Need help to link KDEprintfax with Kaddressbook.

[Duncan]

Richard Dawson posted on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:17:09 -0700 as excerpted:

> I remember 2009.1 hype to the effect that addresses would be available
> for all programs, but when I installed (from powerpak DVD), neither the
> addressbook nor some replacement was present , even in Kontact, the most
> obvious place one would would expect to find it. I had some trepidation
> about installing Kaddressbook, since I thought there might be some new
> KDE approach to storing addresses. After all, Konquerer was replaced by
> Dolphin (Why?), so perhaps there was a new place or way to store
> addresses..
> 
> Failing to find any alternative, I installed Kaddressbook.

Three things to mention.

1) kde4 printing is now based on qt4's printing.  It's not (yet) as 
advanced as kde3's printing was.  That's an acknowledged issue, in fact, 
one I happened across on kde techbase the other day.  Improvements are 
coming, but expect it to gradually improve over the next few minor (4.2 > 
4.3 > 4.4 > 4.5) releases, as the functionality is added and debugged 
either in qt4 itself or in kde extensions.  BTW, this also can affect the 
seamless kde interoperability 3.5 had.

Remember, it took several years for kde3 to get to the 3.5 level.  My 
personal prediction is that in general, 4.5 will be roughly comparable, 
and with minor releases every six months, that'll be a year from now.  
Note however that even then, with the same minor numbers, kde4 will have 
taken 2.5 years to get to that point while kde3 took 3.5 years to get 
there, so kde4 /is/ coming along faster.  It's just that kde3.5 was so 
polished and functional that getting /anything/ that close to working 
perfection takes awhile, and while I have my quibbles with dropping 3.5 
support until 4.x, say 4.5, is there, the coders do IMO deserve 
commendation for the giant work they are doing, /and/, judging by 
progress so far, bringing it off, when 3.5 was for its time, /so/ close 
to perfection, that they have HUGE shoes to fill.

2) As Anne mentioned, it seems kaddressbook is still needed, but 
apparently not installed by default with Kontact on many distributions.  
She covered that well enough so I won't go into it further.

3) The dolphin/konqueror thing:  If you're interested, you can find a lot 
written on this elsewhere, but (not so) briefly, there seem to be two 
factors involved, here.  One, usability and security.  It seems some 
people got confused with konqueror filling both the file manager and 
Internet browser roles.  To some extent, that's an idea Microsoft tried 
in a far larger venue, and pretty much everyone agrees that at least for 
some users, it's a bad idea, security-wise, because it merges browsing 
the possibly unsafe web with browsing what one hopes is a much safer 
local filesystem in people's minds.  Many Linux users criticized MS for 
it, yet KDE was doing it too (if arguably with a safer implementation).  
Two, related to that, but more from an implementation perspective, many 
people thought that konqueror didn't separate the roles as well as it 
could have, and thus didn't/couldn't implement either one as well as it 
could have.  Menus and menu items that were most appropriate in one role 
were present in both, the browser home page got confused with the 
filemanager homepage, Internet bookmarks got confused with filesystem 
bookmarks, the single set of profiles for both roles was confusing, and 
as mentioned, the roles weren't really separated very well so no matter 
the profile, it still had menu items etc from the other role, etc.  Also, 
one of the biggest complaints I've seen about konqueror over the years is 
the "overabundance" of toolbar buttons it defaults to every time someone 
upgrades.  Most power users at least, very quickly reconfigured their 
toolbars to remove the ones they didn't use, and perhaps add a few more.  
While the different toolbars and konqueror profiles did allow some 
management, this too was very confusing to new users.  Having konqueror 
only in the browser role by default allows choosing rather more sane 
browsing toolbars and buttons in the default config, without the 
profusion of file browsing buttons even in web browsing mode, while still 
allowing power users to adjust them as they wish.

Plus, dolphin had come up with some of its own innovations, like the 
breadcrumbs style location bar that many found very useful once they 
understood how it worked (and with ease of switching between it and the 
old style typed text location entry).

So, somewhere along the line, the kde folks made the decision to make 
dolphin the /default/ filemanager.

Do note, however, that I italicized /default/ in ordered to emphasize 
it.  Those who wish to can configure konqueror as their filemanager, or 
(at least with 4.3) even qwenview.  There's also quite a number of 
krusader fans, and while I don't have it installed, I understand it can 
be configured as the system filemanager as well, when it's installed.  It 
should also be noted that with kparts, the difference between dolphin and 
konqueror as a filemanager is blurring.

Personally, I appreciate the new defaults, but perhaps not for the 
reasons most would.  That's because I prefer the text/ncurses based mc, 
aka midnight commander, for system management tasks, where the GUI focus 
on icons isn't particularly useful, but file information like dates, 
ownership and permissions, is very useful.  mc is just more efficient for 
that, especially since it's bash script extensible.  Without that, what 
remains of my file management tasks is more GUI based, and dolphin (or 
for still images, gwenview, which is fast growing on me) simply works 
better at that than konqueror, or at least, it does for me.

Plus, unlike a lot of people, I do use konqueror (as opposed to firefox) 
as my primary browser, tho I do use firefox with its more advanced 
extensions for some things.  But, the combined effect is that with kde3, 
I used konqueor more for browsing and less for file management than most 
people, and where I did use it for file management, dolphin is more 
effective already, so I don't mind that konqueror's defaults now more 
emphasize browsing, at all. =:^)

But as I mentioned, it's configurable, so those who prefer konqueror (or 
gwenview or krusader) to dolphin as their file manager, can easily set it 
so, thus continuing kde's emphasis on great user configurability.  And, I 
do agree that the new defaults are probably best for users that don't do 
a lot of reconfiguring /of/ the defaults, so all around, I believe kde 
did the right thing, choosing dolphin as the new default filemanager, 
thus allowing konqueror to be better configured by default for its 
remaining default role, web browsing. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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