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.

Since Christian Ehrlicher expressed his unhappiness with our (KDAB's) efforts in the area of DBUS on Windows in this blog post, I thought I'd clarify some things. The work that we announced in

Haven't blogged for a while, so here's some of the changes that have happened in Kubuntu recently.

I finally found some time for the KDE port of system-config-printer, still far from feature parity with the Gnome version and needs plenty of tidying up but should be usable.

mornfall got back to hacking on Adept 3 featuring super fast xapian search.

In other packaging news the Dist Upgrade tool got a pyQt 4 port.

And gdebi, the .deb installer, got a pyKDE 4 port.

We're turning on the Apport crash handler for KDE programmes. Unlike the KDE crash handler it creates a full backtrace with debug symbols thanks to Launchpad. Will have to see if the bug team will manage to forward relevant reports upstream.

We finally got a shiny new website, thanks to Ryan.

I turned on compositing by default in kwin, still needs a patch to Compiz so we can use the same blacklist as it does. Not sure it'll stay on for final, just depends on how reliable it is out in the wild.

Worlds finest distributed revision control system, bzr decided to go with the world's finest toolkit for their GUI, I uploaded qbzr today.

Next week

Finally, congratulations to John and SakiFlux.

Great quote from Danimo's Chaos radio express interview when the topic Akonadi is discussed.

Since I am one of the developers invited to this year's KDE PIM developer meeting in Osnabrück, I am currently trying to improve my knowledge of Akonadi.

Being the maintainer of a rather small PIM application, kabcclient, which only uses one of the specialized APIs, the addressbook API KABC, I thought that a good way would be to start there.

KABC and its sibling KCal are based on the KResources framework, which means they get their data from plugable backends, so called resources.
Since they are part of the kdepimlibs module and have been released as part of KDE 4.0, they will still need to work once we have transitioned to Akonadi in KDE 4.1, or in other words they both need a way to get data from Akonadi instead of their usual sources like direct file access.

So I started to work on a KABC::Resource which operates on an Akonadi collection and a KCal::ResourceCalendar which does the same.

The one for addressbook data already works quite well, the other one still crashes a lot, you have been warned :)

While we are on the topic of compatability: Aaron writes from a conference in Australia that Akonadi is also being recommended to our peers in the GNOME project.
This makes a lot of sense because Akonadi is basically the next generation implementation of the principles they are currently using with E-D-S, the Evolution Data Server, quite similar to how D-Bus is a next generation implementation of concepts we previously used through DCOP.

Such a change is obviously quite some work, so it might make sense to do it as a series of smaller steps.
One such step could be to let their E-D-S application side APIs untouched but make them talk to Akonadi instead, a bit like how the embedded version transparently uses D-Bus instead of CORBA.

Most of the access patterns can be mapped quite easily, I have a compatible D-Bus service side implementation based on our traditional APIs (e.g. KABC) sitting in my local SVN repository (which I might commit to playground once I have finished its transition to Akonadi).

Like many KDE application, strigidaemon uses DBus to talk to other programs. Debugging inter-process communication is never very convenient and strigidaemon is no exception. So far, there are no unit tests for checking the quality of the DBus communication in Strigi. I set about to write some and found it was not so easy, so I'm documenting what I did for the benefit of all the other developers using DBus.