At KDAB we spend all of our time working with Qt. As with any software development, much of that time ends up being focused on understanding, debugging, profiling and bug fixing rather than implementing new functionality. To help us with that we constantly improve the tools available to us and other Qt and KDE developers. That is what has brought us awesomeness such as massif-visualizer, verktyg or various bits and pieces in Qt Creator and KDevelop. The latest result of our tinkering with tooling was released at Qt Developer Days in Munich last week under the name GammaRay. It's a comprehensive collection of high level introspection and debugging utilities specifically tailored for the various frameworks in Qt. You can find out more about it and see some screenshots here. The whole thing, including all plugins, is released under the GPL so it can be useful to as many Qt developers as possible and in the hope that many of you will pitch in and help us make it even more useful for us all. Here is the announcement email to the KDE lists sent by Volker Krause, who has been leading this effort since its beginnings in the Kontact Touch project. Enjoy!

It is quite normal, in Free Software initiatives, for people to come in, help out, become proficient, maybe even moderately famous, then eventually move on or drop out. Often life gets in the way, parenting, post entry level jobs and growing responsibilities reduce the available time something fierce and once one is no longer really familiar with the code base, it becomes hard to make an effective contribution in those short time and motivation windows that open up. Somewhat ironically, since a large part of my job revolves around KDEPIM, this is very true for me as well. Over the last two years or so, apart from lunch discussions over architectural issues with my colleagues, I've been able to do little more than ensure things build and work on OSX, my current main platform. Much to my delight, this has recently changed. After many years, our efforts to build and transition to the Akonadi platform are coming together lately. Although we've decided to delay by a month, relative to the normal KDE 4.5 release schedule, with KDEPIM, we are nearing production quality of all of the components of Kontact now. KDEPIM from 4.5 branch is fully based on Akonadi and usable for my normal business and personal email, calendaring (Kolab, of course) and contacts management. In this current phase, there are a myriad smaller things to notice, analyze and fix (or give someone else enough information with which to fix). Many rough edges need to be filed away and regressions in the functionality and usability identified. Especially for the later it's really useful to have been working with Kontact for many years and to know the history behind why certain things work the way they do or whether those reasons still make sense. I find this to be very satisfying work, as it allows me to throw in my experience and my odd hour of hacking time and make a meaningful difference. This got me thinking that it would be awesome if we could re-activate some of the other old KDE hands to help make our next generation PIM infrastructure and apps all that they can be. So this is a call to arms for the KDE veterans, whether they've worked on PIM in the past or not. You all know KMail and friends very well, you know deep down you really wanna be coding again, at least a bit, and you all want KDEPIM to rock the world again. The platform and tools are excellent to work with, these days, and the code base is pretty clean and modular. The community is large and friendly, it's an enthusiastic and highly motivated group that is a joy to be around. So saddle up, you weary warriors, and ride with us once again ;).

We are collectively elated, in the KDEPIM community, by the news that all four of "our" applications for Google's Summer of Code have been accepted this year. There'll be work on bringing the wonders of plasma to Kontact's summary widget, improving Akonadi's SyncML support (mentored by last year's student in that area, awesomely), porting KMail to use Stephen Kelly's very cool Grantlee templating library (which will allow much easier themeing and probably attract 1000 elephants) and on infrastructure for import and export of data and settings. All this is exceedingly useful and much needed stuff, and exactly the kind of work by new contributors that we were hoping to facilitate by building a strong, flexible, nice to work with foundation in the form of Akonadi. As the core Akonadi team continues to improve the machinery under the hood and as mobile versions of our applications emerge (watch this space for news on that hopefully later today), new contributors and those who have been waiting for a while for their moment can get to work improving the overall experience and bringing KDEPIM and Kontact to its full potential. The summer of code projects are part of that, but by no means the only such efforts. It promises to be a very exciting summer. I'm personally especially happy to see several applicants succeed (in KDE overall) who failed last time. Some even failed twice but continued to learn, improve their proposals, get involved in other ways the community and have now reached a personal goal in getting accepted. I applaud their perseverance and spirit, that's what makes our communities great, I think. Speaking of perseverance, it warms my heart to see no less than 11 successful applications from India, this year, much more than ever before. Maybe we in the Free Software world are finally starting to bridge the digital divide and truly engage contributors from more diverse backgrounds.

It is raining massively, outside, again. It does that every day here, in Manaus, what with it being the rainy season and this being the Amazon jungle. The negativity ends there, though, since it takes about 15 minutes, is very refreshing, and everything else here is Awesome (TM). I have really enjoyed the past few days, Bossa Conference has been a great experience. The presentations were generally of high quality, I had many very good conversations over many excellent meals, and by a luxurious pool, met several impressively talented individuals and the equally impressive INdT teams. There is a lot of very nice work being done here in Brazil in Free Software in general and around Qt and KDE in particular. I'm proud to have been invited to come.

Given the pile of awesome that was Camp KDE 2009 in Negril, Jamaica, how could I not attend this year as well? I'll be presenting and doing some Qt training sessions again, like last year, on whatever topic the audience wants. There'll be sun, there'll be hackery, there'll be merriment. You must not miss this, so make sure to sign up now and meet us in Sand Diego in January.

On a related (to my other blog post today) note, while I'm giving credit where credit is due: my personal KDE hero at the moment is Anne Wilson, who has been helping KDEPIM users for years on our lists and at meetings and has been a voice of reason, courtesy, constructive feedback and positiveness that makes a huge difference in the atmosphere of our community. I much admire her work with the documentation team (userbase, anyone?) and the community working group and ever since I first met her in person (in Glasgow, I think) I have been impressed by the fearless and all embracing manner in which she has found her way amongst us weirdos and become a gentle, well respected leader and wrangler of geeks. I don't know when exactly it is, but happy 70th birthday, Anne, all the best from us PIMsters, we thank you and look forward to many more Akademy meetings with you.

With all the excitement and energy surrounding Akonadi and the ongoing porting of our main applications to it at the moment (over 100 commits to KDEPIM yesterday alone!), it's easy to get the impression that we've collectively abandoned our stable versions and the many users relying on them today. Not so. While Volker Krause and his team at KDAB (currently Kevin Ottens, Frank Osterfeld, Sebastian Sauer, Leo Franchi, Stephen Kelly and Laurent Montel, with various others pitching in occasionally, like Marc, Guillermo and Romain) are ripping through KDEPIM trunk, Allen Winter and Thomas McGuire (again aided by Marc and others) are faithfully watching over the stable branches. They are making sure that all relevant bugfixes found by the Akonadi port make it back into the 3.x and 4.x stable branches and are doing many bugfixes and features in those branches themselves, every week, which are then merged into trunk. This results in a steady stream of improvements into both the 3.x and 4.x series, all of which make it to our users (i.e. you out there, probably) via the Linux distributions and via the KDE Windows and Mac packages regularly. This is mostly unglamorous and sometimes boring work which they carry out with great professionalism and personal commitment, both during their KDAB work time and well beyond, in their personal time. They hardly ever get any recognition for what they do, so this is an attempt to remedy that a bit. Rock on, boys!

I'm back from the awesome Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. It feels good to be back in Berlin and with my family, but I'm very scared of the backlog that now awaits me. Before I tackle it (and potentially blog more about the event) I need to get something off my chest, lest it is forgotten. I'd like to publicly thank Klaas Freitag, who's term as a member of the KDE e.V. board of directors just ended with our general assembly a few days ago, for his contribution to our project. He stepped up to help out with the more mundane and every-day tasks that are required of the board, thus freeing up people like our beloved bouncing ball and poster boy Aaron (who's term also ended, but who'll get plenty credit anyway ;) to do what they do best. I really admire the effective, quiet and ego-less way in which Klaas has carried himself and represented us. He's done a lot of work behind the scenes that benefits KDE greatly and helped get e.V. and its operational side up to a sustainable level. So thank you very much, Klaas, and enjoy the extra time you can hopefully now spend with your family again. :)

I'm currently sitting at a table in the still empty Qt Software / KDAB booth, listening to the awesome KDE Linuxtag team get the KDE / Amarok / Kubuntu presence behind me ready for another day. Throughout all of Linuxtag they have been, and will continue to be, proudly showcasing what we have collectively already achieved and helping new contributors make their way into our community so we can do even greater things in the future, with their help. Today the conference program features a KDE track, full of diverse and interesting presentations for a wide range of audiences. Claudia, Luca and their team have done an amazing job getting this conference presence and the many talks lined up. KDE is again making a very good impression, I think. Yeah, us! :)

The joking and chatter behind me has reminded me how much I'm looking forward to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. It will be great to catch up with everyone, like every year, but unlike every year, this time I'll also be able to catch up with friends from outside the usual KDE circles, since many friends from Gnome and related projects will be there. I'm sure this co-located event will be awesome and will bring our two communities, which share so many of their core goals and ideals, even closer together. I'm going there a few days early to do some hanging out on the beach, diving and general R&R. Good times.

But now I need to get going, the KDE track starts in a few minutes and my presentation on transitioning from Qt/KDE 3 to 4 as a developer is the second one.

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the key contributors to KDE on Windows for many years is unhappy with the way we, KDAB (and our partners at Intevation and g10code) have handled our collaboration with them. In particular, Christian writes:

I'm also disappointed by the role of the firms involved in KDE/windows development. Two years ago they asked us what they can do for us. We told them that we need:
*a continuous build like the buildbot from Dirk Müller
* a proper dbus/windows implementation
* a server to place our binary packages