Akademy 2008

As you've seen from all the stores on the dot and on planetkde this week has seen all the KDE developers gathering in Mechelen in Belgium. The organisation this year has been excellent - even the network (usually the achilles heel of KDE conferences) has worked from day one.

As well as the usual socialising, talks and BoF sessions there has also been a lot of coding. I've focussed on ksnapshot and plasma, KSnapshot gained a few minor changes:

• KSnapshot will now record the window title in the image if you've chosen to capture the window decorations. Hopefully this should be useful to indexers like strigi.
• I've fixed the 'not saving settings' bug - it looks like kdelibs changed behaviour.
• I've increased the JPEG quality setting a little so screen shots look nicer.
• Tackat has persuaded me to look into writing a simple post processing app so that you can easily apply effects like screenie before you upload your pics to the dot.

The work on plasma was again to do with scripting, I first of all got the code that was broken by the API changes fixed - this meant that the spinning squares demo now works again. I then got the scripting support for the new widget api working. You can see this in action in the screenshot below which shows a calculator written in javascript using the plama widgets next to the current C++ calculator.

This isn't quite ready to commit because the actual calculator logic is a bit broken, but it shows that the widget support is nearly ready. In order to make it easy to test this, I finished the implementation of package uninstalling in plasma libs so that you can now use the plasmapkg tool to easily install and remove scripted plasmoids.

I've done a little work on a few other things, but they're not quite ready yet, so I'll save them for another post.