Harsh J

If you like open source software, you end up doing that someday sooner or later – you scratch your itch and make a contribution. That’s how it rolls. Well unless you’re sponsored to do so, of course.

I did the same for KDE, having had an on/off relationship with it since 3.x, and finally settling onto 4.3, I managed to get into writing code for it. Although not a fan of the entire desktop, it is what I use on a daily basis and I do feel the lack of a few things sometimes. There’s already too much to customize; and am sure I don’t know the half of it yet.

I read a lot of comic books in my free time, on the PC. While I do have my collections named and arranged neatly, it has always been hard finding a particular file since there were no previews of its covers on KDE 4. Since Okular, KDE’s magnificent all-in-one document reader, reads the files (.cbr, .cbz type) why not also preview it. That became my itch, my want. And I scratched it with copious amounts of help provided by its development community. However, I’d be glad if some artist came along and gave the format an Oxygen-style icon as well – since it still lacks one.

In KDE 4.4, you will have comic book previews which would show you the comic book covers in its file manager’s preview mode. This should make your life easier. However, for .cbr thumbnails to work, you’d need the non-free version of unrar cause the free ones don’t do version 3+ files well. It isn’t a hard dependency, and .cbz ZIP files would work just fine without unrar. I’d also written support for .cbt, but it’d have to wait until KDE 4.5 cause of their ‘feature freeze’.

Since I made it this far, I also fixed certain minor annoyances – some reported by other people as well. A small list:

• Move spelling suggestions to top level menu
• Add timezone data to KRFB while sending desktop invites
• Don’t show ‘add to places’ in dolphin if item is already in there
• Fix the new Kickoff menu for recent applications
• Fix a minor annoyance with KMail’s Composer shortcuts

I’ll be more than glad to hammer more bugs, once the feature freeze melts. Go here to read about what’s new in KDE 4.4.

Don’t worry, both of these are just minor UI improving Mozilla Firefox extensions and not one of those heavy-weight resource hoggers. And you’d probably need the first one installed, its like a bug-fix. Read on …

First one would be the Long Titles extension.

As you’d have noticed on Firefox at times that the title attributes (tooltips/titles) in various pages are never displayed fully and always end abruptly with a “…”.

Like this image below:

This is cause of certain bug in Mozilla Firefox. Though this has been fixed in the upcoming Firefox version 3.0, you can fix this partial-showing in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 with this extension – Long Titles.

After fixing they’d look like below: (To get what am talking about)

The second extension is a rather personal pick of mine. Its called Hide Menubar.

Does what its named as, hides the menu bar (File, Edit, Favorites, History, Tools, etc …) and shows them only when you hit your ALT key.

Before:

And, after installing the extension:

Just like IE 7 does, perhaps. I use this to get more viewing space since I don’t really use my menu bar that much.For bookmarks, I use the Ctrl + B sidebar feature instead, when required. (This plugin also auto hides your menu after a certain amount of time, neat!)