This post is actually rather after the fact. I've been super busy, and my blogging tends to fall way, way behind when that happens. But I wanted to tell people about plans for Amarok Mobile, where things stand now, and what needs to be done. (And how you could help!)
First off, I need to give a big shout-out to Nokia. A while back, they donated ten n900 devices to KDE developers who submitted proposals describing what they would work on. I was one of the lucky winners, and this provided both the motivation and means to start working on an Amarok Mobile.
I actually was not initially supposed to use this for Amarok Mobile development -- I had sumitted a proposal to bring functionality similar to the beloved* Popup Dropper into a library for Maemo programs. Problem: having never used Maemo before, I didn't realize it had longpress functionality (my previous phone was an iPhone).
So, not wanting to reinvent the wheel needlessely, I instead decided to start working on exactly what everyone had assumed/thought/wanted me to be working ...read more...
KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 was released, among it a new Marble version with great new features. Please give it a try; we're looking for testers and appreciate feedback via IRC (#marble), email or Bugzilla.The handbook is not yet updated, so here goes a quick tip for one of the features that may be a bit harder to spot: Exporting a route to .gpx is possible from the routing context menu. Click on any point of the route in the map with the right mouse button and select "Export route..." in the context menu.
If your navigation device (or whichever software you want to use) does not support the .gpx format directly, have a look at gpsbabel as a universal conversion tool.
Security researcher Joanna Rutkowska and her company have lauched qubes-OS, an FOSS based OS focussing on security by virtualizing all dangerous processes in the system. For example, you'd have a 'work browser' container, a 'shopping browser' container, a 'game' container etc.
They all work together and integrate smoothly, although there are of course a few limitations and extra steps the user has to go through for now.
Why is this interesting, besides from the security point of view? Because Joanna and her team have used KDE desktop technology to run the qubes-OS desktop (screenshots here).
They have made a couple of modifications, and integrated the technology pretty deep. Sounds like an excellent reason to interview them and ask about the why and how of this choice.
Another thing which came up yesterday is this email thread. Joanna here presents a proposal to from now on securely sign released KDE software packages. It's very cool Joanna is actively working on improving security within the FOSS world and ...read more...
I’ve resigned my job at KDAB last month in a swift move towards more KDE-time. This all came pretty suddenly, but it felt like The Right Thing to do for me personally and for KDE, which I care a lot about. Since May, I’ve been working for Open-SLX, a German company that makes and supports the openSUSE boxed version. My focus in that work is the user experience of the product. The idea is to work upstream (in openSUSE and KDE / Plasma) as much as possible. While Open-SLX benefits directly from my work done in KDE, this is also a nice way to give back to the community, by making sure I get to spend enough time on things that are not directly related to the product. So now I’ve settled into my new job, and up until now, it’s been great. I’ve been able to catch up with a couple of areas in KDE, I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted in the past, and ...read more...
It is a well known fact that devs hate writing the user documentation (we are not even fond of writing devel documentation), so it was the same case for me and Lancelot’s manual.
But from time to time our conscience tells us that we should do something about it. In this case, the role of my conscience was played by annma
The comparison is most probably biased (although I tried hard for it not to be), so any help in that department is appreciated. (any help in any department is more than appreciated)
Now, the article that is yet left to be written is the introduction to the Shelf applet (ex Lancelot Part) and I’ll be able to rest on ...read more...
After a few delays, the PR 1.2 firmware for the N900 is finally released with Qt 4.6.2 shipping by default (see maemo.org for all PR 1.2 related info). This means that all the apps that up until now only ran in the SDK can finally be deployed to real devices
The final Qt packages have the version tag 4.6.2~git20100401-0maemo1+0m5 (no April Fool’s, despite the date).
Some useful information:
A good starting point for developing with Qt for Maemo 5 is the Nokia Qt SDK.
The Qt for Maemo 5 examples can be found in Maemo’s extras-devel repository. The package is called libqt4-examples-maemo5 and installs to /usr/examples/maemo5. Documentation is here.
The Qt 4 wiki contains useful information about building, debugging, running and deploying Qt apps.
Just a short blog today to announce the immediate availability of rekonq 0.4.90 (0.5 beta) tarballs. As I’m having troubles today with my sf account (rekonq site and tarballs are on sourceforge), you’ll find code just on gitorious (download source from git there) and on kde-apps (the usual tarballs).
If you live under the rocks and you yet don’t know what rekonq is, just let me say that it is a web browser based on (Qt)WebKit that aims to be lightweight and to be well integrated with KDE technologies.
A chat with Armijn Hemel (during good food - Roti Kip) about contributing lead to this blogpost. Within the KDE community we have a large number of volunteers working in a variety of areas. Paul notes in his blogs how 'modularization of the community' can be dangerous when a bus rides over an important contributor. Luckily I haven't heard of busses doing that recently, but there are other matters in life which can pull away contributors. This hurts communities, and I think contributors should think a bit more about that.
Real life interference - think about it! Unfortunately, leaving is something one rarely plans in advance. Most contributors want to stay involved, and still offer to take on work - they just don't actually have time for it anymore. This obviously makes planning rather difficult - as Armijn noted, being a volunteer doesn't mean having no responsibilities.
But does it mean you always have to do what you promised, despite real life? My take: absolutely not. I think people should be free - and have ...read more...
The purple blob called algorithm?, It has taken shape. It’s a relief to have deviced it completely in my head, as that was the part that had me the most concerned about the program. I felt that if I couldn’t device one quickly, I would not finish the program in time.
That way of thinking has accompained me since I learned to survive in higher education: my disastrous ability to get distracted from study (or anything that resembles work or isn’t pleasing) meant that I had to device ways to get myself to do things in time or at least before the final deadlines.
That role as been fulfilled by my conscience, that evil overlord with a whip that keeps reminding me of aaaaaaall the things I still have to do, with the highest priority targets earning me more mental whipping per unit of time.
Look at the images below, can you distinguish which direction the lines are moving?. Can you find a difference between both?.
.. is the total number of countries where the Multimedia/Edu sprint participants in Randa are from. You read that right: seventeen! We had developers from Austria, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland (the Netherlands), Italy, Norway, Peru, Poland, Scotland (yeah, I know…), Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA. Impressive, isn’t it? So sad I had to leave this afternoon already, but here are a few highlights of the weekend: we had a very talented chef who spent his holiday to prepare our yummy meals, very productive sessions in the various rooms of the huge building during the day, gorgeous weather, the worlds most beautiful mountain right around the corner ( I am biased ) and of course the mandatory Raclette evening, prepared by Mr. Fux: And here is the man who made all this possible: Mario, the most efficient Sprint ...read more...
I'm currently in Lisbon, Portugal at the Real-Time Conference 2010. I won't write about it just now, since it just started and I'm tired.
But here's something that just surprised me. If only all laptop batteries would improve this way: design capacity: 69000 mWh remaining capacity: 72880 mWh
The KDE-Edu team is very productive in Randa. On the second day we started with a Logo session. Our eyes keep seeing logos in the everyday life and we have been wanting a logo for years. At the meeting, Alexandre from Brazil, a professional designer, watched us the whole first day when we talked about who we are, what are our targets and about our programs. He then started to work on a logo concept: he defined a few verbs about KDE-Edu and came up with the conclusion that KDE-Edu makes people's knowledge grow. So the main idea behind the concept is "growing knowledge". The logo is still in its infancy so please don't comment like "I don't like it" or whatever without being productive. We as a group, after the logo was presented, did not do a "like/hate" unproductive waste of time session. We agreed that the concept idea was good. One thing Alex also said is that if a logo looks good as a stamp, in black and white, it'll look good anywhere. It'll come into ...read more...
KMyMoney is now in kdereview. It has to go through a 2-week review before being approved to move to extragear. Given our development experience (we are by no means a new kid on the block), I expect it to be fine. As part of the process, I had to prepare a small summary about the current MyMoney development situation, which I think is worth sharing here:
So, first coding day. in the morning we had an awesome breakfast then fastly we went upstairs, to the 4th floor and opened our laptopput it in the back of a red VW microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the city dump. up there was the Multiemdia people with the KMix, Kdelive, Amarok, VLC, and others talking about multimedia, and also Apol, Me, Alexandre, Annma, Sput and such talking about edu stuff.
We had to drink a lot of bottled water, since programming is something that really tires a persons muscle, it had a funny taste and was a bit yellowish. I had to get proper water in the tap.
24 * 9 bottles of beer on the wall.
The big brother watches us from his tower of wisdom.
hi! just a quick note that a new method of reporting bugs in KDE's bugzilla has been pushed to the live server after setting on the test server for quite a while.
Today I released the initial version of Smaragd, a themable window decoration engine that allows you to use Compiz/Beryl Emerald themes together with the KDE window manager KWin.
This version is not yet ready for production use (there are no shadows and theme installation has to be done manually), but you can already start choosing your favorite theme out of over 1500 available Emerald themes.
There have been some great additions and refinements in the last few weeks and picking the best is going to be a difficult task. But we don’t mind if you make it still harder
(This post was published on Friday, but I put in a wrong tag and I didn't get aggregated, so, republished)Although I've been hacking on my GSoC project for quite a while, doing little experiments and getting my mind around various factors involved, this week was my first official coding period, since that was what I had in my timeline.The first piece to implement is the kioslave to browse UPnP
I've been looking for a local store which offers a colour sprectromitor and chanced upon the spyder3. I have to say that it is a total let-down. It doesn't work on Linux to begin with. I feared this going in but the gracious return policy at the store allows me to buy things and simply return them within two weeks without any reason - my standard answer is "It doesn't work with linux". They smile and give me my money back - great store, they get a large part of my earnings :-)
In the case of the spyder3, it didn't even work with windows, really. No more whites, everything is blue, the colour profile it creates is horrible. I tried it with daylight, incandescent, etc and to be honest I can do much better with my eye. Definitely returning it when I get back from my trip to London and the Libre Graphics Meeting. Crap in a box for 99? if you ask me.
If you want to try out Qt 4.7 and the interesting new world of Qt Quick ("from now on /the/ way to make GUIs"), Kubuntu 10.04 users can try it from the experimental PPA. The Qt Creator packages there have Qt Quick designer integration.
Mike Arthur, the man, the legend, the red haired Scott joins KDEMU.
What is KDEMU you ask? It’s an *all* KDE show that will cover a wide range of KDE topics, releases, interviews with developers, etc.
If you are a KDE contributor and want to talk about your work in KDE or just want to co-host a show or two, feel free to email me or use the contact form in my website.
Since api.kde.org has been down a lot lately, I generated some Qt Assistant-compatible documentation from kdelibs, and put it up on my server, and also linked to it from the topic in the #kde-devel IRC channel. But since not everyone visits IRC, I thought I’d mention it here too. So, fetch kde45.qch and save it somewhere save, launch Qt Assistant, go to Edit
I arrived on Thursday afternoon in Randa, in a beautiful scenery with big mountains and white summits. The weather is quite sunny (not that we have been out a lot today ;-) and the house is very nice. We started working today with a together session to get to know who each other is and how we can share knowledge. Then we split and in the KDE-Edu side, Frederik started with suggesting topics we could work on, community-related for KDE-Edu. You can follow the proceedings here: http://community.kde.org/Multimedia/Sprint2010/Schedule#Friday.2C_May_21. We defined the schedule and had quite a full and productive day. We're noting everything down and we try to keep focused on the topic. We're focused in defining what is the KDE-Edu project more than hacking widly although we branched kdeedu for 4.5 and opened trunk for 4.6 as an exceptional measure. It's very nice to be two groups (plus some satellites) as we feel more part of KDE overall and we benefit from other people energy and input. Needless to say that Mario has been and is ...read more...
After a long development cycle focused almost exclusively on KMid, it's time to give some love to other projects. I've been working lately on KMetronome, a MIDI metronome for KDE and ALSA. It is the oldest project of my little family.
The only issue in KMetronome's tracker is this one year old request, which has suggested the title of this post. The "Weird Metronome" is a popular simple MIDI metronome for Windows, which is the origin of "Open Metronome".
The major advantage of Weird / Open Metronome is the definition of rhythm patterns. The drawback is that it only works on Windows. It may be a good idea to make a Linux port. His definition of patterns is very simple and elegant, if somewhat limited. It has two branches: one producing MIDI events, and the other producing digital audio.
Although I can't rule out porting Open Metronome to Linux in the future, I've decided to ...read more...
Not really… It is actually 7 months of “kdelibs/plasma” (or libplasma) repository activity in 15 minutes (but that would not sound really as attractive as a post title).
Today a fellow co-worker showed to me a really nice application: gource (like ‘source’ but with ‘g’ letter, maybe for ‘graphics’) written by Andrew Caudwell. This application offers some really nifty source code control visualization and supports git/mercurial and other source code control systems using some hacks.
Since internet speed (not even talking about latency…) in Manaus/Amazonas is lacking to say the least, I decided to use git-svn to checkout a specific revision of kdelibs/plasma directory and later I did a rebase to update the code with the trunk.
So, for your amusement, enjoy.
I have some hints about this visualization:
in the first seconds there is an explosion of files (because I didn’t checkout the code from the very first commit in svn, is like the touched files warped inside of logs)
the code seems to be rather modular (there are a well defined set of ...read more...
gorgeous weather, the worlds most beautiful mountain right around the corner ( I am biased 
)
and of course the mandatory Raclette evening, prepared by Mr. Fux: 
And here is the man who made all this possible: Mario, the most efficient Sprint 
