[Kde-science] kst interested in the KDE science effort

Stuart Jarvis stuart.jarvis at gmail.com
Wed Sep 8 00:09:07 CEST 2010


On Tuesday 07 September 2010 22:26:30 nicolas.brisset at free.fr wrote:
> Hi KDE-science,

Hello and welcome :-)

> just writing to let you know that kst is interested in the kde-science
> initiative. I stumbled upon this list in the process of looking for places
> to share developer and/or user information for kst. I guess the next step
> is adding some info on http://community.kde.org/KDE_Science and waiting
> for some feedback on this list?

Pretty much. We're a bit slow starting with this (the list has been around for 
some years but only just become 'active' again). Anyway, you're in the right 
place for news and to get involved. There's also now an area for science on 
the KDE forums, which again we need to get active.
 
> Kst is a very capable 2D plotting tool which is not (yet) very well known,
> although the kst 1.x series has been around for a few years.

Yep, I looked into it briefly a couple of years ago while looking for KDE 
plotting apps but mostly discounted it because it wasn't obviously active 
(still KDE3 and no obvious news). Also I had the impression it was more for 
signal processing than generic data plotting, though it looks like I was 
wrong.

> It is
> probably relatively close to SciDAVis, which I won't endeavor to compare
> it with as I have not yet tried SciDAVis.

Which is what I ended up using and it's nice although a little unstable and in 
need of more contributors, I think. If Kst is similar then it could be very 
interesting to me.

> The project has recently reached
> a new milestone, with version 2.0.0 released as a Qt-only app for now to
> ease distribution on some platforms (e.g. Windows). The plans are to
> benefit from KDE goodies on platforms where KDE is installed, by
> reintroducing some optional dependencies in a forthcoming minor version.

Cool - I see there's a 2.0.1 beta, would that be the one?

> In the meantime after the release of the first 2.x version we want to
> launch some promotion work, as the tool's mindshare does not do justice to
> its quality. We've discussed some points on the kst mailing list already,
> but there have been only very few concrete actions taken until now. So,
> stay tuned and let us know what the plans are here, and whether/how we
> could get some help for that promotion work (or why not, coding!).

How about we (someone on this list, someone from KDE promo or me) do an 
interview with you/other team members about Kst 2 for KDE Dot News? I'm one of 
the editors there so I can say that's something we'd be interested in running 
-  one of the things we'd like to do is get some articles out on KDE Science 
apps (Qt with plans for KDE integration is fine).

Luca Beltrame recently did an interview with the lead developer of RKWard (R 
frontend) which will be published soon and ages ago I did and interview with 
the LabPlot and SciDAVis developers [1].

Actually you might want to talk to them too - I know calls from users for 
teams to work together don't always make sense ;-) but they're working 
together on some backend stuff with the ultimate aim to have SciDAVis as the Qt 
frontend and LabPlot as the KDE one, plus other variations in UI and 
capabilities of course.

Cheers,
Stu

[1] http://dot.kde.org/2009/10/16/labplot-and-scidavis-collaborate-future-
free-scientific-plotting


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