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Since few weeks, an active work have been done with Julien Pontabry and Julien Nardoux to solve this bug report.

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So I have again the pleasure of being selected for Google's Summer of Code for Amarok to scratch some very serious itches concerning media device support in Amarok 2.

Itches:

• Playlist Support
• More GUI Feedback, more intuitive interface
• UMS(Universal Mass Storage) Support

Playlist:

Actually, iPods in Amarok already have their playlists read on connect, but at the time I wrote the code, the code in Amarok for any collection dealing with playlists wasn't at a satisfactory level yet, which I believe it to be now thanks to the work of a few people, in particular I know that Stecchino (Bart) has worked on it.

GUI:

The media devices applet seemed like a good idea at first, but it's terrible from a usability standpoint, and since the PUD (Popup Dropper) removes any possibility of dragging-and-dropping tracks onto it, for instance, it doesn't make much sense to have it.  However, I understand there's plans in the works to redo some of Amarok's GUI, part of which will accomodate the previous functions of this applet, and I'll be taking advantage of that.

UMS Support:

Yes!  I swear it this time.  It turned out ...read more...

Hearing that kubuntu jaunty was out, I upgraded two machines today.
My wife's machine, so she can finally use KDE 4.2, and my own desktop machine. On her machine, NVidia card, no problem at all.
On my machine, ATI Radeon X1300, after the upgrade, X would always just show some red dots on the top of the screen, and then the machine would hang (no keyboard, no ssh, nothing except reboot).
I tried every possible driver in xorg.conf, no difference. So this isn't a driver problem, but an Xorg problem.
Other people on #kubuntu (e.g. "chx") reported the same issue.

So... I recompiled the xorg packages from intrepid (i.e. X.org 1.5.2) so that they can be used on jaunty. Long and painful, but it solved the problem. Proof that the problem is really X.org 1.6.0.

In case anyone is interested: http://www.davidfaure.fr/2009/xorg_debs.tar.bz2

Quick instructions: download, unpack, then
sudo dpkg -r xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-input-all
sudo dpkg -i *.deb.

If you see apt-get -f install removing a bunch of video drivers, that's fine; I didn't recompile them all, ...read more...

Sometimes little details gives a way greater feeling of power and customizability, without actually adding much and more importnant without adding tons of new buttons and configuration options.

Plasma panel can arrange widgets in an ordered linear layout, one after another, but what about if you have a panel where you want to distinguish between different groups of applets and want to put a space between them to make the look more clear? Since a couple of days in the plasma configuration dialog a new single button appeared: "Add spacer":

Clicking on it it adds that little widget at the end of the panel, it's just a space and you can drag it around as with every other widget or resize it as you wish by dragging the borders of it (that in this screenshot are a little darker) just like any window or resizable stuff in general.

Of course a space is not something that you should see: it's empty right? So you close the panel edit mode and ...read more...

Fresh from the oven: Qt 4.5.1, Qt Creator 1.1, new SDK.

Details on what has changed can be examined in the changes file. Now that the release is out, the QtWebKit team is busy again fixing bugs and backporting important fixes for the next patch release (4.5.2). Expect to see more extensive changes there. Few QtWebkit-related examples which I have written are also being cleaned-up and imported as new Qt examples, as we speak.

The Kubuntu Team is proud to announce the release of Kubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope!
With this release, the development team brings you the best KDE distro out there. With its world-renowned Ubuntu core and the KDE 4.2 desktop, Kubuntu 9.04 gives users a well-rounded, feature-filled and elegant desktop.

On the top, KDE 4.2 brings beauty, innovation and updated software with new & improved features. Underneath, updated kernel and core systems bring stability and speed.

Canonical has announced the final release of Ubuntu 9.04 ; also announced were the releases of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition and Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix, but of course also Kubuntu 9.04 , and Xubuntu 9.04 . This new Ubuntu release delivers a host of new features, as well as lots of improvements.

As part of Qt 4.5, we added QGraphicsItem::opacity. Which is great! But it doesn’t work as well as it could. We’re receiving a few comments about how this implementation could work better. Trouble is, in Qt 4.5 we only have two ways of rendering: direct, and indirect (”cached”, e.g., ItemCoordinateCache). And in order to apply opacity, you really need full composition support… :-/

Here’s a rundown of the trouble with today’s opacity support:

• The current behavior modifies the input opacity of the painter
  • …so you can override this opacity on a per-item basis (intentionally or not!)
  • …and each primitive (line, rect, pixmap) you draw with QPainter will be composed one at a time inside the item (which is bad!)
• The behavior is slightly different depending on whether you cache an item or not.
  • …if you use caching, the offscreen pixmap is rendered with an opacity, whereas the item itself doesn’t have any opacity set on its painter.
• Each item applies opacity locally, and even though opacity propagates to ...read more...

After much hard work from Qt Software developers in Oslo, Berlin and Brisbane, Qt 4.5.1 is now available.

Qt 4.5.1 is a patch level release providing a large number of bug fixes and minor improvements over the 4.5.0 release that went out in early March. You can get Qt 4.5.1 here and you can see what’s changed in the changes log.

Many thanks are due to those users who provided feedback on the 4.5.0 release. Your feedback has been very valuable in helping us to improve Qt, and we hope that you will continue to send us your constructive criticism, wishlists, likes and dislikes for the 4.5.1 release and beyond.

Make your word count - new Plasma Widget Explorer in development: http://www.wouwlabs.com/blogs/anniec/?p=37

Like I promissed you, the step-by-step of the GSoC project will be all described in this blog.

So, for now…

As I said in my proposal, the first task of this project, besides studying libs and stuff, would be the appliance of the focus group technique, right?! Ok.

But, first, what is this focus group about? Well, it’s something like a meeting with 8 - 12 people with opinions (very important - they gotta have opinions) about certain matter. There is also moderator that is going to lead this 1-2 hour discussion, and he will make sure that all the points and questions to the matter were covered. Here is wikipedia to help you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group

In this project, the moderator would be me and the matter would be the Widgets Explorer, of course.

But how to get it done? Well, the traditional technique says it must be a traditional meeting, with people in the same room. But since this matter involves a international community - and so it would be hard to get together at the same room -  how ...read more...

Ok, just a quick update on what we are doing / have done the last two days except drinking beer and eating quite a lot of food (though it never seems to be enough somehow….)

• Apol was polishing CMake support, speeding up KDevelop startup time when you enabled the QtHelp plugin, making sure that Kross plugins get loaded properly and some other things
• Adymo started some refactoring of Sublime in an experimental branch (actually they had quite a long discussion right now about things in the UI which should be changed/fixed). Besides that he also fixed some little bugs in the includepath resolver for CMake
• Nsams is fixing PHP support and adding new features here and there. Esp. completion inside a foreach over a Iterator class works now!
• and as always ZWabel did fix quite a lot of bugs, most of them which only were discoverable in a few corner cases, very nice indeed.
• shaforo who sadly already left us again to attend university fixed the sorting in the Project view among other things
• With Apols help I managed ...read more...

This is the follow-up to what I wrote before: hue subdivision for mortals.

Seems everyone echoes my sentiment: increasing the coverage area of green is not the right way to go. The easiest explanation is as follows. Since this is an additive color model, due to the higher sensitivity of green, its contribution to other primary colors should be reduced. Effectively, this means we should shrink the green region in the color wheel:

For the "Mortal" version in the above picture, I modified the conversion from hue to RGB (assuming fully saturated color), because I discarded the idea of curve-fitting to map the angle to the hue value. Another change is that I gave up keeping the triangle of the primaries, i.e. while 0 is still red (as an arbitrary reference), 0.333 is not green anymore. The actual position of a color component is now determined by the inverse proportion of its part to the grayscale function. I arrive at 26% red, 17% green, and 57% blue. Unsuprisingly, it means blue ...read more...

So Kopete got two slots for this year’s SoC. Tiago Salem Herrmann will be working on improving the MSN support and Pierre-Alexandre St-Jean will be working on turning the chatwindow into a library.

Congratulations to Tiago and Pierre-Alexandre and thanks to all other students that submitted proposals to Kopete SoC!

PS: For the ones that didn’t get accepted but still want to work on the projects, just send a mail to the Kopete mailing list and we will try to help mentoring the work.

1. the number 6 is a project specific detail and should not be pushed on every project because it won't fit every project (Mark notes he works on projects with 1, 3 and 6 month cycles; other cycle are also possible, of course); what we're really talking about it timed releases made with a relatively high level of consistency


2. The discussion is often coupled with the idea of coordinating different projects to the same cycle, which is really a different sort of conversation altogether with "length of the resulting release cycle" being an implementation detail within it


3. it's only one half of the equation, with the missing half being the non-high-level-of-consistency-time-interval releases; too often it was an either/or discussion where if you were doing one you couldn't have been doing the other

...read more...

The question in the title pertains if you use kdesvn-build. kdesvn-build creates a separate log directory for every single run it makes. If you’ve done a lot of kdesvn-build runs and you’ve never manually cleaned out your log directory you’ve probably got quite a few hundreds of log bundles.

Someone finally noticed and filed a bug. Attached to that bug is a patch I’ve created to remove all log directories but the ones referenced in the latest kdesvn-build run for a given module. I consider this the correct behavior so at this point I’m not looking to make it optional or require a magic incantation to Do the Right Thing.

So, if you use kdesvn-build I’d recommend trying out the patch (always use –pretend first!). If you want to skip straight to pruning directories you can use a command like kdesvn-build --no-svn --no-build --no-install kdelibs (replace kdelibs with a module in your rc file). Also, does anyone have a reason to retain more log directories than those in log/latest? (And has a reason that you can’t ...read more...

The use of HSV/HSL color space is obvious when we need to have several colors distributed in an optimal way, colors as unique as possible. For example, SpeedCrunch uses it to autogenerate the colors used for the syntax highlighting feature. The details behind its algorithm was already described by Helder in his Qt Quarterly article Adaptive Coloring for Syntax Highlighting. Basically we use the color wheel and subdivide the hue into equal parts. Primary additive color components are red, green, and blue. This distributes the colors in maximum angular distance with respect to the hue values.

So far so good. However, it was known that human eyes are generally more sensitive to green than other colors. In computer graphics, this is often manifested in the grayscale function, i.e. the function that converts RGB to a grayscale value. Take a peek at Qt's qGray(), it gives the red, green, and blue the weighting factors of 11, 16, and 5, respectively. Shall we take this into account ...read more...

"WebKit is an application framework that provides a foundation upon which to build a web browser.

Just like all the other cool KDE projects Amarok did of course also get their share of excellent students for GSoC this year.

• Teo Mrnjavac will make the playlist rock after having worked on tagging during last year’s Season of KDE.
• Sven Krohlas will give us some unit testing goodness to find all those nasty bugs before a user gets to see them.
• Alejandro Wainzinger will make sure our media device support will make people happy.

I am sure you’ll do awesome work! I hope I can soon add the names of those who are going to take part in Season of KDE (and another super cool thingy we arranged which I can’t yet talk about) to this list.

Thanks to Google for running GSoC and making this possible.