A look at KDE 4.8 Dolphin 2.0

As some of you may know, one of the most exciting changes/features landing at KDE 4.8 is Dolphin 2.0. The KDE main file manager is already full of powerful features and has seen its performance heavily improved in recent releases, but sounds like the jump to version 2.0 will bring several impressive extras.

Peter Penz goes deep into details in his ARTICLE on the subject, so I very much encourage reading it in full for those interested. For a quick summary, though, here are some highlights:

• Dolphin 2.0 will no longer use Qt's Interview Framework: "The new view-engine for Dolphin 2.0 is built on a (very) modified subset of Itemviews-NG. In the longterm (probably with Qt 5) it is planned to integrate Qt-Quick but this affects only a non-critical minor part of the view-engine and has not high priority at the moment."
  
  The benefits of this new approach include improved performance, unclipped filenames and more flexibility around item boundaries, which no longer have to be rectangular nor as big as they used to be.
  
  
• Grouping enhanced: "Currently the "grouping" feature is only supported for the icons mode but will be available for all view-modes in Dolphin 2.0."
  
  
• Animated Transitions: Probably the feature that adds less value, but the most visually evident and thus, the one that has created most noise. Here´s a preview which demonstrates this feature:
  
  
  
  Personally, I think it adds to the eyecandy side of things, those animations do look good, but I have no strong feelings one way or the other. It seems Peter made sure those animations wouldn´t end up becoming a bloat fest, so as long as Dolphin does not slow down, I am good.
  
  
• Reduced complexity: "From a developers point of view the new engine simplifies the maintenance a lot and lowers the barrier for developers to contribute patches for Dolphin."
  
  

So there you have it, Dolphin 2.0 is definitely one more reason to look forward to KDE 4.8, which will go live some time in January 2012.