KDE: Beauty within

Well, I'm gonna try to use Blogger web interface directly... but probably I'll paste everything into Kate before to publish. <grin>

Yesterday, I saw the most beautiful dialog I've every seen in KDE. It is part of Qalculate. I've always been attracted by Qalculate, probably because of the nice snapshots but also definitively because I find it more logical to get rid of the calculator style keypad when you have a full keyboard at hand.

So I finally installed it yesterday and I kicked KCalc out of the Kicker. Qalculate is fuller than an eggshell when it comes to available functions. You can calculate in any unit that come to your mind, in any number base, convert in between the units, the bases. The number of functions is so large that you have an auto-completion to help you find the right one. Something that pleases me is to be able to do calculations in base 12, especially to be able to enter numbers directly in duodecimal. This possibility may not be useful for everyone but you can also do the same in any "regular" base: binary, octal, hexadecimal. They are some many things in Qalculate that I'm probably going to read the manual. ;-) And amongst all this, I found a periodic table that demonstrates the potential of Serenity. I tried with other styles and I ran back to Serenity. Oh boy! I don't want to brag about Serenity but it's a real beauty. (This is what I call "self-satisfaction".) ;-)

Back to Serenity. Today, I got a proof of validity of the Open Software model --if I ever needed one. Somebody reported a strange bug. I looked in the source, I got an idea, I tried it, it worked for me. I sent just the file I modified to the bug reporter, he built it and answer me it also worked for him. Problem solved in less than one hour. If there weren't something else I wanted to tune, I could have released a new version one hour after the bug report. Try to do the same with a big company (of which I won't mention the name in order not to soil screens), but don't sit waiting in front of your screen for an answer. :-b

Now, I'm gonna do some tuning... or something else.