This post was supposed to be published yesterday January 18th 2012, but I’m delaying it of 24 hours in support of SOPA STRIKE
Last weekend the Digikam Code Sprint was held in Genoa (Italy). Yes, I’m not a Digikam developer, but I live in Genoa and this was a very good occasion to implement something that I’ve being planning to implement for a long time: A KIPI Plugin for Telepathy. So before saying anything else, here is the mandatory screenshot:
Telepathy KIPI Plugin
Thanks to this plugin, you will be able to send your pictures and albums from digikam, showfoto and any other application using KIPI plugins. Most of all I wanted this feature in KSnapshot, and yes this is now possible.
This is something I already implemented in the past [1] but I must admit that having all the contacts in a menu was a bad idea, so I gave up at the time… ...read more...
I am at linux.conf.au at the moment, where I am delivering two talks, about Qt and Multithreading, and Social applications with Telepathy. The first one was yesterday, and I was very pleased by the feedback I received – thanks to all of you who attended, and if you couldn’t make it, videos will be up soon. The conference is being streamed live, so you’re still in time to follow me on Friday.
Besides that, I wanted to blog about some improvements towards flawless power management inhibition. A GCI student, George Stephanos, took the task of testing and fixing inhibition in 4.8: the results were two bugs fixed, and dragon player being able to successfully prevent any power management action. But it does not stop here: yesterday I also added inhibition support in Okular – if you are giving a presentation with it, you don’t have to worry about your screen or your system going down anymore.
Microsoft announced that they had added XMPP to their Windows Live APIs. Microsoft announced that they had added XMPP to their Windows Live APIs. That means that any Jabber client could connect to MSN using our favorite open IM protocol! No more closed protocol to reverse-engineer.
Since Gabble now supports it, I just had to add a little bit of magic to support the Messenger OAuth2 authentication in KDE-Telepathy Auth Handler and add a profile to the Account Manager. Microsoft implementation still have some problems (you cannot add/authorize new contact, yahoo contacts are not shown, etc.), therefore by default the “old” method will be used, but we think that it is important that people starts using it, therefore starting from KDE Telepathy 0.3 (that will be released the 25th of January) you will be able to use XMPP protocol with your MSN account.
It is important to notice that you can have just one MSN-XMPP account at the moment, so here is ...read more...
A default installation of a distribution using GNOME 3 can be a pain to use, but thanks to available extensions, you can make your GNOME 3 installation a little bit more fun to use, or at least closer to the type of desktop environment you are used to.
There are several menu styles to choose from in the K Desktop Environment, but my favorite is the Takeoff Launcher, which is why I consider it one of 2 cool reasons to use the K Desktop Environment.
It's been quite a while since I last wrote a blog post, but it's not because I haven't been coding, in fact quite the opposite. The Qt opengov project is finally underway and I've been doing quite a lot of work on the various SSL classes. I'm now an official Qt approver, so as you can see the process of getting non-nokia developers the ability to commit to Qt is working.
In Qt 4.x and currently in Qt5 even though the various QSsl classes provide an abstraction from the underlying SSL implementation, there is only one backend and it uses openssl. I recently made a change that means we can add new backends during the Qt5 life time by separating the concepts of SSL support from the availability of SSL - of course this doesn't change anything if openssl is the only game in town.
Over the last couple of weekends, I've been investigating GnuTLS as a potential implementation that could form the basis of a second backend. I started with the easy part - handling X.509 certificates, and ...read more...
I’ve previously talked about how the Qt 5 Winter is coming. Since we started talking about that, people have begun asking what are the date limits for each thing, when the API would freeze, when Qt 5.0 would be stable, when we’d release, etc. This blog tries to answer that a little.
Last month, we were preparing a list of features that needed to be done for Qt 5.0. The result of that activity is Task QTBUG-20885, which is a meta-task containing as sub-tasks everything that needs to happen for Qt 5.0′s feature freeze. Those are the changes that must go into Qt 5.0 and not in any later release. They are major refactorings or other changes that would break source- or binary-compatibility.
"As a sociologist I am very interested in the idea of community, in how people come to understand themselves as belonging to some community and how they determine who is in and who is out.
The rewamp of the KDE Plasma Desktop is continuing: in the 4.8 release it got a completely new QML based device notifier (already quite improved for 4.9), now a new redesign has landed in master, scheduled for the 4.9 release of KDE Plasma Desktop.
The Plasma widget explorer and activity manager have been rewritten from scratch in QML, giving it s much smoother look and feel, new animations for free and what I love most, a way simpler code base.
By replacing the activity manager and widget explorer with the new implementation, over 4000 lines of C++ were removed (traded with around 1000 of much more readable and maintainable QML): this makes it easier to maintain, easier to spot possible problems, easier to modify and experiment new ideas.
With the rewrite of the various components of Plasma Desktop in QML I expect to slash away most of its C++ code base, making the entry level for contributors significantly lower (and being able to finally close long standing bugs ;)
Last month Linux Mint 12 was released to quite a buzz. It addressed many of the issues disaffected users experienced with GNOME 3 . This was great for GNOME users and Linux Mint in general, but hey, what about us KDE users? Well, the KDE version is nearly ready and users can test a release candidate now.
Yesterday I wrote about instruction set and ABI manuals. Today I’d like to go into details about the ABIs I listed there. This was done mostly as a summary for me: it’s tiresome to search for the information in the manuals, especially since some of the manuals are PDFs without links. For example, I never remember what is the order of the registers used in parameter passing on x86-64. So what you’ll find here is a listing of what I found interesting for when I might need to read or write assembly code.
As a bonus for you, dear reader, I added a few words about each platform.
Every now and then, when coding in C++, I find myself needing to know some assembly to understand what’s going on. Sometimes, it’s because I am actually writing assembly code, such as when I was writing the new atomic classes for Qt. More often, it’s because I need to read the assembly generated by the compiler to figure out if it’s optimal or if it’s doing something weird.
So I often found myself downloading the same manuals over and over. I decided to put together a small library of manuals I use often and those I seldom use, but might want to some day. This is the list.
Now that 4.8 is tagged and should be heading downstream someday soonish, I figured why not post some details on neat shiny improvements that won't be in it, but instead the 0.5 year from now 4.9 release, just to give you something to look forward to ;-)
In the spirit of spreading QML to everything in Plasma as best we can as well, I've now merged my WIP Konqueror as well as the Konsole session applet widgets. Or, profiles as they are sometimes called. It's a simple scenario, but I just moved the logic out from the applet into their own DataEngines and did all the UI stuff in QML.
Here's a screenshot showing what the old style one (kate, right-most widget) looked like when compared to the new (2 left-most) widgets. The old ones had non-plasma decorations and didn't fit in the workspace very well.
Today, at 2pm, GMT-2, there were a discussion on the #kde-brasil, at freenode to talk about the upcoming Akademy-BR. the log of the meeting is here, mostly in portuguese, but there were some Argentinian dudes there too. =)
Now, we are looking for a place to hack on Porto Alegre, if you know anything, please get in contact with Camila or HSantana in the #kde-brasil, on freenode.
Testers can find Plasma and KDE Applications RC 2 (4.7.97) in the Beta PPA for 11.10 and compiling now in the main archive for our development release.
At the end of December my wife and I were invited with other parents to my daughter last dance lesson of the year.
Of course, I brought my camera with me. I shot a little bit more than 160 pictures from the one hour lesson (if that sounds like a crazy number, then you probably don’t have kids…).
Some of them were shot in burst mode, where the camera continuously takes a few pictures per second, increasing the chances the wannabe photographer gets at least one decent picture (and partially explaining the embarrassing large number of shots…)
Importing, aka, the mistake
Back home, I imported the pictures with Gwenview importer and started to comb through them to get rid of the cruft.
Burst mode is fun, but Gwenview importer does not play nice with it: by default it renames imported pictures using the shot date found in the image EXIF information. I like this feature because I find it more expressive to have a picture named “2011-12-17_12-47-47.jpg” ...read more...
When introducing Dolphin 2.0 I talked about grouping support for all view modes. But I could not offer any screenshots, as this feature was not ready yet at that time. So here we go showing the same folder grouped by the file type in the icons-mode (which is already available since Dolphin 1.2):
... in the compact-mode:
... and in the details-mode:
I think there is a lot of room for visual improvements of the group-headers especially in the combination with the details-mode. However this is something that needs to be discussed with our Oxygen-gurus Nuno and Hugo and will hopefully be improved in the next version.
Still I'm quite happy with the new implementation. It fixes performance ...read more...
The changes made the new implementation looks a little more like the old one :-)
Changed disconnect icon to user-offline.png;
Re-add the interface list, now it is hidden by default and can be toggled by the new "Show Interfaces..." button;
The interface list is always shown when clicking on an activated connection. If the connection list was hidden before clicking then it will be hidden after clicking on the "back" button in interface details window;
Add a disconnect button in interface details window. The current disconnect button is small, someone can wrongly tap on the connection item instead of the disconnect button, which will trigger the interface details window. With a disconnect button in interface details window the user can still disconnect instead of trying to tap the disconnect button again. The button is hidden when the connection is not activated;
Improvements in the filtering algorithm in connection list;
Show number of suppressed networks in the m_showMoreItem.
The result is this:
And yes, I have noticed the graphical artifacts, the misaligned traffic plotter, the plasmoid's popup always closing ...read more...
If you live near Karlsruhe, Germany you’re invited to join us on January 28th at 19:00 at Cafe Stövchen for a release party. KDE contributors and users are welcome as are people from other Free Software projects. Please add your name to the wiki so I can plan better. It’ll be a fun evening.
You don’t live near Karlsruhe? Check if there is a party near you on the wiki page and sign up for that. No party near you yet? Organize one! It’s really not hard and a lot of fun.
(I am writing this post because I think I don’t have guest/courage to talk directly about this and hoping that all of you read this.)
Yesterday 30 December 2011 will be unforgettable day of my life well I can say I got a friend of my life; Lucinda, I regretted and miss not to to be with her on the new years eve (well I can say my mistake). she is one of the few people I would like to spend your rest of the life with.
While talking to her I missed some of my really good friends Anand Ramaswami, Sharath MS, Saurabh Gadhi, Ankur Gupta, Snehal Shivsharan, Nikhil Karwall, Mohit Bhoite, Mohit Jain, Sunil Mishra, Milind Sali, Sagar Dhavare and I realize how much important they are to me, guys you are some of the people who will never asked me why didn’t I talk to you since long time but the conversation will be like we just spoke yesterday I think that just because we understand each other so well that we never had that question or attitude within us.(or may ...read more...
Last Christmas I received my usual presents: bugs to solve :-/ Bug #289812 drew my attention because it looks like NetworkManager supports WPA shared connections after all. I do not know since when but that does not matter :-)
This week I pushed some changes to make Plasma NM create WPA shared connections. The changes went to both master and nm09 branches. The instructions to create the connection are the same as I described in my last post about shared connections, just change the security type in the "Wireless Security" tab:
Now the tests. Well, my two notebooks can communicate with each other when both use Gentoo Linux. When my old notebook uses Windows XP it detects the network, tries to connect but the connection times out. The Symbian S60v5 in my cellphone also does almost the same: detects the ad-hoc network, tries to connect, shows an error message about missing feature (although it does not specify ...read more...
ex Lancelot Part, has became ex Shelf and got a rather fancy new name – Chiffonier. It will remain only until it becomes mature enough to become a drop-in replacement of the current version.
The searching works without issues, and in that area there are no differences between the C++ implementation and the new one.
The things yet to come are:
In-applet configuration, not a QWidget-based dialog like it currently is.
Automatic sizing of the popup applet… will be tricky.
Setting the icon, drag and drop, multiple models in one shell…
Well, this is it for now… just wanted to make the name known
As i got a Kindle for Christmas...I was wondering if the Qt reference library, and other related material such as QtMobility and QtQuick docs were available anywhere in an ebook format such as .mobi??
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