As I wrote in my previous blog post, I've been doing work on getting Calligra working on Android. My first attempts of this used Calligra Mobile, our QWidget based mobile UI originally written for the Nokia N900. One big problem with this is that the scrolling speed when running on android was horribly slow. I think I got maybe 1 or 2 frames per second, and that on fairly powerful hardware.

Since so many students have already shown interest in working for KDE during this years Google Summer of Code, with some already having started to send in first drafts of their proposals, I thought I'd a bit of advertising for a specific idea. Well "my" idea :)

It has been mostly ignored so far, i.e. not getting a lot of obvious attention, probably because it is "hidden" in the KDE PIM section and not listed in one of the section that guarantee eternal fame.

So here I am attempting to correct this misconception: this idea is mostly about creating workspace components, e.g. Plasma applets, for information made available by KDE's PIM infrastructure.

Currently almost all display, input and managment of PIM data happens through their respective applications, e.g. receiving, reading, writing and sending mail through Kontact Mail, applications which are of course designed for that tasks but not always strictly necessary.

Lets take for example a person with a mobile computing device of some sort, e.g. a traditional laptop or a tablet running KDE Plasma Active. Such a user might like to have a quick way to prevent all or certain email accounts from being checked for new mail (current Internet connection could have traffic limits) or specifically want to synchronize with a particular server-based calendar right now.

Launching the respective application would work but might not be the quick and easy way the user would like to have.

All information and applicable actions are available outside those applications, what we need is a way for users of our workspace product to interact with them.

So I sat down and, with the enormous help of Viranch Mehta (who wrote the pure QML based UI), created a prototype for such an interaction point

The suggested GSOC work would be to take that prototype and existing workspace integration solutions such as Lion Mail and build an experience that makes contacts, emails, events, todos and notes first class items on our workspaces and provides us as users with means to check and control what all these little busy helpers do when we need to know or need to make decisions for them.

Hint for interested students: think first about what status information people are usually interested in (more specific hint: e.g. new/unread mails, calendar reminders) and only then do research into displaying data.

Additional suggestion: have primarily a look at Plasma related technologies, this is where most of your tasks will come from.

As most of you are probably well aware, since quite a while it is not very hard to write Qt applications to run on Android devices. A couple of weeks ago we at KO GmbH decided to look into how hard it would be to get KDE applications to run, and more specifically, if it would be possible to run Calligra with one of its mobile UI's on an android device.

I finally got around to running vttest [1] in Konsole (4.8/master) [2].

The most noticeable issue is the the console resizing commands don't work [3].

First, I've changed the branches that are being built on build.kde.org to reflect the branching of 4.8.

Second I've incorporated a build of Qt 4.8 branch that is triggered once a week to keep up with fixes there.

Third I've tried to get a build of Qt 5 up and running also, however this is where I've hit some bumps. I've been unable to get Qt 5 to build and as such not all other jobs are working :(

kdelibs frameworks branch is now covered in build.kde.org :)

But due to a bug in the build system it requires a special hack to build, ie the cmake call does all the required work but fails with a message about inqt5 not being in the export set. So to make it build in Jenkins the exit code from cmake has to be ignored. Other then that it seems to work ok.

A long over due update on the status of build.kde.org.

It now builds most of the old core KDE modules. Both the stable, currently the KDE/4.7 branch and the master branch. Sadly I haven't gotten Qt5 or kdelibs frameworks branch to build as a result nepomuk-core doesn't build either.

There is also an IRC channel for notifications on the build status, #kde-builds.

A second build node has been added that kicks in when the master node is busy, as this node is low on bandwidth it is set to only try and build if the master has been busy for some time.

Current list of jobs:

As Andreas note we are rather close towards Calligra 2.4 which will be the very first release of the Calligra Suite.

Our pretty cool Calligra Quality Dashboard lists 11 remaining release-critical blocker bugs that still need to be fixed till then.

There's been a "small" upgrade to my desktop machine at work, and as a part of that I got my hands on a 1920x1080 Dell monitor and couldn't help placing it as a secondary monitor, rotated. And I couldn't help noticing various problems with this setup.

Today is the second and last day of the Calligra Words mini-sprint. After spending yesterdays first day on planing and implementation of decisions made we spent today on solving all kind of problems that showed up since then.

In particular today we land;
* Fix wrong placement of anchored object if the object is anchored in a paragraph that spans two pages, and the anchor is in the part of the paragraph that is on the first page.
* Be sure to only try position an anchor once per layout-run.
* Implement anchor stacking.