Irc-Unix.net

Sometimes you crunch some numbers on a  particular metric and the result simply causes you to stare at your screen, slack-jawed, wondering “why did nobody notice this at the time?” Well… maybe someone did and I hadn’t noticed. Here is a deliberately vague plot. It is deliberately vague because I do not want to prejudice your thoughts about what we are… Read more →

In case you didn't hear, KDE is running a fundraiser which helps fund sprints and other expenses of your favorite desktop/applications/games brought to you by the KDE community. Plus there are cool konqi postcards!

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled blog reading, have a nice day.

Unless you've been living under a rock today you would have seen that Groupon™ have been trying to use a trademark that belongs to GNOME™. Today GNOME™ started raising money to fight a legal battle.

I know there have been ongoing private discussions for months, and even though I have no idea what was said I do have full faith that if it got to the point of Gnome threatening to take legal action, it's because they felt they needed to.

It seems to have worked.

Communities Unified

What I loved to see most about this was I opened my G+/Facebook/Twitter feeds to see all of my KDE colleagues resharing this piece and donating money. Even /r/linux on Reddit, normally a somewhat feisty community, was filled with comments like "I don't use Gnome, but I'm going to support them".

Working together, supporting each other is what us open source communities should be about.

We're Not Easily Pushed Over

I don't think there was any attempt or conspiracy to try and destroy Gnome, but I do think there must have been ...read more...

If you have had your head in the sand today you might well have missed the story that the GNOME Foundation and Groupon are is a disagreement over the use of “GNOME”.  I already shared my thoughts in Tweet form earlier… But now I’d like to talk a little more. Not about the event, but about how we (the Free… Read more →

UI

Scott Petrovic revamped the UI of the transform tools for better readability and usability, and is now heading towards changing around the brush-settings.

Boudewijn  changed around the way background colour works: now Krita uses white as the default transparency-fill colour. You can set this from opaque to transparent in the new-file dialogue to get the transparency checkers back. The new file dialogue will remember this for next time as well! There’s still some bugs involved with this, but hopefully they’ll be fixed soon.

The crop tool now has grey handles instead of ugly yellow ones.

Kickstarter

Dmitry Kazakov is still busy on the transform masks. Transform masks are saved transformations so they may be applied non-destructively. The major holdback is several bugs which make the transform masks a little glitchy and unpredictable. In effect, this makes the current work on the transform masks similar to polishing an octogonal wheel till it’s round: Without it, we’d still have a wheel, but it would be uncomfortable to use.

There’s a seperate branch for Layer Effects started. Currently, the plan is ...read more...

Over the past year I've been reading a lot of opinions on the new init technology, systemd. Some people think systemd is wonderful, the bee's knees.

After the first KF 5 release, I contacted the creator of the Krita mascot Kiki and the KF 5  dragons artwork, Tyson Tan, if he would be interested in design a Kate mascot, too. He immediately agreed to help out and after some months of roundtrips, here we go!

Kate has a mascot: Kate the Woodpecker

The short design summary (by Tyson Tan):

Why a woodpecker? I said I was going to draw a humming bird, but she turned out to look more like a woodpecker, and the sound a woodpecker makes knocking on a tree is coincidentally similar to the sound of keyboard strokes).

Kate is female because of her name. I thought about other names like Klicky and Katherine, but I would rather save them for other future KDE projects to pick up as their names.

Design elements:
“{}” on the chest, “/” of the feathers, and “*” in the eyes.
The wing feathers also resembles multiple document tabs.
Color scheme inspired by doxygen source code highlighting.

And how does the first version of the mascot ...read more...

Since KDE SC 4.10, Kate ships with the Projects plugin. This plugin provides an automatically generated structured list of files belonging to a project. Currently, in Kate 5, the Projects plugin looks like this:

What’s new in the Project plugin in Kate 5 since some weeks is an auto-loading feature. In 4.x times you needed to create a .kateproject file that was then read by the Projects plugin to populate the listview. This still works in Kate 5, of course. But if a .kateproject file does not exists, you can now still read the file list from the version control system. To this end, auto-loading for the respective version control system needs to be enabled in the settings (enabled by default):

We hope this is useful to you

Final lovely quote from Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. Please get the book for yourself if you want to know how to foster creativity in a community or company.

In the very early days of Pixar, John, Andrew, Pete, Lee, and Joe made a promise to one another. No matter what happened, they would always tell each other the truth. They did this because they recognized how important and rare candid feedback is and how, without it, our films would suffer. Then and now, the term we use to describe this kind of constructive criticism is "good notes." 

A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn't clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered in a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem. A good note doesn't make demands; it doesn't even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific. "I'm writhing with boredom," is ...read more...

I just noticed a couple of features today and yesterday in plasma next and kwin that I appreciate and wanted to thank whoever thought of adding them. Both are simple but very handy to have. I'm talking about the little X buttons on both the wallpaper configuration dialog and the kwin present windows effect. I don't use either of these features very often, but yesterday when I was testing knewstuff with the wallpaper config it was very handy to be able to delete the installed wallpaper from the wallpaper selection dialog. Then just now it was very handy to be able to close extra windows I had open that I no longer need when I was in the present windows effect looking at what I need to be doing next. Makes it very simple to clean up a workspace.

Just throwing this out there, thanks whoever added these simple nice features.

As you may recall, I recently switched to GitBook.io as my primary publishing platform. Alas, my GitBook.io experiment didn't last long. Everything worked smoothly until I encountered a rather serious issue: for some reason, EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files generated by the service didn't include any images. I duly submitted a bug report and tried to contact the developers via Twitter, but I got no response.

This is not the end of the world, of course, but it's a good reason to find a better and more reliable alternative. I did some research, considered the available options, and decided to go the DIY way. Continue to read

The 5.3.0 release includes fixes and enhancements to 21 components and modules of KDE Frameworks including KArchive, KConfig, KCoreAddon, KIO, KNotifications, KTextEditor, KWindowSystem.

When software goes slow, generally, the first reaction is to profile. This might be done through system tools (like Instruments on OS X, perf/valgrind/etc on Linux, VTune, etc). This is fine and good, but just because you have the output of a tool does not necessarily correlate to understanding what is going on.

This might seem like an obvious distinction, but all too often, efforts at improving performance focus on the small picture ("this thing here is slow") and not the bigger picture ("why is this so slow"). At Jolla, I had the pleasure of running into one such instance of this, together with Gunnar Sletta, my esteemed colleague, and friend.

As those of you who are familiar with Jolla may know, we had been working on upgrading to a newer Qt release. This also involved quite a bit of work for us, both in properly upstreaming work we had done on the hurry to the late-2013 release, and in isolating problems and fixing them properly in newer code (the new scenegraph renderer, and ...read more...

… is the best in the whole wide world!

In this icon test we take a look at another colored icon set. Please, again, participate and help us to learn more about the usability of icon design.

Keep on reading: Understanding Icons: Participate in magic survey #9

With a series of icon tests we currently study effects on the usability of icon design. This article however does not focus on these general design effects but presents findings specific to the Treepata icon set.

Keep on reading: Intermediate results of the icon tests: Treepata

I'm writting this article sitting on 3 hour flight to Madrid where I'm going to spend next week being on holidays. Still on my mind there's one thought How am I suppose to live and be happy not writing patches for Kexi??? Actually I know I will find answer to this question. Just want to make a point how spending two days at Akademy 2014 affected my attitude towards programming and life. But to start with..

Who am I?

My name is Wojciech Kosowicz (wkosowicz, wojak). I'm software engineer. About half year ago I met Jaroslaw Staniek who I asked on the ways I can learn qt and next thing I remember was email confirming my devloper account at kde. I'm actively contributing to Kexi project.

Akademy 2014

Being enthusiatic about qt, kde, open source I decided to attend Akademy 2014. Never expected it gonna affect me so much in so many ways. I attended only first two days of Akademy. Actually you cannot learn a lot in such short time in the form the first ...read more...

If your mail inbox was quiet during the last month, it could have two causes: Either nobody contacted you, or your KDEPIM made holidays!

Jokes aside, KDEPIM 4.14.0 was released with a refactored IMAP fetching code, in preparation for a planned GMail IMAP plugin. The refactoring includes a more modern way to fetch the mails from the server, which unfortunately broke with some specific IMAP servers not completely conforming to the IMAP RFCs.

The effect of this bug is that no mails are fetched from some IMAP servers when you check for new mail, despite new mail arrived. If you were using such a server, be prepared that with the coming KDEPIM 4.14.1 update, the bug is fixed, and your inbox might get flooded with accumulated mail.

For details and patch, see KDE bug 338186. Thanks to to Christian for the prompt fix, and all reporters and testers for providing valuable feedback!

Based on a popular request, here's massive list of 10 new Junior Jobs for Kexi. Now they are mostly related to Kexi Report Designer, which receives a lot of love recently as an unique Free Software solution of this kind.

Breeze C++

Plasma Addons

Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.13.3 are available for Kubuntu 14.04LTS. You will recieve them from the regular update channel.

Bugs in the packaging should be reported on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.

Time flies when you're in good company, i planned to blog every day and now i realize we're on day 4 already.

Well, here comes some of the things i've been doing
* Participated in a few discussions about "the KDE SDK" Aleix seems very promising to recruit new developers :) Let's see if I can convince Aleix to blog about it
* KGeography port to KF5 started by David Gil is now complete.
* Started and finished Blinken port to KF5
* Made some patches for some frameworks while porting KGeography

Some of the cool things I've seen:
* kdenlive cleaning up their code to ease maintaince
* GCompris, a nice educational tool for children
* The KF5 Book is shaping up nicely
* Lots of KF5 porting and refining everywhere

Let's keep rolling!

This week end I started to implement a script which allows to convert old connect api to new qt5 connect api (see http://qt-project.org/wiki/New_Signal_Slot_Syntax)

So it’s still in progress and it’s not perfect.

It will search variable from ui file, look at current class from .h file and parses connect line.

It will convert to new api.

But after that you need to verify if it compiles.

It will failed when slot is protected, or when there is “overloads”

I was able to port a lot of connect in kdepim*.

I will continue to improve this script. There is still a lot of work to do

Volume controls. Based on PulseAudio. For Plasma 5.

Built in Randa.

I've been steadily chipping away at creating Python bindings for the many libraries which make up KF5.

Hello,  this is my third report for my GSoC. I was idle for the past 3 weeks, because I was in an exam period. So this week I implement the launcher for the Plasma Active.  The launcher doesn’t come with a new UI, it is more or less a port of the old one.  At the moment there is a bug with the search field (sometimes it loses the focus based on the application that is running in the background) but it will be fixed soon.

You can find us on #plasma or irc.freenode.net

I just finished patching the Tags sidebar widget it now supports “No Tags“, As you can see here:

When you click on the “No Tags” radio button, the tags tree is disabled and all the images which have no tags are shown in the main view as shown here.

When you click on “Existing Tags” radio button, The tree is activated and the previously selected Tag album is set to the main view, as you can see in the following snapshot.

That’s all.

Wait that’s not all, Those features will be available in the next release of digiKam 4.2.0, and it’s so soon.

Ready to receive your feedback about it.