The release train keeps rolling on… In one week both Muon and QApt 1.0 will be released. Until then, here’s one last pre-release to iron out any remaining issues before the stable release. Packages are in the normal place, and sources for QApt 0.5.0 can be found here. (Muon 0.5.0 sources will be uploaded in the usual place once I get back to the hotel… unfortunately I cannot do the GPG signing of the tarball on my grandparent’s computer) Here’s what’s new since last week:
QApt 0.5.0
No coding changes, but there are now a weeks worth more translations for the qapt-batch utility. Go, go kde-i18n!
Muon 0.5.0
A teeny new feature, but I added a nice little busy indicator overlay on the changelog viewing tab while it fetches the changelog. This improves usability, so that you can tell when it is really working, etc. Try it out.
Fixed a bug where an error such as an authentication error or download error would not ...read more...
Here’s a guideline for you: If your library uses exceptions, and you intend users of your library to catch them, don’t implement them inline in the header.
Example:
class LIB_EXPORT MyException : public std::exception { public: explicit MyException( ... ); // ... (but no dtor) };
Here, the compiler will generate a MyException destructor for you, since you didn’t provide one. Compiler-synthesised destructors are public, inline, have an empty body, and the same exception specification as the base class’ destructor. So, the above is equivalent to:
class LIB_EXPORT MyException : public std::exception { public: explicit MyException( ... ); ~MyException() throw() {} // ... };
Unfortunately (well, actually fortunately, but not for our scenario), the destructor of std::exception is virtual, so ~MyException() throw() {} (explicitly written by you or synthesised by the compiler) is the definition (as opposed to declaration) of the first virtual function of the class MyException. Most C++ compilers take that as a cue to emit the MyException virtual function table, as well as its RTTI information at that point.
So for the last months we have been working really hard to, port our great PIM software to the mobile world, and I must say it is a challenge, the rules all change and most of what you know does not fit the specificities of the interaction methods, the size and dpi of the screens, or even how something as simple as a gradient does not work as you expect. Had that, to learning new exiting technologies like QML and starting to do working mock-ups with them that developers can interpret much better, and in some cases implement directly. (ok this was only a problem for me, but hey if I can do it any one can :) )
And wen you try do a no compromise, solution for the software, meaning that no major feature is removed, you find your self with a monumental challenge.
The good part is that so far we managed to overcome all major problems with what I believe in some cases are really innovative, new interaction paradigms, example the folder selection ...read more...
as the pencils down for this years GSOC is approaching I thought it’s time to write another blog entry to notify the world about my current status.
These past weeks (boy, the time flies…) I’ve mostly spent on hardcore KDevplatform internals. Especially getting multiple languages in a single document working was not easy. I knew it would be the most time consuming and most demanding aspect during these three months, but also by far the most important. I’m confident to say now: I’m nearly there. All projects we put into the KDevelop repository have now a multilang branch in their team clones. And if you look at e.g. the KDevplatform multilang branch or the Quanta multilang branch you hopefully agree that I didn’t slack off too much. I just wasted some time to find the right approach, often by implementing one just to find out it was not practicable.
Thanks (once again) to the help of David Nolden I’m now on the right track. Finally :)
As I mentioned in two earlier blogs now, within openSUSE a strategic discussion is going on - what direction should we, as a distribution community, take?
I would like to address a few things in this post. First of all, why a strategy, and what will it and won't it do? Second, there is one strategy I'd like to mention specifically, as I think it's disrupting but as a community proposal it deserves to be discussed as any other strategy. That's about the KDE strategy for openSUSE.
Strategy
But first about the idea of a strategy in the first place. The strategy portal page talks about it plenty and I won't repeat that. I only want to stress what a strategy does and doesn't do.
It does:
help make project wide decisions; for example say we choose the home for developers proposal and the liveCD is full. Do we remove the second media player or the second debug tool? The first it is...
help focus marketing; say the marketing/promo team wants ...read more...
Hey there my Ubuntu and KDE people! I am still around. I have my daughter for most of the month of August so I am currently AFK. I will be back in a couple of weeks full-time again. In the mean time if you need to get in touch with me, hit me up on Twitter @nixternal, or if you have my phone number you can call me there.
When I come back, I have a great review in the pipeline of a new ZaReason laptop that runs Kubuntu out of the box!
My daughter and I have been having a blast these past couple of weeks. We have enjoyed the weather, watched a lot of bike racing, and she got groovy with Ubuntu. She likes Kubuntu’s look better, but I hooked her up with some Ubuntu to play around with. She wasn’t down with the default look, so we found some themes, colors, and fonts, that she likes, and thus far she has been happy. I need more than an ...read more...
In a few hours KDE 4.5 will be released. And together with it the new version of our Virtual Globe and Map Widget Marble. The new release Marble 0.10.0 will bring lots of additional features (Routing, Tile-Bulk-Download, Multiple Layers, initial WMS support and a lot more) - many of them related to OpenStreetMap. Of course development on the next release has started already: Dennis Nienh
...and the winner is...Berlin. It will be the "star of our system" for a week during the summer of 2011.
The II Desktop Summit has location, a good one. I'm excited about this event for several reasons. The first one is because, somehow, it gives credit to all the hard work done to celebrate the I Desktop Summit (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit). But above that, I'm excited because, after breaking the ice during that first approach, this event can be a huge oportunity to takes steps forward in joining efforts between GNOME and KDE to develop better technologies, better solutions for more devices and more exciting applications.
Beside pure technical issues, there is a lot of work we can do together in areas like marketing/promotion, usability, internationalization, education, etc. This is a great chance to begin.
So, do you want to know why Software Libre makes a difference? Come and live it by getting involved in decisions that matter.
While going through openFATE (the feature tracking tool openSUSE uses), I bumped into one asking for "Present Windows" effect as mouse button shortcut. In essence, this user has one of those million-button-mouses, and wants to use them.
I've heard that tune before, and last time I checked, linux users were still out of luck. Now I never had any idea what to use these 'extra' buttons for, until I bumped into this request. Having a button to triger an expose-like effect: great idea. Sure, I go with my mouse to the top-left of my screen and I can see all my apps just fine.
Still, I have only 4 corners on my screen (yes, it is square, as most computer screens) and 3 are in use already (app launcher, close window and clock). So I'd love such flexibility...
Now I don't know where the limiting factor is right now - what is needed to make it possible to assign actions to mousebuttons other than the left, right and middle one? Anyone who knows? Anyone up ...read more...
Linux user, how many different Internet browsers do you have on your system? You have Konqueror if you use KDE, Iceweasel or Epiphany if you use GNOME, and optionally, you might have Firefox, Chrome or Opera.
Today, on the 3rd day of the month, 333 days since the initial announcement, it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of a new release of Trojit
The KDE/Telepathy project has gained a lot of momentum in the last few months, and many of the basic components we planned to build have started to take shape. As a result, it’s time to start thinking about getting some of that code out there for testing. So, we’re planning to make a preview release some time this autumn. This release will be installable on top of KDE Platform 4.5, and will be suitable for power-users and testers who don’t mind a bit of breakage. We haven’t got a date set yet, but you can track the progress towards this release by looking at the dependency tree of the release bug.
Developer Sprints
In order to get all the separate Telepathy components we’re writing nailed down and working nicely together, and to allow API and Nepomuk usage review, we’ll be having a developer sprint. It will take place from 17th-20th September in Cambridge, UK (venue kindly provided by Collabora). More information about this sprint can be seen on its wiki page.
If you own a N900 phone and have tested or want to test Kontact Mobile it would be great if you participate in our current user survey- a diary.
Kontact Mobile has been under heavy development for the last weeks and however it is still at an early stage we encourage everybody to contribute and to become part of the process!
You can find all information concerning the testing in this mail: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-mobile-users/2010-August/000027.html
You will do real pioneer work with reporting what you liked and didn’t like as well as your ideas on usability and interaction design. This will help the developer team to create a great user experience for Kontact Mobile in future. Help us to shape this great product!
KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly , roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals.
Creating custom brushes is important for digital painters. A brush mask you can create using procedural dialogs we have (like Auto brush, Softbrush) has advantages of being somehow like a vector – you can easily scale them and rotate them without artefacts. But they are restricted to the shape – we support rectangular or circular shapes only.Recently I had idea of creating vector brushes with QPainterPath. I think we need to create some nice ui for that and it could work. There are problems, like supporting features like hardness/softness, but I did not dig deeper. It is nice area where somebody can play in Krita.
Bitmap brush has advantage of being any shape you want, but when you scale it too much, you see artefacts. Usually you open some image or photo reference or you use your current state of the canvas, make some selection with selection tools and save the selected pixels to your palette of your brush masks. This did not worked in Krita for a long time. We have custom brush dialog in Brush Tip for this ...read more...
In some news, MapQuest embraces OpenStreetMap, launches the maps site at open.mapquest.co.uk using the data from OpenStreetMap, as well as sets aside $1 million funding to improve the maps situation in USA. Let's see if other maps services will follow.
As usual the International Forum on Free Software (FISL) took place in Porto Alegre from 21-24 July and gathered together roughly 7500 attendees (students, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and govern representatives) from 16 countries. About 500 activities (talks, short-courses, and community meetings), 250 exhibitors, and an organizing team with 376 persons (including volunteers, SoftwareLivre Association staff, and hired press office and services) made FISL 11 one of the largest Free Software events in South America. FISL is always a great opportunity to meet new people and widely disseminate what is happening in the KDE world.
We (KDE Brasil) usually coordinate in advance about which talk proposals we want to submit, trying to come up with interesting topics on where KDE is heading to and some roadmap to guide potential new contributors and show off why we are a pretty amazing community We usually got about half of the proposals accepted for presentation, activities in FISL program range from highly geek topics with non-sense titles like “The ant meets the elephant, or ...read more...
... lots has been going on in the Plasma worlds, including:
We managed to get number of critical and important fixes in after RC2 for the final release of 4.5.0. These fixes have come not just from the usual suspects such as Marco or myself, but also people such as Will Stephenson, Raphael Kubo da Costa, Alex Fiestas, Rafa
I'm a hobbyist writer of fiction and poetry, which is to say that I write for the purpose of enjoying the pleasure the activity itself brings and for little other purpose. Sometimes I'll go back and read something I wrote some time ago, perhaps years ago, maybe even a decade or more. Sometimes when doing so a fairly odd thing will happen: I'll suddenly realize something that I was trying to say, something which was quite plainly there in what I had written, but which I was blind to at the time of writing. I've heard similar experiences from other writers, and if you are a writer you may have experienced the same thing too.
I had a similar experience with Plasma the other day. We get asked from time to time "Why Plasma?" or "What is the purpose of libplasma, exactly?". Or we get compared to other projects out there, even though there are only passing similarities. (I have yet to find another single project that approaches this problem space in the same way Plasma does; either Plasma ...read more...
I announced in a previous post that I’ve created a dictionary runner for KDE SC 4.6. One requested feature in the comments was the ability to define a custom trigger word. I have added it. Here you see it uses definir instead of define. It’s configurable through the KCM popup in the krunner settings.
If you set the trigger word to nothing, then it will add dictionary entries for every query, which could be neat:
Hoping to move this out of kdereview soon and into kdebase.
I am very glad to inform that most of the code for my GSoC Project is in the trunk now. In continuation to my previous blog post about auto centering, the following features are now added to Marble.
Auto Zoom: It is an optional feature, if enabled the map adjusts itself to an appropriate zoom level so as to keep an appropriate distance on the way ahead visible to the user respective to the current location of the gps device.
Showing current route instruction and a plugin for showing time and distance remaining to reach the destination.
The plugin (bottom right of the map) shows the time and distance remaining as well as the distance covered(progress bar) during the journey. The route instructions(For Example: move left, move right etc.) appear few minutes before reaching it. When the user selects a particular instruction now, the portion of the route where the instruction is valid gets highlighted.
As of now I'm an employee of Novell. That means a couple of things.
First of all: awesomeness, working with all of you!
Second the boring stuff: I'll have to update linked-in and some other sites. And put a disclaimer on this site - my previous employer (the Dutch government) wasn't exactly involved in what I did for KDE... And I'll have to go through the administrative stuff in the company. Boy, do I look forward to that ;-)
Third, I should get started. I'll be flying to the US of A tomorrow to meet people at the Novell offices. So if you want me to tell them anything in particular, let me know! Remember, for now, it's my FirstNameLastName on gmail if you want to mail me.
Besides that, I will of course start doing things within and for openSUSE. After all, my job will basically have three sides (at least that's how I currently see it):
Help openSUSE archieve world domination (eg be a volunteer in openSUSE, evangalize to the ...read more...
Pardon me for the excessively cliche title, I was short on time :P Its been a week now since college began, and already I feel the extreme busy-ness that occurs trying to squeeze every activity into 24 hours. The vacations were comparatively totally empty. The UPnP collection support in Amarok is concluding pretty well. Today I committed the fix that considerably shortens the amount of data transfer required over the network for subsequent queries once the local cache is relatively filled. With a relatively small share on miniDLNA, I got near native performance, with the tracks being populated as soon as I opened up a tree. The kioslave too has had some additions that allow applications using it to bypass many of the user-friendly features (required for browsing via Dolphin or Konqueror) and get blazing fast results instead. With another Amarok release coming up, I want to get some time to fix bugs, but it has been hard to come by, even ...read more...
Perhaps Dave's presentation could have been a bit "safer" if it had looked at just more recent times, or covered more than just commit rates, but presentation time is limited and, really, any information on how your community works and is put together is invaluable to its health and improvement. If I were part of the GNOME community, I'd be looking for ways to embrace Dave's hard worked for information in positive ways.
Dave's intentions were undoubtedly good and he put an obvious amount of time and effort into his presentation, but was repaid with a very public and unflattering flame war about something rather tangential to his goals with that presentation. Ouch.
Tribalism
Why does this happen? That's a great question, and I'm ...read more...
Since the C# bindings are apparently not really used/wanted by anyone (except for some Windows people – but that’s really not my main development platform) I thought that maybe some more people are interested in Java bindings.
There was a poll on kdedevelopers.org two years ago that showed Java ahead of Ruby and C# – but it doesn’t seem to be really representative: there are at least some Ruby plasmoids on kde-look.org, but none in C# (which was still ahead of Ruby). Given that Trolltech/Nokia abandoned QtJambi I’m not too sure about Java bindings either.
So I’m asking the community directly before I start putting too much work into a project that noone really wants: So far we have (active) bindings projects for Python, Ruby and Perl – is there any demand for Qt/KDE Java bindings in the community? Or if not for Java, for any other language/platform?
Go, go kde-i18n!
