Subclassed: KDelicious 3.0 (+ roadmap)

18 December 2007

KDelicious 3.0 (+ roadmap)

After a few days of obsessive bugfixing, I've finally released KDelicious 3.0.

This is a big step forward from pykeylicious: it now uses PyKDE components to save preferences and interact with the network, which means transparent support for proxies and KWallet.

On the usability side, I've moved the option "Tag this post on del.icio.us" to its natural place, out of the submenu. There's now a GUI to manage options, which means that you can now switch del.icio.us username or choose how to rearrange your locally-synchronized bookmarks, all from a nice and simple interface.

Unfortunately, the resulting proliferation of files forced me to adopt a "proper" installer mechanism, and for now I settled on distutils. This has one major drawback: non-root installs are much harder than they used to be, if you don't know your way around python.

Mainly for this reason, I (foolishly) decided to maintain two codelines. Pykeylicious 2.x will still be available for people who can't be root or don't have/want the KDE bindings for python, in bugfixing mode. It will not have support for proxies, unless somebody else hacks it in. I hope this doesn't come back to bite me; I'm actually tempted to "downgrade" pykeylicious to 1.0, which got better feedback than 2.0.

In the short time (3.1) I'd like to get rid of all calls to kdialog. I resisted up to now because they work and are fairly low-maintenance, whereas using the proper bindings need a little bit more infrastructure, but they are really ugly and slow and I hate when dialogs stick around after the program crashes. I am also tempted to use the python-dcop bindings, but they look complicated and dcop is going away in KDE4 anyway, so I don't know if it's worth it.

One thing that didn't make it in KDelicious 3.0 is support for Ma.gnolia.
I personally don't use the service, but they (very cunningly) expose a mirror of the del.icio.us API to allow for an easy switch, so adding the new backend shouldn't be too time-consuming. Unfortunately they don't support bundles, which in KDelicious are very useful for sorting the locally-synchronized bookmarks. I'm thinking to add this "multi-backend" option in 3.5.

For 3.2 I might package it for debian. The only reason for the effort is to have an "uninstall" option, that distutil hasn't. It's a boring job, but probably necessary. I'll also try out other del.icio.us plugins to steal featu--- ahem, get "inspiration" for new features.

By the time all this is done, KDE4 will have been around for a while (see my previous post)... KDelicious 4 might be a very nice app by that time ;)

Labels: delicious, GeekDiary, kde, kdelicious, pykde, pykeylicious, python