This post is part of an ongoing series about developments and discussions in Qt.

Some parts of this report are still under discussion, and don’t necessarily reflect the final state of Qt 5. The target audience is people involved in Qt development itself, but without the time to follow everything that happens, and others with a strong interest in Qt, Qt 5, and the community.

This week we cover QLibrary loading performance, release preparations and improved APIs for stable and repeatable unit tests.

QLibrary loading performance

The performance of QLibrary loading has been improved with a series of patches in Qt 5 written by KDAB engineer Sean Harmer. The patches use an improved search heuristic for the common case of file names for libraries and plugins. As this is a behavior change in Qt 5, the patches were also added in a backwards compatible way to Qt4 followed by a series of patches to enable use of the feature.

More cleanup of Qt5 CMake files

Some recent effort has gone into improving the ...read more...

As you know from a previous post, I recently joined SUSE as openSUSE Team Lead. After several years of great work, the team is now getting ready to face new challenges keeping the same basic goal: make openSUSE rock.

To achieve this task, we want a senior developer to join us.

openSUSE Team at SUSE is a multidisciplinary group of professionals that works in many different areas in constant evolution so learning is part of our natural process. We have a clear R & D focus. We will work in projects covering several different technologies, so we are looking for somebody that is open minded, not afraid to work with a wide range of tools.

The position involves mentoring. It won't be just about designing solutions, solving problems and delivering, but also about engaging new developers and motivate them. Our team have high exposure to the openSUSE community and internally at SUSE. We also work with other communities and companies. Therefor communication ...read more...

Nokia is shutting down its Qt offices in Australia, laying off the team that was responsible for developing key parts of the open source development toolkit, including the QML user interface layout system.

Our dear planet readers should have seen it, toma asked for ruby hackers who would be able to write a plugin for hooking in our commitfilters to projects.kde.org, based on chiliproject.

Now, i’d like to extend that request. Some might have seen it, our webteam is trying hard to integrate a common look to our websites, called Neverland. Of course, projects.kde.org should also get that look. But as toma already stated, neither sysadmins nor the webteam hackers are really able to handle RoR code. The raw look is done, and available in skeleton html files, as well as the images/css/js via our CDN. It just needs the ruby code.

So for those interested in the plugin, and maybe even in the theming, feel free to contact us either in the #kde-sysadmin channel on freenode, or in our webteam channel at #kde-www or via mail to kde-sysadmin@kde.org or kde-www@kde.org

… not just testers. While our products Squish and Squish Coco are about testing we also need developers! Good ones. Those that are good with C++ mainly. But in the end we can also throw Java, ObjectiveC, C#, Python, JavaScript, Perl, PHP and Tcl in the mix if you want to work on one of the editions of our products.

With Nokia step-by-step retracting from Qt the development scene is going to change. Nokia needs to be applauded for what they’ve done to the product. But Qt has outgrown what a single vendor can provide. Partially, because the needs of its users are so diverse. As part of putting development of the core product and add-ons on more shoulders we are among those companies that are open to hire some more ex-Trolls and Nokians.

Version 4.9 provides many new features, along with improved stability and performance.

Yay! I'm so happy that we got it out of the door, 4.9.x is going to be amazing :-)

Personally I'd like to thank Fabio d'Urso for being my new Okular co-developer (actually he did more commits than me, but don't tell anyone) and implementing the store annotations to pdf files feature both in Okular and in poppler. Fabio you rock :-)

Are you waiting impatiently for KDE 4.9? Warm-up your compilers with Amarok 2.6-RC that has been released just now! There have been a couple of bigger fixes since Beta 1, so we want to make sure that nothing hits your grandma in 2.6 final. Give it a good testing and report possible bugs to Bugzilla as usual. Thanks!

As part of a KDE-wide effort to prepare for Qt 5/QtQuick2 , and a push to improve the window manager, KWin now sports QML decoration support .

KDE developer Jonathan Riddell has announced that the Rekonq web browser has now reached version 1.0 and is available to download.

Here's some good news. The code for the whole Social Feed thing is now clean & stable enough, so I decided to finally put it online, where the development will now continue.

Right now it consists of several parts (which you all need in order to have it working):

1) KOAuth library

This is a library handling the OAuth stuff in Twitter/Identi.ca. It's a modified version of the Microblog dataengine auth mechanism. The code is quite heavy and can be simplified significantly with the help of QtOAuth library, so I plan to refactor it on top of QOAuth class.

The nice thing about this approach is that we don't need to store user's password/credentials. User still has to put them in, but then it will authorize him with the service and return an OAuth token, which is stored in KWallet and that's all that is stored (well the username is stored as well, but that's for convenience only, the password is never saved anywhere).

2) Akonadi Social Utils

This one provides ...read more...

Keeping on top of the news has never been easier, thanks to the advent of RSS readers.

Hi! With almost a year delay as life was pretty good at distracting me, here’s a short heads up on what we’ve been doing.
Those that don’t know yet what Project Neon is should read Michal’s introductory post.

• Oneiric builds have been suspended and the packages will be removed in a week. If you want to continue to use Project Neon please upgrade to Precise Pangolin
• As of today Project Neon is fully running for Quantal Quetzal, enjoy your daily dose of builds on the devel release
• We now have pre-built KVM Images for Project Neon so you don’t need to separately install Kubuntu first before using it!
• As people keep asking for it, we’re working on the Python bindings (pykde4). As this requires more work than I initially hoped it will take a while until we’re done. You’ll hear from me again once you can use them.

If you have questions or just ...read more...

Review Mint 13 KDE and it soon becomes clear that it's a release that contains so many good things in a single package Hot on the heels of its Xfce build , the final release of Linux Mint 13 KDE is now available for download.

 This post is part of an ongoing series about developments and discussions in Qt.

Some parts of this report are still under discussion, and don’t necessarily reflect the final state of Qt 5. The target audience is people involved in Qt development itself, but without the time to follow everything that happens, and others with a strong interest in Qt, Qt 5, and the community.

This week we cover some features made possible in QML, greater possibilities for platform configuration integration, discussion about the use of color profiles in Qt, and various efforts towards release-readiness.

New QML 2 showcase

A new showcase of QML 2 applications from the Qt team were publicized last week. The applications are already available in the qtdeclarative repository as example applications. The applications and video show the changing and new possibilities made possible for QML 2.

Native API for event filtering

KDAB engineer David Faure added API for native event handling to Qt. The rationale behind the new API is well explained in the commit message. It ...read more...

Plasma NM 0.9.0.3
SHA256Sum: d8ad2dd89521dbe21e17131ef24bd7d792e90a150e15f0fbdab1bfa4a46e00f7

This release should fix the crash when opening kwallet bug in all known cases. The last release (Plasma NM 0.9.0.2) fixed the problem in the most common case. Upgrade to 0.9.0.3 or at least 0.9.0.2 before reporting crashes related to kwallet. We receive duplicates of this bug twice a day because users have not updated their Plasma NM installations. Unfortunately, some distributions still have not created updates for 0.9.0.2, which was released more than 40 days ago. Please distributions, help me and provide updates for your users, ok?

Kubuntu packages:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/quantal/i386/plasma-widget-networkmanagement/0.9.0.3-0ubuntu2

Yes, I'm still working on my GSoC project about statistics synchronization in Amarok. I've somehow skipped the last report (I was too deeply immersed in coding), to this one will be a bit more beefy. In short, I've fixed some bugs of the EngineController (the thing actually responsible for playback) that negatively affected Last.fm scrobbling first and then I've rewrote the class that actually scrobbles the tracks.

Little side-effect of Last.fm improvements: correction suggestions

What I've done in week 8:

• The rather big patch series that fixed data-loss bugs was finally merged to master to be included in Amarok 2.6 release candidate. Please give it a good testing.
• Improved EngineController and Phonon interaction with regards to meta-data changes.
• Improved MetaStream classes that represent audio streams. They now implement statistics (and some other fields) so that you can for example see how many songs you've listened to on particular ...read more...

Linux Mint is one of the most popular distributions on the list these days, no doubt in part due to its variety of editions.

Hi,
I’m so excited to tell you I’m now part of the Lunatics project animation team
All useful informations on the project website: http://lunatics.tv/

This week I’ve made some work for the teaser that you’ll can see soon.

The production of the pilot episode should start in September, and I’ll work mostly on the storyboard and some 2D animation scenes
(using Krita and Synfig-Studio, and maybe a few of the other usual cool FLOSS graphics software where needed…).

The Kickstarter to finance the production of the pilot episode will be launched tomorrow if everything goes right, more infos to come then.

Stay tuned

I spent last week and part of this one making tests to see how Marble gets on with Vector Tiles. There are vector tiles up to 5.8MB size depending on the planet zone and its detail level, so the need for a new logic for storing and managing tiles was obvious.

As talked in the previous blog entrance, TextureLayer keeps all the image tiles in memory and that would be impossible for vector tiles. Depending on the map projection selected (Marble’s map can be viewed as a Globe, Plane Map or Mercator) image tiles had three different mappers that “blended” the images to fit the map and a logic for downloading image tiles. In our case, parsed geometries are inserted into Marble’s treeModel which takes care of those three projections so we didn’t have to worry about that and it made possible to create a single mapper (VectorTileMapper) and create it’s logic in it.

...read more...

The Calligra team is proud to announce the release candidate of the Calligra Suite. Compared to the beta, this new release contains many bug fixes. However, a regression was made in this release and will be fixed in the next release (see bug 303696).

Try It Out

The source code of this version is available for download here: calligra-2.4.92.tar.bz2. Also many binary packages are available for various operating systems and distributions. This release is packaged for Windows by KO GmbH, and you can find it on their download page.

We would welcome volunteers who want to build the Calligra Suite on OSX.

About the Calligra Suite

Calligra is a KDE community project. Learn more at http://www.calligra.org/.

KDE Software Compilation 4.9 will be released in August and it will contain features such as Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, improved searching, sorting, display and inline rename on Dolphin, better integration of Activities for files, as well as lots of performance improvements and bugfixes to improve the overall user experience.

Qt Quick Training The main event of the Monday was KDAB running a Qt Quick training session.

A week in Estonia, the lovely sunshine, the magical forest and all the BoFs you could want.

Qt Quick Training The main event of the Monday was KDAB running a Qt Quick training session. Qt Quick continues to be full of swish bling although the widget sets are all a bit incomplete. The good news is there's not a lot of QML change in Qt 5. Kevin even showed us some new bling from Qt 5 which makes snowflakes, pretty.

Tuesday was the KDE e.v AGM. Amazingly enough we had a volunteer for treasurer. This is such a valuable job to have filled so we're very lucky to have Augustin actively want to do it.

On Wednesday I sat in on the KDE Telepathy BoF which made a challenging TODO list for 0.5 which we expect to include in Kubuntu. vhanda also ran a BoF on Constructive criticism for Nepomuk that looked at the many problems it causes and where best to start fixing them.

Thursday saw the Plasma Media Center BoF and I went ...read more...

This post is part of an ongoing series about developments and discussions in Qt.

Some parts of this report are still under discussion, and don’t necessarily reflect the final state of Qt 5. The target audience is people involved in Qt development itself, but without the time to follow everything that happens, and others with a strong interest in Qt, Qt 5, and the community.

This week we cover documentation for the new plugin system, Qt Contributor Summit reports, buildsystem improvements and standards-conformant Cookie handling.

New Plugin system documentation

The plugin loading system has changed entirely in Qt 5, as I wrote previously in porting notes. The new system is now documented more completely by removing references to the old API which no longer works (Q_EXPORT_PLUGIN2 etc).

Notes from Qt Contributor Summit

On the mailing list, many results from discussions about the Qt Contributor Summit were posted.

• QWidget session notes
• QtCore session notes
• ...read more...

Really quick post just to say that I'm back from Akademy were I meet old friends and made new ones, (as usual), had lots of fun, made my presentation, helped in a training, and still managed to do some work :)

So I'm back home and not as stressed with real day to day work as i was in the pass few months, And this gets me some time for bug killing in Oxygen icons.... today's victim..... A smart phone..... 

I was in the beautiful town of Tallinn last week, attending Akademy 2012. It was great to hang out again with other KDE developers around a laptop or a drink.

We had an awesome Karaoké night which started slowly but got a lot more fun when MC Aaron grabbed the microphone and convinced us to sing… Sébastien Renard and I even thought we could sing “Born in the USA”. our interpretation was later described to us as “courageous” . There are pictures of us in action, hopefully no video of this performance is online…

On a more serious note, I noticed a recurring topic during this Akademy: Bugzilla. Jeroen van Meeuwen delivered a great presentation explaining the way Kolab Systems AG uses Bugzilla and how KDE could benefit by doing the same, we also had further discussions on how to take advantage of milestones, setting appropriate bug statuses, or integrating bugs.kde.org with our wikis. All those discussions got ...read more...

Hello,

On the fifth week of my GSoC, i have added support for CMakeLists.txt and for plasmapkg on the KWin Scripting.

Until now the user wasn’t able to install or create a CMakeLists.txt for the KWin Scripting packages. Now he is able
to both generate a CMakeLists.txt and install the package through the Publisher. Below i describe the main difference between the

CMakeLists.txt and the plasmapkg.

• Plasmapkg will install the KWin Script locally, so the other users will not be able to run your KWin Script.
• CMakeLists.txt will install the KWin Script globally, so the other users will be able to run your KWin Script.

The Plasmate’s Publisher