kind of supports viewports[^] (that is, the implementation of virtual desktops that Compiz and probably practically nobody else uses). Which means it possibly still sucks a bit here and there [x], but it's at least as good as in GNOME. In fact, after little checking[!], it appears that it is a bit better (try e.g. dragging a window in GNOME pager with Compiz running).

Today, in one user forum, I noticed somebody saying that they use different virtual desktops for different things and therefore they'd want different panel for each desktop. Our bug #79531, more or less. One interesting note is that the user uses GNOME, but would be willing to switch to whatever provides this feature.

What was it ... ah, yes ... KDE4.0 has been just released ... just in case you haven't noticed yet in all the other blog posts all around.

No, in fact, the thing I really wanted, was: People, the proper capitalization is "KWin". Not "KWIN", not "Kwin". It is the KDE Window Manager, just like KCalc is the KDE Calculator, KPat is the KDE Patience Game or KMenuEdit is the KDE Menu Editor. Okay :) ?

As one of my colleagues notes, this statement holds true on its own. However, for those like me too blind to see some things, there are two things about Flash you should know:

1. The latest Flash update fixes various critical security issues.
2. The latest Flash update does not work with anything that is not Gecko-based.

Do the maths yourself. Or just watch it happen as soon as your distribution's update hits your machine.

(I suppose using such number for this part makes the previous blog entry, part IV, written already quiiiiteee log ago, to have a wrong number, but who cares about that nowadays, it's just numbers, right? Anyway, it was so long ago that even I don't remember what it was about, which means I now have to think what to write about now. Hmm.)

I did a presentation on compositing managers at the local LinuxExpo last week. Using kwin_composite for demonstrations. And KWin actually did its job quite fine (although it had taken quite some effort to get it there, with KWin being almost ready for it for more than a week). What did somewhat worse was the human factor - having more than 20 shortcuts wasn't a very good idea and failing to show the final and best feature because the bloody modifier was supposed to be Ctrl was a bit embarrassing. Oh well. C'est la vie. The good thing is that there are more things to show.

I finally find out recordMyDesktop and played a bit with it. Animations are a bit boring as PNG images after all. Too bad the recording seems to take up quite some resources and the videos look a bit jerky because of that (GeForce2 is not that slow :) ). I had to intentionally make some of the things slower and take longer and it still looks worse than in reality. Oh well. Ok, some new things in kwin_composite from Rivo Laks, Philip Falkner and yours truly:

Ok, time for another screenshot. It actually shows most of the recent improvements in kwin_composite:

[image:2548 size=original]

Oh, cool. Novell's PR department needed only a week to produce FAQ that'd actually answer frequently asked questions. Press releases full of quotes, long words and other strange stuff are simple, but a plain and clear explanation of what's going on apparently takes time for some unknown reason. And, since pretty much everybody has already tried to interpret various aspects of the deal, including here on Planet KDE, why couldn't I as well?

Current kwin_composite branch can finally do some simple effects. The obligatory screenshot:

[image:2493 size=original]