Firefox like search bar in KDE: welcome konsole

Since Firefox introduced its concept of a search bar at the bottom instead of an additional window several users asked for this to be implemented in KDE as well. Several KDE applications now implemented own versions of such a search bar, the newest app is konsole. Konqueror is still missing, however.

One of my famous bugs (not *that* most famous bug) is the wish to implement a firefox-like search bar in all KDE applications. That already happened with konversation and kate and now konsole followed as well.

Unfortunately, it seems that all these implementations are application-specific implementations and that these are not shared between the applications. It would make much more sense to rework the standard way of searching inside applications to be able to implement this new search bar everywhere where you have much text: kmail, kwrite, maybe even akregator, and of course: konqueror. This bug-wish, #93439, is actually one of the most wanted features

Unfortunately the response of some KDE developers wasn’t promising at all: it was always suggested to use the ‘/’ search technique for konqueror. That is not really an option for anyone with for example a German keyboard layout or with Chinese characters. Also, I seriously doubt that this technique would pass any usability test.
The developers listened to these concerns eventually and stopped suggesting the ‘/’ technique. But it doesn’t look like that anyone is working at this feature at the moment for konqueror or for all KDE apps in general. I guess everyone has already enough to do…

Well, there is still time and I hope someone starts implementing this as a base function for all apps. In such a case all other apps could take usage of it as well without having to spend any more time with it. So, if you like that function: vote for it in the KDE bugzilla.

Adobe flash player – official rpms

In former times the Flash Player was provided as a tar.gz. An additional project created pre-packaged versions for various distributions. This has changed now, Adobe is providing rpms on their main download page.

In former times (read: Macromedia times) the Flash Player for Linux was provided as a tar.gz archive. Other packages were available via a community project driven by Warren Togami. This project was tolerated, but not officially supported.

This now have changed: today I realized that the official Adobe download page for the Linux version features a rpm version as well as the tar.gz version. Looks to me like Adobe really tries to make Linux a first class citizen. And before you now ask for deb packages (which would be cool anyway) please keep in mind that that rpm is the LSB format – whether you like it or not However I’m not sure if this package is LSB compliant.

Fortunately there is still Warren’s community page – this has all the necessary packages and also provides repositories. Providing rpms is very good, but nothing beats a native repository.