Every year Linux fans wait for the results of LinuxQuestions.org Member Choice Award Winners and today the end of 2014 results are in. What was the favorite distribution this year? Which was the most used messenger these days? Who brings the best office suite or desktop environment? You might be surprised.

Using the View -> Group Images -> By Format command, you can group photos in albums by format. This feature can come in useful for managing albums containing photos in different formats: JPEG, TIFF, RAW and video files, etc.

Continue reading

We've been seeing more and more questions about GSoC and how to get involved.

GSoC 2015 will be happening, but it is not yet time for orgs to even apply, much less be accepted. So we have no ideas page as yet for GSoC 2015.

That said, the best way to have your GSoC proposal accepted is to join
a team NOW and work with them on triaging and fixing bugs, and working
on old and new projects. As you work with your team members and the
codebase, you will be learn how to create a proposal which fits the needs
of the project, and also find willing and able mentors willing to guide you. Remember, mentoring is hard work. Probable mentors want to choose students they can trust to complete their proposal successfully.

The time to prepare for GSoC is now -- but it is not the time for
creating proposals yet. The important part of GSoC is embedding
yourself into your chosen project.Your energy can transform a project
from one lacking a spark ...read more...

Disclaimer

First time I wrote more than a one-liner in Perl, the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages. After quickly skimming the beginner's tutorial, (and no longer just copying Perl one-liners from Stackoverflow and friends), I consider myself ready to write porting helpers for kde-dev-scripts.git! Hey!

If you still don't know those scripts, check them out now. They're tremendously helpful, especially those for porting KDE4-based applications to Qt5/KF5. I wouldn't want to miss them!

Make the most out of CMake's Automoc

Now there's a new porting helper: convert-to-cmake-automoc.pl, just committed today with https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/121991/.

This script tries to remove includes such as #include "<basename>.moc" from cpp files to make source code suitable for CMake's Automoc feature.

There are some pitfalls, though:

• In some cases, one still needs to #include "<basename>.moc"; for example when the moc-generated code uses classes declared inside the .cpp file (hint: K_PLUGIN_FACTORY) -- in this case the moc file cannot be compiled in a separate translation unit.

• In some cases, one still ...read more...

KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms.

I’m pleased to announce that the kdev-qmljs plugin that I’ve developed during the spring and the summer is finally released in version 1.7.0. This version is compatible with KDevPlatform 1.7.0 and KDevelop 4.7.0. You can download the source tarball on download.kde.org.

• SHA256Sum: 70927785de7791335eda43b55ef7742af7915425823d5f70b97edac1828681e1
• SHA1Sum: 78ad0f72ffa091f6aff5ea633eb5f135e9d625f3
• MD5Sum: e51b93519e4eb028a8863c5d7bc96848

This release contains all the features developed during the summer. It adds support for the QML and Javascript languages in KDevelop and is able to recognize Javascript variables, functions, “objects” (based on prototype oriented programming) and most of its standard library (along with the DOM standard library and core Node.js modules). The QML language supports Qt 4 and Qt 5 modules, custom binary modules (modules for which you have an .so file), modules in your application and all sorts of import statements.

More advanced support for Node.js, richer QML helper tools and some other features will be available in the KF5 version of the plugin. I hope to have time to work on it shortly.

The tarball that I linked hereabove is known to compile and work on Fedora and a preliminary ...read more...

Packages for the release of KDE's document suite Calligra 2.8.7 are available for Kubuntu 14.10. You can get it from the Kubuntu Updates PPA. They are also in our development version Vivid.

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

We just release a new version of GiraffPanic – a logic mobile game written with Qt and QML. In the new version we give the users the possibility to share unlock codes with each other to unlock new levels. So we wanted to have a nice way to share the code between devices without any need to copy paste them (codes) into another application. After trying a lot of different approaches (that did not work), we found it is possible to invoke the native Android share menu from within our application. Using this method keeps our own code quite tidy and supports all the ways of sharing provided by the host device.

By using sharing that way the application does not need any special permissions.

Here is a preview of what the end result might look like:

...read more...

I’ve been slow on updating the progress of the project — I apologize for that. I’m working on implementing an improved noise estimation function for digiKam.

Currently, I’m working on a CLI version of the implementation to better understand the noise estimation process. The implementation consists of calculating the gradient covariance matrix of the image. For an image patch y, it’s defined as follows:

where

and are the horizontal and vertical derivatives of the image patch respectively. The resulting matrix is then decomposed to get the eigen values.

To put it briefly, the gradient of the image patch gives us the differences in pixels. We then decompose the covariance matrix to get eigen values whose values represent the strength of the image patch. Specifically, the larger the maximum eigen value, the richer the texture is, in ...read more...

Kexi can be used for designing and implementing databases, data inserting and processing, and performing queries. It is part of the Calligra office suite.

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...