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KDE GUI

The People Behind Quanta Plus 137

Posted by michael from the quanta-is-nifty dept.
anonymous writes "In this fascinating interview, Eric Laffoon and Andras Mantia give us a glimpse into the world of the Quanta Plus project. Read on for everything from tantalising references to Kommander, billed by Eric to be part of the foundations for the next generation desktop and user experience, to details of future plans for Quanta VPL (Visual Page Layout)."
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The People Behind Quanta Plus More

The People Behind Quanta Plus

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  • Next up: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @04:41PM (#5784647)
    Koffeemaker - for KDE hot drinks
    Kondom - for KDE developer safesex
    Kommode - for taking a KDE Krap

  • Quanta? (Score:3, Informative)

    by L3WKW4RM ( 228924 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @04:45PM (#5784681) Homepage

    There is only one Quanta [ultrasoul.com].

  • Next generation in bad UI design maybe (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Molz ( 87066 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @04:47PM (#5784696) Journal

    I mean, good god, look [sourceforge.net] at the layout of the tabs in that dialog for Kommander. Most of the other shots don't get much better.

    Is it too much to ask these guys to put down the source code for 5 minutes and skim a chapter or two in an HCI book?

  • Misspelled name? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @04:47PM (#5784702)
    Shouldn't it be, "Kuanta"?
    • Or Kwanta...in hopes to be more open to those of other cultures (as in Kwanza).

      In the words of our friend Krusty the Klown: "Have a Merry Christmas...and a Krazy Kwanza"

  • My Views, (Score:5, Informative)

    by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @04:48PM (#5784708) Homepage
    Quanta Plus is probaly the only WYSWYG editor i have used and liked.
    I use vim for all my work, be it writing c/java code, shell scripts, html/xml , emails . basically everything that requires using keyboard for extended amount of time.
    Over the years i have tried various IDEs and WYSWYG editors and gave up on them after some time to fall back to my trusted VIM.
    Most of them are too bloated and takes ages just to start up. Plus you need a special directory structure and so on so forth.

    Quanta plus is very fast, the pre-view actually works , and very intutive piece of s/w.

    • Re:My Views, (Score:4, Informative)

      by KDan ( 90353 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @04:53PM (#5784758) Homepage
      You wanna get your hands on a copy of Eclipse [eclipse.org] for Java, mate. Better yet would be Borland JBuilder Enterprise edition, but that costs $$$.

      Daniel
      • Eclipse has too many views and panes that obstruct the view of the editor for my tastes. It looks complicated. But the great thing about free software is that you can afford to chose which suits you best. I like simplicity and VIM plus a shell to run a debugger is fine for me.

        Eclipse may actually be better but I was overwhelmed and I run my resolution at 1024 x 768 which obstructs views. I was under the impression that version 2.1 came with autocompletion but I did not see it. Maybe I should upgrade my mon
      • Oh please..
        Although most of my coding is in Java, I would be the last person to use a Java GUI tool. JFC/Swing are hopeless slow. AWT is not bad but slow yet compared to vim or even emacs.
        Borland JB is a big mess of stuff that i don't need. I have coded in Java for more than 4 years now, and I don't need most of the features that JB offers.
        All I need is
        • syntax highlighting :- VIM can highlight over 200 types of files
        • customisable/plug-in support :- Customisable beyond belif, can write plug-ins in ruby/p
        • Yeah, well, some of us don't wanna spend weeks doing stuff by hand when it could be automated. You may load vim up fast, but I can create a Struts application with a few clicks.

          Plus vim doesn't have code completion/insight, doesn't compile shit as you type, etc. Rather than spending half my time alt-tabbing to compile, see a typo, go fix it, compile again, see another typo, go fix it, etc, it's really worth the spare cycles to just see the wrong shit underlined in red while you're typing.

          And if you find
          • Thank you!

            Swing is slow. 4 years ago. Swing today isn't bad at all, especially with JDK 1.4.1. I seriously wish the "java is slow" bigots would get over it and try a modern version with java with a modern application. JEdit perhaps?

            And you're spot on about JBuilder. IT's fantastic for actually writing code. The only thing I don't like about it the fact that it wants to name everything for you (JMenuItem1, JPanel4). I'd like it much better if you could toggle settings to have it prompt you for the n
        • Actually Eclipse is based on swt which is lightning fast. It uses hooks to interact with the native wtk's on your platform of choice. The downside is the win32 version is better then running it on a motif Unix platform. But its alot faster then netbeans or jbuilder using swing because of its native hooks. Its snappy.

          I prefer Vim myself. But I am not a java developer.

          Eclipse is a complex tool and is the most advanced I have ever seen. Its the autocad of ide's. It has plugins for c++, UML and all sorts of
          • You can customize all the stuff you mentioned. The only problem is that, as far as I could find out, anyway, the plugins are mostly in developmental stages, and not very user-friendly at all. There's a handful which are actually useable, but even those don't come close to the integration you get in JB. That's why I like JBuilder - it automates almost everything that can be automated. But JB is good only for Java. The Eclipse project is a platform that could be used to write an IDE for any language. It's des
      • I scoured the website, but I couldn't find any screenshots -- maybe I'm just missing them?

    • Re:My Views, (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
      If your using Windows try out AceHTML. Its free for non commercial use. Comes with alot of stuff including custom scripts and a w4c html validator.

    • Quanta Plus is probaly the only WYSWYG editor i have used and liked.

      Quanta is not WYSIWYG my friend. I once wished it were, but then I discovered learning HTML is not that hard.

    • Quanta Plus is not a WYSWYG editor! According to the article they are going to include a WYSWYG feature in the next release.
  • ...still not as good as ed.

    • Its ok but....
      ...still not as good as ed.

      Oh yes it is:

      pvsavola@tienel:~$ ls -l `which quanta`
      lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 Oct 25 11:17 /usr/bin/quanta -> /bin/ed

      I think it makes it at least equal, neh?
  • Holy crap! Marcie in Advertising got a story posted at Slashdot! YOU GO, GIRL!

    • Haaa haa haa...
      My thoughts exactly. "fascinating interview" , "tantalising references"

      What suspense! What drama! Goodness gracious, I'm practically beside myself in anticipation of the goodies yet to come!
  • i realize they have a KDE fetish, but is it really necessary to make something to general as a web development environment based on kde *schtuff*, so that i need to load all the bloated libs to use it? they seem to proud of their quality, but rather restrictive with respect to a user's preferences for desktop environment. doesn't seem to be any good reason to not use gtk2... just my unwanted $0.02
    • The KDE libs offer more features than pure GTK2 at the expense of larger footprint and depending on Qt/KDE. Their choice I guess. I tend to prefer neutral software (which invariably uses GTK2, pure Qt apps are very rare), but I'm not really religious about it.
      • I tend to prefer neutral software (which invariably uses GTK2...)

        so, neutral in what sense then?
        • As in desktop neutral. IMO "Karma Sucks" is wrong, GTK2 is indeed neutral - it has no dependancies on any of the GNOME libraries, it's used in a lot of non-gnome software (gaim, xmms, gimp etc). The fact that GTK is easier to configure in GNOME than KDE is more to do with where the respective developers priorities lie than anything else, KDE could easily write an xsettings front end, but so far have not.
          • GTK2 is not desktop neutral. It does not integrate with my KDE desktop and as you admit it can't even handle its own configuration without GNOME around. gaim, xmms and gimp are not desktop neutral.
      • GTK2 is not neutral software, it's GNOME software. How can you stand that useless file dialog?

        At least the KDE core is usable for real work and development. The professional and modern looks are a bonus. I run KDE 3.1.1a on an ancient computer. You are really overblowing the large footprint, it works great!
        • While we're at it. Since GTK2 is supposedly so neutral, how the hell can I theme GTK2 apps without running that crapass gnome -settings-damon. You know, that neutral piece of software that clobbers my root window and gets real pissy if I want it back for KDE.

    • Re:kde? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by JollyTX ( 103289 )
      Hey, KDE is meant to be used this way. KDE developers didn't create the nice elaborate framework that KDE is just for fun. KDE provides resources to make programming large apps easier and apps like Quanta+ is the fruit of that labour.

    • Maybe you should understand which libraries they are using for what before you shoot from the hip. For example, by just using KDE's file-open dialog they don't merely gain the obvious advantage of a look-and-feel which is consistent with the rest of a KDE desktop, they also gain the ability to open and save directly to any (psuedo-)protocol implemented in the kio-slaves (also part of the KDE library); this includes ftp, ssh, sftp, webdav, and http, to name a few. That's not bloat, those are really useful

  • The Quanta Plus page claims HTML validity and even sport a "Valid HTML" button, but the site doesn't actually validate [w3.org].

    Their front page is generally pretty weak. I have no real idea what their software does. Is it a text editor? A web IDE? A WYSIWYG page-churner? All of the above? All I see is a verbose attempt at associating their project with PHP, Apache and Linux, and at saying their software is the best - but doesn't really say what it's best at or what it's better than. Even worse, looking at the link

    • >The Quanta Plus page claims HTML validity and even >sport a "Valid HTML" button, but the site doesn't actually >validate [w3.org].

      Missing ALT tag? Oh, boohoo!

      These are such nits you are picking. Minor bugs that can be fixed in a few seconds. Instead of sending a polite bug report, you decided to pull a tantrum on slashdot.

      Good for you.
    • And their screenshots of how it renders incorrectly in "Internet Exploder" by "M$" (which is, in fact, what I'm using right now and it renders just find) really encourages me to give their software a fair trial-- after all, they have so much respect for the most popular web browser in existance.

  • Nice timing.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by unorthod0x ( 263821 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @05:11PM (#5784901)
    Just moment ago I finished putting together a 50 page annual report - I decided at the very beginning of the project to give Quanta a shot; I knew I was in for a lot of copy and paste, I've been working with vi for ages and had a feeling that I may be able to save time by taking this on using Quanta.

    End result? There's little doubt that it saved me time; probably 8 hours in total. Not bad. There were some annoyances as with all software of this type, and most of it can probably be chalked up to my inexperience with this software package; tags being auto-closed when I didn't want them to and vice-versa, strange text colouring, etc. Then there were some quirks like when some tags auto-closed they also moved the display up a couple of lines; so if I wanted to paste with my middle button right after having a tag auto-complete it would end up somewhere else. Stuff for me to R{more of}TFM and submit bug reports, but bottom-line is that I was quite pleased, it kept me organized and saved me some time. I'll certainly use this for future [applicable] projects and provide the community-feedback these guys deserve. Well done, check it if you haven't already!

    • Re:Nice timing.. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gnugnugnu ( 178215 )

      Please do carefully think about the problems you had. Even if they were due to inexperience they may well provide you with an insight on how the interface could be imporved.

      Self awareness and careful analysis will allow you to do useful research in the area of Human Computer Interaction without the need for any specialised knowledge or equipment (although reading up on the on Usability and HCI should help you distill the issues you are having and help you write clear and constructive criticism).

      Good luck
  • They've said it before and they say it here: They plan for Quanta to be the best webdev app under the sun, which means they have to compete with one of the best commercial apps out there: Macromedias Dreamweaver.
    Other than the usual BS about Gimp being a PS killer (utter nonsense) I think it's actually doable to eventually dethrone DW as king of webeditors. I see no way DW can go any further than now without getting hideously bloated. And if Macromedia doesn't manage to get into detailing DW and rid it of a

  • Only on Slashdot. . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fritz Benwalla ( 539483 ) <randomregs@gmai l . c om> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @05:18PM (#5784964)

    . . .would mentions of an interface development tool be described as "tantalizing." Some other suggestions:

    -- "Naughty little whispers of Gideon."
    -- "A playful spank of KwikDisk."
    -- "A lingering yet mournful longing for the world that DCOP would bring, yet knowing it shall never be. . ."

    ---

  • Used to be Homesite, now Quanta... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aquarian ( 134728 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @06:23PM (#5785546)
    I've been using Quanta for a few years now. My favorite HTML editor used to be Homesite, but it got too bloated. Then I found Quanta, which was like the older versions of Homesite, but has steadily improved while Homesite has gotten more and more bloated. Quanta has been my favorite HTML editor, on any platform, for quite awhile. Thanks, guys!

    BTW, I also think KDE is a better Windows than Windows.
    • I used HomeSite up to 5 I think, and liked it. Never thought it was too bloated, but I also never used its advanced features like project management. I wish that large-ish features you don't use could just be disabled. In opera 6, if you didn't use the email or IM client you could disable them from loading and hogging memory.

    • I too migrated from HomeSite to Quanta and have really liked the clean interface and the way it generally works. One of the things I like best is that it is pretty customizable, so I was able to set up some of the default keybindings to some of the ones I really used a lot in HomeSite and have become accustomed to. The customizability (is that a word?) of the application is a strong point.

      After reading the article, I figured I'd try downloading the CVS version and see if I could compile it so I could giv

  • I have to say that Quanta has so far been my tool of choice for web development since switching to a Linux platform. I like to think of it as an InterDev "lite" -- it has all the useful editor and project functions I actually used under InterDev without all the overhead, crashes and expensive per-seat license.

    The only things blatantly missing from Quanta (from my perspective anyways) are the database tools that InterDev has. It's nice to be able to view table and field properties, edit data, test SQL state

  • The real killer app... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by listen ( 20464 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @06:27PM (#5785577)
    would be intra and interapp scripting that is consistent and based on a real component model.

    There are tons of bloody component models, why can't one be agreed upon? Because they all seem to suck.

    * KParts is not robust - its basically standard C++ linkage with a funner preprocessor. Also GPL bound. And I'm a GPL fan, but this is too restrictive.
    * Bonobo is ridiculously overweight and doesn't seem even half sensible. The CORBA C binding? You have got to be kidding me. It is an absolute mess if you wanted to define a new interface and actually use it from a C program without wanting to gouge your eyes out with POAs and BOAs and excremental error checking. So you have to wrap it up in a GObject - ie you may as well forget defining an interface. And CORBA is fugly in any language.
    * XPCOM - dunno, only used by mozilla atm... uses lots of ugly random numbers (UUIDs). Seems like a clone of MSCOM
    * UNO - OpenOffices COM clone...

    Either we pick one or really try to find an optimum. Hopefully ban the use of random numbers in source files (UUIDS), use domain strings instead.

    Hopefully freedesktop.org or someone will try to standardise here - atm it is horrible.
    You should be able to
    * write a widget component and use it in a GTK, QT, Tk etc program.
    * write a theme component and use it to control the look of any of these toolkits. - hopefully a better solution than duplicating or triplicating theme plugins.
    * the whole ole shebang
    * write non gui components and mix languages.

    MS have had this working in a very ugly (on the source and implementation level) way for *ages*. Some of it is due to the level of control they exert, but we need to catch up.

    This would be especially good because if we had a reasonable C mapping, people wouldn't be forced to use C to write infrastructure. Which isn't everybodys cup of tea.

    None of this is new or clever, its just something that annoys me every now and then that no progress is being made.
    Yeah yeah, I know, "show me the code" etc, etc.

    • Re:The real killer app... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by miguel ( 7116 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:32PM (#5786013) Homepage
      What you describe was in the minds of a lot of people in the Gnome world back in 2001. There was a project by Havoc and Owen called "The Hub", which was aiming at creating an object Hub for all the different object systems. Allowing everyone to talk to each other.

      Then Microsoft published the .NET Framework, which many of us see as a "hub" for object integration: integrate old apis through P/Invoke or runtime support. Languages like C++ are supported directly through native compilers, and a common set of rules helps other compilers generate code that interoperates.

      Look at http://www.go-mono.com/rationale.html for some of the early motivations for the project.

      Today there are nice bridges for Perl and Python that allow them to consume objects from .NET.

      Miguel.
      • Hi miguel, I've been trying to find the URL for the Hub for a while, but Google isn't helpful. Do you have it?
      • Is it really rational to expect people to go through a VM layer for the base case? Ie linking together two native code components? Nobody is going to do this on windows, we are going to be stuck with the elegant lump of ugliness that is COM for quite a while in win32 land.
        I've looked at mono and I use .NET on windows, and it is a nice system. Java revisited effectively, and a slightly better VM design. I wish you well, but currently I don't get how this is going to help replace shared library plugins with
      • the .NET Framework, which many of us see as a "hub" for object integration

        While, unsurprisingly, many others of us simply see Dotnet as a rehash of Java.

        The hard problems of interoperability are not addressed by either. For example, something as simple as pass-by-reference or pass-by-value should be dictated by configuration rather than hard-coded, yet practitioners seem to be under the impression that the solution lies in implementing 'value objects' rather than fixing the platform itself.

        As long as te
    • KParts is not bound to GPL. What is non-robust about it?

    • Re:The real killer app... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      check out http://vcf.sf.net
      looks like an interesting component model, and is based on C++ AND is BSD licensed. Llinux port is in progress and Mac port is coming - looks like the guy ordered a G4 just for this.
    • And dont forget XParts. This is how KDE embeds Mozilla and VIM.
  • Actually, I really like Quanta. I've been more productive with Quanta so far than any other HTML editor on any platform. Maybe it's less what Quanta does, than what it doesn't do - mangle code, for one. I was used to graphical/WYSIWYG editors for a long time, but now I really do prefer to write HTML code with the excellent tag properties menus. As much as one can write HTML in a text editor, I just can't always remember every attribute for every tag I use. So, it helps me be complete. I think most peo
  • Why would I buy or use an html/web page editor form a company or organization with quite possibly one of the most ugly and ametuerish web sites I have seen in a long time?

    I don't mean to be rude (or to sound like Simon Cowell!) but after the excellent web page designs we saw here [slashdot.org] and most especially here [homelesspixel.de], how could I take any tool seriously when created by people who clearly can't do good web design.

    I personally would like to know what Radu used...;)

    And for the record, I don't pretend to be a web designe

  • First of all, let me say I think it's great that there are a lot of programmers out there (myself included) who take the time to write free software.

    What bothers me is the user interface design. While I understand there have been plenty of UI design tools out on the market that have this same design, Visual Basic is of course the one that first comes to my mind. Look at the interface, it looks like a clone of VB.

    When will the programmers of the world wake up and realize that Microsoft's user interfaces

    • Menus are reasonable. There's no chevrons at the bottom of them revealing all of the choices; if there's that many choices, then something is wrong. Toolbars are another great example. They have a handful or two of very large icons that are easy to spot. The whole purpose of a toolbar is to provide very quick access to very commonly used and unique functions, not to duplicate the menus in the toolbars. For instance, you rarely find toolbar buttons for new, open, save, and print. Those are functions that are

  • This may be a little off topic, but I thought it'd be a good time to ask: Can anyone recommend a good free/Free editor for HTML? I'm not looking for a WYSIWYG editor -- just something that allows me to hand-code more easily (with syntax highlighting and the like).

    My current favorite [handcoding.com] is probably Crimson Editor [crimsoneditor.com]. Its big features include syntax highlighting (of course), a tabbed interface, and change detection (it notifies the user if someone else has changed the file on-disk).

    Any others I should look into

    • I use JEdit when I'm restricted to Win32 but as you stated it doesn't have a tabbed interface but when you have many files open it's just as easy to use the dropdown to switch between files.

      I also use GVim when I want something quick and lightweight but I keep forgetting about the different key bindings when I use it so I tend to not use it for any extended editing as I usually end up stuffing things up by trying to copy or paste.

      J
  • Got VPL? Try wearing a G instead.
  • and have a cat, then buy some premium catnip toys & stuff from Kitty Hooch [kittyhooch.com].

    Kitty Hooch is Eric's business. He pays Andras to work on Quanta. Thats not much dough a month (Andras lives in Romania of all places) but its all out of his own pocket.

    And for what its worth, cats like his catnip a lot more than the store-bought one.

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