Datschge 

There are plenty sources for KDE relates feeds and news, but reading them through the usual neutral feed readers or even on separate sites takes the fun out of the less serious ones. Also the common separations between different parts of KDE (internal devs, external dev, artists, usability experts, bug hunters and pr people) is reflected in the different community cultures (mailing lists, bko, dot, wikis, kde look/apps/files, other forums) which usually never mix (dot comments are probably the closest to that happening). I always thought putting them all together onto one (naturally huge messy) page should give an interesting overview, similar to the yellow press' collection of often useless(ly funny) article collections. As I recently found out about simplepie I decided to test myself how far I would be able to go with an automated yellow press parody of KDE news, all while both making good use of my limited webspace (with "unlimited" bandwidth) as well as satisfying my rather constant need for KDE tinbits from everywhere. The result after a couple of hours today is here (warning: brutal use of bright colours). Read More

first of all I hope you are aware that your heading "a lesson to all" sounds like pure arrogance to everyone who took part in these discussions but is still not considered in any of your reasonings. Read More

The following post is mostly a response to Aaron's comments in his latest blog entry. It's basically about the reason why I like KDE and why I do the contributions I do, so it might be an interesting albeit highly theoretical read. Read More

Nothing big, I just created two importable khotkeys mouse gesture settings for download mimicking some of the Mozilla and Opera mouse gestures. Feel free to suggest and contribute more. Also a couple of Mozilla/Opera mouse gestures are not realized yet since I don't know which way a mouse gesture would ideally affect an element (ie. link, image etc.) it is hovering. Read More

Did users ask for Expose? Yes, they actually did. Most likely they didn't think of this kind of solution, but its intuitiveness even though it is an unpreceded feature, as well as the positive feedback shows that it is something which was wanted. The problems for which Expose is a solution are: How can I find a window by its look? and How can I get a quick overview over all of my desktop(s)?. There already exist several approaches to solve one of those two, Kasbar's windows thumbnails tooltips, KPager desktop thumbnails, OS X's genie effect for minimized windows, to name but a few. Expose is innovative in that that it takes the technical capability of Quartz (smooth scaling of whole windows) for offering a combined solution for both problems at once, giving an overview over the whole desktop as well as allowing users to recognize individual windows without much of additional abstraction. With Expose Apple is here leveraging some backend features they previously introduced to OS X for offering a completely new user experience. The same is what KDE is starting to do now. Before the work within KDE was mostly focussed on the backend, the framework, building flexible and easy to use tools for developers. This backend is now being leveraged by more and more applications, Konqueror and Kontact being the most apparent examples. We can now proceed leveraging KDE's backend while trying to solve multiple existing concerns by users. In the best case this will offer innovative and practicable solutions for all users. In the worst case we will still have examples of the power of KDE's backend. Most important is that we make potentially useful (combinations of) existing features visible and accessible to users. I'd like to show several examples using new components which will be included in the upcoming KDE 3.2: The first one is Khotkeys2, included due to the never stopping stream of requests for mouse gesture control in Konqueror (a la Opera). Khotkeys2 offers support for custom shortcuts and for custom mouse gestures system wide, not only in Konqueror. Combined with the within KDE widely used DCOP this will allow users to optimize their workflow. This new addition is potentially usable in innovative way by combining mouse gestures with alternative pointer devices like touchpads, tablet system and many others, giving access and control to parts of the system which were not as accessible with the previous pointer support alone. The other one is the Universal Sidebar kicker extension. By itself, being exactly the sidebar users see in Konqueror already, it might not be very interesting. But the potential applications for the Universal Sidebar as a globally acessible area like the tasbar are manifold: Read More

Update on bugs.kde.org: The new script old-bugs-statistics is now up and running. It includes links to "bug lists" containing all the possibly outdated reports, making the former "Idle Reports Search" on the front page redundant. I consequently removed it and cleaned up the front page a little. I'm pretty sure that old-bugs-statistics combined with weekly-bug-summary and all their included links fulfil most (useful) statistic and bug hunting needs. If not let me know. Read More

Hi, here's Datschge. I guess I should introduce myself first, but there's really not much to say. I'm a big fan of Motoi Sakuraba and am crying me myself a river for not being able to visit his live concert last Saturday. -- I'm putting my oar in into KDE for about one year now. Being an ultimately useless non-programmer I've been digging for parts where I can easily teak ("improve") stuff while hoping to reach my goal, making it easier for "outsiders" to effectively contribute to KDE. I started being vocal during the discussions which led to the kde.org redesign, added noise to the usability list, then decided to pick bugs.kde.org, something noone else seems to like to tackle, tweaked stuff here and there, added an hopefully easy to grasp supporting KDE page which I hope will be translated and localizated into other languages/localizations soon. Right now I'm "working" on (I'd rather call it 'keeping myself distracting from') writing a decent help page for bugs.kde.org and putting together a pseudo "KDE HIG" informing people (myself!) about all the build in consistency features KDE offer for ages already. Right now I'm totally excited since I got a hack of weekly-bug-summary for showing the amount of old reports and the ratio of old and all reports per product to work in my local bugzilla installation. Thanks to Steve for the inspiration. ^^ Read More