L-P Huberdeau

I came across an article called Why KDE Rules from KDE News. I have been using KDE for many years and I use multiple applications from the suite on a daily basis, but this article talks about features I had never heard of. It really is worth reading. One of the good aspects is that the author attempts to remain objective and use valid arguments.

According to him, amaroK is one of the best aspects of KDE. I have to agree. Until recently, I was using XMMS, which is not a bad player, but the interface is a decade old and does not integrate with anything. I tryed switching to other players many times, but interface was simply worst. Until the day I heard about amaroK, which has an option to use an xmms-like interface. The player is simple to use, pretty and has a lot of features for managing the music collection and playlists.

An other great application is Kontact, which does everything I need: email, newsgroups, calendar, todo-list and RSS feeds. The Akregator news feed reader was integrated in the very last update. I tested it, and a few minutes later I trashed my old feed reader. KDE finds new ways to improve every release.

One of the section of the article I found the most impressive was the section on KIOSlaves. I had no idea it could do all these things, even rip and encode music CDs. I decided to test it out. Since I had no new CDs to rip, I had to pick one that was already ripped. After all, it was only a test. It actually works great: open the music CD, open up the folder matching your prefered encoding format, drag the songs to an other folder, and it’s done. The only problem I have with it, which means I will stick to Grip, is that I don’t have as much control over the file naming as I like to. It lets me select the components of the file name I want to see, but it won’t let me convert them to lower case.

I have been hearing about Ruby On Rails for around a year. A bunch of fanatics really devote their life to promoting it even where it’s off topic and inappropriate. I tryed looking into it a few times, but the syntax got me away from it every time. Instead of going the same way as any other langage, they decided to try to make everything comapct and unreadable. With the release of the 1.0 version, I visited the website once more and found these videos, which really demonstrate the ease of use.

The things they do within a few minutes really is impressive, but the impressive part is not the language itself, it’s the entire platform. All the examples I saw were made from OSX, so I don’t really know which IDE they are using, but it seems efficient with the language. There are a bunch of scripts available to generate base files and structures. All common tasks have quick ways to be done, from form validation to AJAX display.

It does look promising, but the syntax is so horrible, there is no way I could stand going any further.