Jaroslaw Staniek 

Yesterday KEXI 3.2 Beta shipped, effect of improvements from entire 2018. Full info in the wiki. That's best KEXI to date! Pun intended because among other things one is especially worth mentioning, entirely new and final date/time grammar for user's SQL. Read More

Today is the release day for KEXI 3.1.0 Beta & its frameworks: https://community.kde.org/Kexi/Releases#3.1.0_Beta_1 Since version 3 it becomes KEXI not Kexi to suggest becoming a standalone app. It's standalone status includes being first-class app also outside of KDE Plasma. To make this real things such as useful yet simple file widget are developed or single click mode is really single click mode "even" on XFCE. Actually implementing optimal experience for Windows is quite similar to supporting XFCE. Read More

Cool, Kexi 3.0.0 Beta 1 and related libraries have landed, ready for testing and packaging. Please find downloads and change logs at https://community.kde.org/Kexi/Releases/3#3.0.0_Beta_1 As usual report bug and wishes are welcome, details at https://community.kde.org/Calligra/File_a_bug_or_wish. Read More

We're pretty close to "beta" releases of the KDb 3, KProperty 3, KReport 3 frameworks as well as Kexi 3, the data-oriented app creator. So while I am not in person @ Akademy I though a "special offer" during this special time would be in order: if anyone has questions or needs assistance in planning port to one of the APIs offered, ping me on IRC or mail me. And also later :) Read More

Two pictures worth thousands of SLOCs^w words. All the modernization KEXI 3 receives these months may be enough to start using upper case letters for the name :) Spolier: 0% of mockups here, top picture: kexi.git master, bottom picture: to-be-published GUI. Read More

Well, consider them unhidden now: if you missed a structured place to link bugs.kde.org big/wish reports with KDE Phabricator tasks, look no further. One or more "See Also" fields of the bugzilla (top-right side) are useful points of integration. Example: link, see the screenshot below. Read More

Intro or what are Kexi objects? Kexi objects are the top-level entities of type Table, Query, Form, Report, Script or Macro. They are compared to perhaps separate document types except of course they are not physical files (in Kexi nothing touches physical files except the database that handles the actual storage but this is rather an implementation detail). Read More

This week database apps builder Kexi that competes with MS Access and Filemaker has been released with cool new features. Version 2.9.8 finally fixes world's issues with SQL! 22 typical scalar functions now work portably across SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL. No other general purpose software I know does this. Read More

[Skip if you're not a git user] You will often want to have more than one build environment in parallel, for example if you want to work on stable and various feature branches. Recommended way so far was to use a git-new-workdir script. This solution saves space (e.g. ~300MiB for a calligra branch instead of ~1200MiB) and time. Read More

I am happy to say that Pre-Alpha edition of ‪Kexi‬ 3.0 runs nicely already after like 3 weeks of porting! Especially its tabular view work out of the box for me after fixing the last compilation error with zero fixes needed in the functionality. Read More

Kexi has improved quite a bit since the last time, especially in Reports. We're close to supplementary 2.8.7 release within Calligra, then 2.9 will follow and Qt5/KF5-based 3.0 with a shiny mask. Read More

Andy, Thanks so much for picking up the topic of color pickers (pun intended). I'd like to add to the topic by discussing cases when accuracy is not as important at results. In this case there's a problem of abundance of choice. You don't have time to quickly and correctly pick one from the 16777216 colors. Plus alpha value? Come on! Whenever you're confronted with a photoshop/gimp-like color picker you either choose random color, or single color that's globally predefined in a palette. I also understand that very few 'casual' users maintain own palettes for consistency. Read More

That was my first Akademy after a while, I've been following previous two with kids on my lap. I think Brno turned out to be both a pretty destination and decent host for all KDErs. A new Kexi contributor Wojtek Kosowicz came with me. You can read about him here and his recent story here. Recently in Kexi there is a trend of new contributors coming from Poland, and specifically from Warsaw. I've heard they're a bit regretting afterwards they didn't join the Akademy too but I trust that will improve next year :) Read More

It's not a secret that reasonable explained and mentored junior jobs attract new great contributors. Based on a popular request, here's massive (growing) list of 10 new Junior Jobs for Kexi. Now they are mostly related to Kexi Report Designer, which receives a lot of love recently as an unique Free Software solution of this kind. Read More

There were quite a few Kexi releases since my last blog entry. I tell you, the focus in this work was on improving stability. As an effect, reportedly, there can be a whole day of work without stability issues. Not bad.. Read More

Kexi usage statistics is an experiment started two years along with Kexi 2.4. The information helps to make certain decisions related to design and direction of the project. Today I'd like to show you first results. Read More

I'm going to Bilbao... well not quite to the whole Akademy but mainly to the QtCS. Looking at my calendar I conclude even getting these two days is a success. That said I'll try to show up @ Akademy too and say hello to you friends and chat a bit :) Read More

It's been 10 years since I joined Kexi and thus the KDE community. I think writing down some history and summary makes sense. 2003-03-28: first touch on Kexi sources for porting Read More

Putting unexpected visions of space tourists aside, now for something completely different. This was a busy weekend with Calligra Suite Sprint 2013 which despite of different timezone fully dominated Essen and Bangalore. More about that here, here, here, here, here and here. You can find the full agenda on the KDE Community Wiki. Read More

KDE is taking part in Google Code-in (GCI) this year once again. It's a contest to bring 13 to 17 year-olds closer to Free Software. One of the tasks I proposed for Kexi was Adding d-pointers to the code. Because of its size I split the challenge into two GCI tasks for truly motivated students. One part has been taken by Shou Ya and second by Andrew Inishev. Both parts have been finished successfully, the patches (2 * 10 thousands of lines) are already in the Calligra master repository. Read More

Good news. The Font Awesome project's founder responded at speed of light to my request and now he plans to release the icon set under the LGPL within a month or so, making the icons as accessible for reuse as the default Oxygen set. Read More

Font Awesome is an iconic font designed for web UIs. It's a full open source suite of pictographic icons available with examples and documentation. During the QML network lecture at QtDD, Jeremy Lainé has noted that icons based on Fonts Awesome are useful for optimizing network usage, especially ones with high latency. While I have never used them I knew the technique which seems to be quite popular among web developers. Read More

Kexi 2.6 now shows indication that edited or pasted text is trimmed if maximum length for field has been reached. See also for the same feature in tabular view. The rationale for this feature is to make sure user knows that data has been only partly entered into the database. Read More

During my short summer holidays I had the opportunity to perform overdue bug triage for Kexi. Funny enough, that alone dominated (by numbers) the Commit-Digest's Bug Killers list for 12th August :) Some bug reports were really dated, 2006 or so, anyway the Calligra 2.6 series is a good occasion for such cleanup. Read More

I hope that Kexi like all the Calligra software will benefit from having a big release every 3 or 4 months. This way more than ever users become co-authors. Read More

Evening conversation with my 7 y.o.: me: Michael, tell me what's the next number after -1. 0 me: OK... what's the next number after π? 4 Read More

Oh my. Microsoft has been using the "Metro" name to describe their new UX without prior careful checking for trademark infringement. PR blunder: Teutonic retailer Metro AG had to threaten them with legal action just two months before Win 8 release, when I bet some folders advertising Metro were already printed out. Read More

This week we celebrated 40 years of Atari, once #1 computer brand. For football and/or Atari fans - on time, some of us think that Mario Balotelli celebrated the anniversary too after scoring during the Germany vs Italy Euro 2012 semi-final match: Read More

Short story: Almost 3 years ago Miguel praised elegance of QML compared to XAML. It took so much time to abandon Moonlight but other than technical, the hottest reason is abandoning the XAML/Silverlight and whole .NET-on-Desktops idea by Microsoft itself. Read More

And Now for Something Completely Different. Kexi's Easter Egg just appeared and quite magically it's only available on April Fools' Day ;) To try, run any beta of Kexi 2.4 or 2.5 alpha. Then close the app, run again and look closer. Enjoy! Read More

There are job offers floating sporadically on planetkde so I guess this one would fit too especially that there are many related technologies involved. You may remember my story about some crazy Qt device. Now there is apparent expansion both vertically and to other types of high-end devices, so: Read More

(this is a continuation of the Fruits of Calligra Suite Sprint #2 series) 2012 started and I am still summarizing ideas from the Sprint. Today an integration idea: Office Forms for Calligra apps. Read More

(this is a continuation of the Fruits of Calligra Suite Sprint #2 series) You don't need to become a seasoned web developer to know the value of styling documents with the CSS. This Sunday the technology turns 15 since its initial release. Read More

It may seem obvious but eating our own dog food can definitely be good for your project's condition. Especially when it is maturing over time. How many testers can we have and how many personas for your user-centered design can we define and maintain? Usually just a few with the actual resources. Is only fulfilling needs of more or less fictional actors focusing on few use cases a good direction? Or does it put our vigilance to sleep? Read More

Over the years, most if not all my presentations on Kexi were aimed at users or power users. When preparing for the Calligra Sprint I thought it would make sense to approach the Calligra contributors with a small update on what are goals and ideas embedded in this specific office application. I hope you, the KDE contributors, would benefit a bit too. Read More

No, this is not HTML5 topic, I mean fruits of Calligra Suite Sprint #2 ;) My plan is to post series of logs from the Calligra Sprint on the following days. Each covering one topic. Today about branding. Read More

"Don't browse, search" is already well known demand and it changes the way people expect to use your app. Recently I needed to finalize first incarnation of my Global Search feature in Kexi. Being late by two days after Calligra beta 3 tagging, I made it fully working only for RC1 now. But it's here. Read More

"World must be crazy" say fellow hackers when realized that one day I left Samsung's Linux Mobile Lab to work on Smart Refrigerators. But well, it's still in the same company, the same city. Yet this does not mean I am stopping to dig in Linux stuff for living: we're talking about Linux fridges. Read More

In addition to usual chatting about whether and how is Kexi utilised under KDE I would like to hear about others, what in the context of the Desktop Summit means GNOME users. Read More

Kexi Web Browser Widget is a form element that lets the user to put full-featured web browser's box onto the Kexi Form surface using single drag and drop and then load the address from the database. The challenge has been accepted by Shreya Pandit within the Season of KDE program for the Calligra project. Read More

As a follow up of his promising Qt Quick Components for Desktop post, Jens shares with us results of his Qt Quick flavour of the QTableView class. This motivated me to think what would be most future-proof if not the best way of finally porting the old Qt3Support-based <a href="http://api.kde.org/calligra-api/calligra-apidocs/kexi/html/classKexiTableView.html>KexiTableView class which with all related classes builds up data/database-aware library utilized by Kexi for presenting tabular data in various contexts. It's so big and complex that I left this task as the very last item while enjoying porting Kexi to Qt 4. Read More

MS Access Visual Basic support in Kexi. Short story: there's no support. The reasoning, from the economical to the technical aspect is provided on the KDE Forum. Or maybe there is some tiny support. Read More

Expect more entries from the front of Kexi integration with maps using Marble widgets since this task has been selected for the Google Summer of Code 2011! Radek Wicik, who just recently joined the Calligra team works on this project. His early attempts have been demonstrated in April during the Calligra Sprint. And he shares his progress info on dedicated blog. Read More

Even if you are certified Qt developer already, I definitely do not recommend to stop but continue the certification effort. One extra point is that for someone like me preparing for exams means having a closer look at technologies I do not use so extensively everyday, e.g. QtScript. Nothing beats the developer's practice of course but learning for exams is almost as good excuse for taking the time as preparing Qt presentations. You have a chance to accidentally learn something relatively new and unnoticed. Read More

Note in bold: no official plans here, however many continuously maintained software projects start with N+1 version development long before N version is discontinued. So yes, I really think the current works at UX level are "the" KDE 5 development. Read More

Last week was big for Calligra: March 30: The first three months of the Calligra Suite is a report showing activity in all possible areas related to Calligra, and creation of new areas like the new Braindump application, new maintainers for applications, refreshed application names, project home page, project git repositories, and finally Kexi Mobile, Calligra Mobile. More to come. April 1: The first Calligra sprint started, the biggest technical event in the history of KDE Office technologies to date: Read More

The recipe is a draft only but shows the taste.

Thanks for the opportunity of presenting Kexi as the official Qt Ambassador Project! Since 2002 it benefits from the solid foundation of Qt (and KDE of course)! Read More

Short story: In the last day of 2011 Kexi reached the 2.3 release as the other KOffice applications. Versions 2.4 and newer will be developed distributed within the Calligra suite, meaning it stays within the team formed by the same awesome, welcoming community. Read More

Besides all possible conventional wishes there is something I wish you for 2011: "Let any good code you commit come back to you redoubled" A twisted variant of the karm^w boomerang theory ;) Read More

Tomaz shares a hint with us: Have you ever tried to create an overlay on top of some QWidgets to make them not acessible, but still visible to the user? I’m not saying about setEnabled(false), but to create a semitransparent – mask on top of some widgets with something inside, a modal dialog or so. [..] aseigo had already told me that it was possible by using a QGraphicsView... Read More

Calligra Suite project is up! The roots of the name are in Calligraphy. Announcement can be read at the dot.kde.org. Here's how I see this. We're widening the scope, definitely we are not starting from scratch. Changes like moving to the git version control system from Subversion would be needed anyway, so there are no that much overhead related to the move as observers would think. And finally you have direct access to roughly the same group of fellow developers as before. Read More

Linux fragmentation requires extra effort from packagers, and extra communication efforts between software vendors and packagers. To lower this unnecessary pain I shall remind, how to package Kexi? Kexi depends on many packages that are highly optional, only suggested for "full installation", which in turn is rarely needed in real world. So each database driver ideally should be packaged separately for the best user experience. For example there is no need for user of file databases to install PostgreSQL or Sybase package(s). Did I mention Oracle? Read More

McGrath's dream, linked by Henri: "There's a huge pool of web developers with HTML and JS skills that can now contribute to desktop apps. Watch how fast GNOME and KDE advance when this happens." Read More

Kexi moves towards the new 2.3 release within the KOffice family. The list of current wishes for Kexi. Add yours! There is no easier way to contribute! Kexi Scripting Example for JavaScript - reading external data. 2.3 Beta 1 released, featuring movable tabs, completely new project navigator compliant with the KDE 4 style, improved look of the CSV Export dialog, reintroduction of Widgets Tree pane of the Forms Designer, and more. List of changes changes available on koffice.org. Notes on further uncluttering style in Kexi. Small but pleasant improvements. All planned features and improvements delivered. Ready for 2.3 release.

In previous "elegance" entries I presented just ideas, without implementation. Readers obsessed in the area of look&feel may remember the proposal for uncluttering tab widget when used in side pane. Read More

It is not clear if there will be another update within KOffice (2.2.3) released in 2.2 series, so for convenience of distributors, following recommended patch fixes stability recently identified issue in the default Kexi database engine: Read More

This week I noticed: I am part of Kexi/KOffice Development Team for 65535 hours now. With fine breaks of course. It's possible to check at the bottom of this file. Read More

Follow up of the discussion about new UI elements: "it may look weird" first-look opinions vs positive results of usability testing. GMail has removed "select all/select none/..." buttons with single combo box for exactly one reason: elegance or UI uncluttering. Read More

KOffice Developer Meeting (pictures). Akademy time! One Kexi dev was available for hugs^wdiscussion; chatted a bit with the ownCloud hackers about exposing Kexi databases though it, KDevelop guys about injecting Kexi database plugin in a form of KDevelop's "Database view" and mobile guys about possible options for Kexi Mobile. http://userbase.kde.org/Kexi updated. New tutorial added: Kexi Reports for Beginners Adam works on porting the remaining Q/K3 code in Kexi, starting with the Project Navigator. Ported now. The works on Kexi 2.2 Handbook started within the KDE Userbase wiki: http://userbase.kde.org/Kexi/Handbook Kexi now supports multipage (large up to 64 KB) memo values when importing data from MS Access. And it's the only open source app doing it! Some work on Predicate, database connectivity and creation library, a new iteration of KexiDB library developed within Kexi (Jarosław). Expect a more in August.

Qt on ARM is, literally, a sign of certification ;) Read More

Proposed by chrome developers - two entries and submenu are removed. Reduces mouse clicks and movements.                                                                      

Do you remember the tabbed toolbar thing that was once born in Kexi? It's an attempt to optimize the UI when collection of actions depends on context. This part of development goes well, even while there is no framework for use by other KDE 4 apps. Those still use the KDE 3 technology, i.e. KXMLGUI leading to rather big menus. Read More

KOffice is a huge chunk of a code and a whole family of subprojects. Multiply this by (growing!) number of supported operating systems. Then you get the idea: yes, we need your help with maintining the newly created UserBase page on where to find KOffice software. Read More

The pictures say it all. If not, see here and here. As always all that would not happen without organizers: Alexandra and Inge! Read More

ohloh.net reportedly goes down. If so, that's the last opportunity to try its nice (even if not 100% inaccurate) reports online, e.g. for KOffice:(click to continue)

Kexi devlog based on identi.ca notes: Kexi is apparently ready for 2.2 rc1 release. Combobox and tab widgets in forms fixed! Fresh logo inserted on the current kexi web site http://kexi-project.org - these pages really need web admins and artists. The odyssey from Kexi 1.1 to 2.2 took 36 months. Kexi/KOffice 2.2.0 packages for Debian Kexi 2.2 is here! With KOffice 2.2. Thanks for your support and we're asking for more!

No, we do not skip March, for Kexi it was just too silent month to blog about it alone ;) Here we go (based on identi.ca notes): Adam now understands the koodf library, exporting a report from Kexi into a spreadsheet can be done 'the right way' :) New address of the Kexi Fan Club on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kexi.project Follow-up on the SQLite the secure delete thing: Oh boy, the guys rock - they have implemented all my requests for 3.6.23. We're going to recommend this version at least. Autofield widget and layouts will be disabled in Kexi 2.2 Fixed visibility of form widget properties in the designer; that was really obscure bug ;) Kexi 2.2 beta 2 arrives in 2 days with KOffice 2.2 beta 2, please test! Yes because of quantum leap there's no Kexi 2.0 nor 2.1 in the wild. Adam just begun work on reports for Kexi 2.3 even before 2.2 is out the door! Supporting plugins and a cleaned up core, so hopefully less bugs (April 4). Adam just added image loading from the database for reports. Closing a bug with 1 line of code.  KOffice Developers Sprint 2010 is coming Kexi is in bug fixing mode in preparation for 2.2. Please try out the betas and let us know what you think on bugs.kde.org or #kexi on freenode (April 19) We've just started development of Kexi Version 2.3 Alpha 1 (a part of KOffice 2.3 Alpha 1)! This is in parallel to perparing 2.2 series. Predicate rather won't be used in Kexi 2.3; doing that is too complex so we keep KexiDB until 2.4 release Group boxes and tab widgets fixed in Kexi forms. Last fixes for 2.2. Optimized display of scaled image entries in table view. Scrolling is smooth for large images too and scaling is smooth.  And last but not least: much of the work is possible because of quality bug reporting, thanks for that and we're asking for more :) These weeks special thanks go to George Goldberg! (brought to you by Adam and myself) Read More

What's new, based on identica notes: Thoughts on deploying SQLite turned out to be work in progress. Valuable input from our distro friends. A special wiki page has been created. See the last item of this entry ;) KoReport, Kexi's rpt backend has undergone some refactoring to make it more generic. Fix number 1, charts working again in the designer. Working through the huge list of issues krazy has found with the kexi codebase, not glamorous, but necessary! Refactored the report renderers, and given better class name, to make the report library suitable for adoption over all of KOffice. Do you want well working MSAccess to Kexi converter? It's up to you - request it! KOffice now has a suite-wide reporting library! (placed in koffice/libs/koreports/) Kexi switched to "system" SQLite again. We want to play with distros well, but will check SQLite features at compilation to maintain high quality standards. (brought to you by Adam and myself) Read More

Remember the last call? After less than 5 months we can see apparent success, and a lot more than a proof of concept. Click to enjoy the show Read More

No, Locus OS concept design, has apparently no association with MS. The author claims: "This interface was designed before iPhone 3.0, Palm Pre, Android etc, making the ideas original at the time :)" Read More

"There's nothing easier" -- you say -- about packaging and deploying SQLite. "Just take the software with default settings and package as a shared lib plus SQLite shell". It's not that simple. Read More

With 2010 we've started to employ identica (then connected to Twitter and Facebook) as an channel for our live changelog at the {power}user level. Here's the dump for the past ~30 days (oh I should have used an XSLT). Read More

I have self-backed policy of not mentioning competition if not really necessary, let it be G or M. So as a minimal effort I just quote these carefully selected bits (bias included!) instead of commenting the recent story: Read More

Today we enjoy 11th anniversary of disclosure of Microsoft's best business and development practices: The concept has been reportedly in development since early 90-ies: Read More

Recently a number of nice coincidences happened: I received my second-hand Intuos3 A5 tablet just day before the new shiny Qt 4.6 has landed with QTouchEvent (among many other features). Also I conducted my 3+ hours of trainings on APIs designing to my coworkers (based on Jasmin's document) just week before we had some essential KOffice APIs discussions based on the same material thanks to Olivier Goffart (QtDF). Read More

Many small fixes are a building block of the Kexi porting effort - the goal is joining the KOffice 2.2. Many of the fixes and refactoring is related to forms. Much more left and we're scheduling works on crazy features even up to Kexi 2.6 already. Read More

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing Adam:                                

As Maemo Summit 2009 starts in a few hours. While I am not there, for me one of the most interesting parts is the Handheld Glom: Easy database applications presentation. Glom is a desktop database developed by GNOME friends using gtkmm (C++). Originally bound directly to PostgreSQL, recently (early 2009) has gained SQLite file database support (default engine in Kexi since 2004). That was a must I guess if someone wants to cover needs of mobile devices; just imagine how easier it is going to be to share data files between various apps one day. While Glom offers somewhat simpler feature set than than Kexi, a gnomedb library db layer has been also developed in the meantime, having partially similar goals as the KexiDB library and (its new awfully delayed incarnation) Predicate in the Qt/KDE world. Read More

Shocked by the title? So I am. Would you like to see Qt supported on this platform? Just two days ago the answer was like "But it's close to impossible". Now with NDK 1.6 the "little robot" OS opens more to C/C++ native code. I am eager to read some analysis on the topic. Read More

While explaining the story behind his great ppttoxml tool, Jos also mentionedSince about a year, Microsoft has, after significant political pressure, put documentation for their file formats on-line. That's fine and solved some issues. But there are MS Access proprietary file formats (mdb, accdb) that remain to be secret. These are not planned to be replaced by XML formats (what would be overkill in databases). I guess there was no pressure to open the formats, what looks like an overlook in EU and the USA (correct me if there's another reason like patents). If you google for that, it is hard to find even a single mention of file format specifications in the above meaning, and even explanations from MS employees or backers show that they do not fully realize one thinf: MSA formats are not covered by the process of said "opening of the legacy formats". Read More

Just pictures this time. For text see very detailed (b)log about the meeting by Hanna. (KoGroupPhoto) Read More

The best compliment for you, KDE devs, ever: "Daddy you have a new computer!" -- my ~4 years old son Michał, yesterday while sitting with me at a (4 years old) ASUS notebook rebooted from Vista to Linux+KDE 4.2.3... Read More

A post on the KDE forum motivated me to write some info about what's new with Kexi 2.0. For sanity I groupped a set of quickies as an 2.0 Alpha 12 changelog. For uninformed, most applications within KOffice will meet the stable 2.0 release (already passed a promising RC1 stage), while Kexi and Kivio neds more time for development. The hope is to synchronize nicely at the 2.1 stage. Read More

New year means some snow and cold noses here in Warsaw, and a new job to me, this time in the mobile industry, what has rather diversified my day, and that's good. Happy 2009 to you, to your friends and family. Read More

                             

The confirmed rumour at least on the IRC has it that I am in process of switching my job after 5 years at OpenOffice Polska / OpenOffice Software. Much of that really interesting time was devoted to Kexi within KOffice and quite a bit to various aspects of KDE on Windows. The switch has been planned about one year ago so is largely gradual. These KDE-related tasks have been already my spare time activities since then. My will is to invest a lot there. Read More

I've been enjoying the time (bikes!), meetings (absolute record # of attendees) and technology (n810!) at Akademy since 9th August. And a young student from Poland, Michał Bartecki has been invited to come, what adds one to the number of the gfx individials around and made the KDE ping-pong team stronger. Kudos for the Team for such an unique event, for their time, sweat and tears :) Read More

Have some pictures? Share with us at http://techbase.kde.org/Events/Akademy/2008/Photos... The social event in "Het Anker" brewery, Mechelen The brewery mascot or so...

That's not new but perhaps you'd like to know... ;) How to write a KDE app or a GNOME app. And of course, Read More

Hi! We, at KOffice, are looking for volunteers to make screenshots for 'visual changelogs' of each release. It's really welcome especially alpha and beta stages. Someone would just interview the devs on time, asking about important features, make the screenshots and publish them. Read More

Microsoft: "ODF has clearly won. We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible. We couldn't do that during the release of Office 2007. We're looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators." Read More

Full text of valuable book "An Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4" by Alan and Paul Ezust (Suffolk University) is now available online at http://cartan.cas.suffolk.edu/oopdocbook/opensource/ under OPL license. Read More

Great news: Robert Kubica (Poland, 23) has won his first F1 Grand Prix (in Canada). Moreover, in the same time another Pole, Lukas Podolski, scored two goals in Euro 2008 match, the first one was assisted by Mirek Klose. Read More

Just got a (link) to offer of the "Polish Walmart" called Biedronka (Ladybird) - cheap (~€290) laptop with Kubuntu. It has been customized for Polish users, e.g. contains Kadu, instant messenger supporting locally popular proprietary protocol. Read More

liquidat has posted some notes on what was presented regarding KDE-PIM on LinuxTag 2008. As people started to ask about native look, let me add three more screeenies, all from May 2008. Read More

NLnet provided new KOffice logos (and it sponsors ODF development). Kudos for that! To help readers of the announcement, let's note that application logo is not always equal to its icon. Read More

Good evening from Osnabrück; Tom shares some facts from the day 1 with you, so all I have now (before putting my hand on svn commit) is some graphics. Recently (except for updating opensuse) I have switched from winnt5 to winnt6 on my notebook (thanks Adriaan!). Read More

Just decided to write some info here as more and more people are interested in joining the KDE project, at least as active users that want to provide valuable feedback. In particular they are asking about various most-used applications like KOffice or KDE-PIM/Kontact. Read More

This xmas I was given a watch. It's pretty geeky one LCD Lexon E8, but for me still easier to accept than real binary counters. If we're at watches, Adam Pigg apparently got something like this hardcore LED BCD watch. In terms of usability I prefer Lexon's LCD to (otherwise cool) LED display, because in the latter case you need to use your second hand to press a button to turn the power-hungry diodes on for a few seconds to read the time. Read More

From KDE4-enterprise-functionality dept.: As already noted in the Commit Digest, another database driver (i.e. data provider) has been built on top of Kexi's database abstraction layer (KexiDB 2, codenamed Predicate). It is Sybase driver, also aimed at handling MS SQL Server connections. Read More

Too many KDE folks refuse to use http://techbase.kde.org/ because it breaks blocks of code. You can however make it usable. A hint just for you: [jstaniek] btw, I've improved http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM a bit, and have 'windows port' column [jstaniek] does not use oxygen wiki style which actually causes usability problems with blocks [marc_kdab] oh, you can switch the style? [marc_kdab] how? [marc_kdab] that could actually make the wiki readable :) [marc_kdab] hates fixed-width formats in websites [jstaniek] marc_kdab: ah, so I should blog about this; too many folks complain... and I talked to danimo @ akademy but... well... [jstaniek] (same for websvn, btw) [marc_kdab] yes, and the apidox [jstaniek] marc_kdab: login -> my preferences (on the topbar) -> skin tab -> monobook [marc_kdab] oh, sigh, login... [jstaniek] marc_kdab: y, you can set permanent login [jstaniek] hacked his wiki page with readable breadcrumbs, eg. "News->Kexi Releases-> Kexi 2007.1" and forced reasonable width (http://kexi.pl/en/News/Kexi_Releases/Kexi_2007.1) [marc_kdab] ahhh :) [marc_kdab] mediawiki look [marc_kdab] files a request for mediawiki to remove styling :) [jstaniek] the oxygen style is great but also breaks mediawiki skin rules a bit - e.g. we have even no kde logo defined for the web site... :)

How's possible that most of my nightly builds I mention here, come from Berlin so far? Tasty food ensured by Trolltech or KDAB? Weißbier? (gfx by mkbart, based on Oxygen icons) Read More

Not even 2 days after out meeting in Berlin, there is an epilogue of the story: Qt/Windows Open Source Edition will support VS Express. Big thanks for considering this! Read More

Recently I work on updating polish translation of QCad manual before its release in OpenOffice Polska. Andrew Mustun, QCad author, has switched to xparrot documenting tool, i.e. an online and offline toolkit, containing markup which is simplified compared to docbook. When using xparrot I sometimes think how faster my work is when I just use simple set of tags (that's why having this in KDE would make me motivated to update docs more frequently, and possibly - online). Yet I have not seen to many templates that take advantage of such semantics used in Docbook (which is great -but for machines)... <--!break--> Read More

(click to enlarge) Yes, this is working copy of KWord 2.0 alpha running on KDE 4 under MS Windows, compiled during KDE-On-Windows meeting in Berlin. I must say local Trolltech's office is great environment for developing. Read More

There's enough of meat committed to SVN so it's time to show you something those involved in Kexi have been waiting for: tabbed and context-sensitive style of application workspace. It honours Fitts' Law-friendly-KDE 4's-large-toolbar mode, while still is aimed at tools accessible for power user and development environments like Kexi. Read More

First, did I say thank you to Kenny Duffus in this blog? Then Big Thanks Kenny, and the Akademy 2k7 Team! There were hacking days @ Akademy but also at least two hacking midnights; the latter (after moving out from Glasgow's Free House pub) was used by me and Holger Schröder to realize what can be wrong at run time in case of larger KDE apps. Read More

KDE People have been asking me about t-shirts I composed at spreadshirt. Here you have the 'shop': http://www.spreadshirt.net/shop.php?sid=95340 [image:2869 align=right nolink=1 width=280]The virtual shop was originally created within a Polish t-shirt company, just for Kexi t-shirts before Malaga, before spreadshirt acquired the company. At the time (2005) I was able to get the shipment within Poland quite fast. Now it always comes from Germany. No udea why. Moreover, labour is obviously more expensive there... so prices increased too. Read More

The long awaited 1.1.3 release is available. These were long months when I shared my time between 1.1.x development, 2.x development (careful porting) and Windows version. Read More

Google uses the same db backend as Kexi for offline operations. I mean: SQLite. http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_database.html Interesting times. This makes it possible to implement live connectivity to offline resources from KOffice and KDE itself. Then, after going online, the data can return to Google's server. With KexiDB it could also be automatically exported/replicated to your very own database, no matter it is MySQL, PostgreSQL or ODBC-compliant backend. Read More

Adam Gierek's report on Innovation (INI/2006/2274: "Putting knowledge into practice: A broad-based innovation strategy for Europe") has been adopted in plenary this Thursday 24 May with amendments. Read More

Thanks to help from danimo, I've grabbed techbase's nice MediaWiki Oxygen web skin and turned it into a regular KDE web/news site skin in Poland (the result: kde.org.pl, dot article). What means that unlike on techbase, which is aimed at more collective editing, kde.org.pl has left hand menu as well wiki tools are accessible and visible only for logged-in users. So it is more like kde.org. Read More

BTW, new Qt4.3's QWizards's field system (see QWizard::field()) looks really useful. It is a clean version of approach to the one we discussed last year -- where we refer to pages/data widgets by name (or ID) and not by pointer. Read More

There were at least 17 internal test releases since December 2006 in my company before so called 2007.1 release emerged (in user-oriented naming scheme). Dealing with customers is going pretty well - people (including those from the USA) have inexpensive tech support and extensions on request. Read More

How to get more developers on our board? No doubt, it's easier to get them as we support more languages. Kross helps to utilize this strategy, especially for Python, Ruby, Javascript and (soon/less or more) Java developers. Read More

One picture tells the whole story: (link) Big thanks to the friendly KOffice team, in particular to Cyrille who deals with the time-consuming tasks related to the release! Read More

Someone on the dot asked about Marcus Furlong -- "I didn't know him, where're his code contributions?". Well. Sometimes I think writing code is so much "safer" activity: you can delay your release, you can keep stuff uncommited or not working, and find at least dozens reasons to justify that. Try to do the same with recent Marcus' task! No way. You need to work in real time. People will not wait. Read More

Today something more lightweight than usually. New database form widget has arrived: slider has been developed for Kexi, as a tutorial for the polish edition of Software Developer's Journal. The widget is usable when data is restricted to a given interval, and in the tutoral it is provided witin a custom widget factory (i.e. an extension, plugin) to show how to implement such thing and let Kexi find it. Read More

We've been waiting for this step. Read on to discover how clever it is. Short version: MS now encourages you to make all your data ODF-compatible. Period. Long version, after the /. article: Read More

This time I am using the blog to ask for some help. I need someone who is able to convert HTML documentation about form desinger (one really important chapter from user's POV, about 35KB) to docbook for Kexi. Not much time left before the documentation freeze (friday evening, 8th sept). Read More

If you, like me, have trouble with slower reading text lacking capital letters, but still want to be up to date with all that buzz, there are good news: "Deaaronify" service has been started :0) Read More

Do you remember my complaints about KDE or KDE apps mentioned nearly zero times in CHIP? Now looks like the magazine has been improved in the area. At least the current 08/2006 issue. There's even a "KDE or GNOME, what's better?" article. Read More

In a thread filled with complaints about problems with (sw)suspend in Linux I found a link to CryoPID - A Process Freezer for Linux. If you know this, forgive me. Let's look at slashing KDE apps startup time. Again. I am referring to topics covered in this thread. Read More

Definitely not. I don't know whether Steven's article should be read as ironic, but it is filled with false or semi-true conclusions. Among them I found one especially funny: Read More

In the last post I blogged about database table schema (design) altering features of the forthcoming Kexi 1.1 (to be released soon in alpha version). I promised to extend that story by presenting how all of this plays with GUI. In the meantime I've decided to take a break from this laborious task and finish the long standing TODO: implement the Object data type allowing to deal with binary data and force the Image Box widget to accept such sort of data. Read More

What has implementation of database table schema (design) altering to do with Undo/Redo implementation for Table Designer? In case of Kexi, everything! Read on to learn why. Read More

Some would even say "only the apps and data matter". Why? The next iteration of the desktop itself may be pretty, but it is just...desktop (yeah, more feature-rich than competition). Read More

Spring suddenly arrived also here in Poland. Not bad pretext to finally replace rather nice CRT with relatively awesome LCD. Too bad that win2k has no subpixel hinting. In software department, this week I got a message from Ralf Habacker who's persistently polishing kdelibs4/win32: Read More

As I agreed with most of these complaints (http://blogs.kde.org/node/1952#comment-4773) and people know I am complaining about the current wiki.kde.org engine as often as possible - here are news/issues on the topic: Read More

There's hidden easter egg in recent Kexi SVN version. Just create a new table design and name it "sudoku" and you'll get a nice game for free... Thanks to ksudoku author for the code ;) Read More

D3tails... See 4lso: P0w3r C0mb1n3d ;)

Sometimes I like such challenging questions (who cares? journalists are sometimes more extreme). Let's look a bit closer at "new" MS's Riboon GUI. If you just want to know who can be sued, and by who, simply jump to the last section of this entry and save some your time. Read More

OK, I guess I should go back from my area where I've recently worked on data/project migration improvements (more about this at bottom of this page) and spend some more hours on scripting stuff. Read More

I've looked at an issue of CHIP magazine (yes, it helps me to be up-to-date with average user's PoV). CHIP is currently not the only magazine offering "Open Source" section. Among other stuff there are contests for selecting a group of best general-purpose FOSS apps. Read More

I mean these analysis: http://www.gnome.org/~lcolitti/gnome-startup/analysis/ Tell me if I am wrong but has KDE something to gain in this department? Using mmapped data structures and/or RAM-disk? Using Suspend-To-Disk-Like trick so most, once prelinked, libraries can be saved to disk and restored on next startup just in one second by loading one large file? Read More

I hope someone could be interested in implementing semantic browser widget for KDE4 while playing with Qt4 drawing features... For example, similar to news.com's News Plasma. Quite suitable complement for KDE4's search engines. Read More

Read more in this article. It's a comparison with Kexi 0.9 from may 29, also read some my explanation.

..especially online tools: try to enter KDE here :) Too bad that entering "GNOME" there is boring task: it's just correct.

One of interesting proposals published in Technical Report 1, a specification for new functionality being added to C++'s standard library, is the Polymorphic Function Object Wrapper. Having that, QObject can just keep a list of function objects, aka signals connected to a slot. Hmm, perhaps a new C++ feature set will be implemented in all major compilers before Qt5? Read More

Finally, DCOP Client/Server implementation for win32 found its way to KDElibs, thanks to great contribution from Andreas Roth (aroth at arsoft-online . com). On the screenshot: 'testdcop' application communicating with dcopserver. Read More

I couldn't complain about excessive number of bug reports for Kexi. Yes, writing 43252352nd text editor, drawing app or a frontend for media player can be more cool, especially if somebody's coding session is just for fun after boring day at {work|school}. Read More

Last month I've "stolen" code from KSpread's CSV import dialog, and now it's tweaked quite much: support for setting primary key (including autodetection) support for 'first row contains column names' flag (including autodetection) column types are autodetected Import is performed to a new table, within a single transaction, and (what's usual for Kexi) in a database-engine independent way, thanks to KexiDB layer. As an extension of above, support for pasting clipboard contents will be added. Read More

KexiDB is a database API that abstracts over the specifics of individual database backends. Following article is just to allow you to make a choice... http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php?KexiDB versus QtSQL Read More

We can see an attempt to reuse mdbtoos by OpenOffice.org v. 2.0. Thanks to Martin Ellis' contribution we have recently more than nothing done (also by reusing mdbtools, not commited yet) in this department within Kexi too. Read More

..with its Spotlight®. See 'SQLite Support' and 'Core Data Framework' here: http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=593. That's not entire KexiDB but always looks like interesting competition.

Yes, first part of my QKW patches are merged with first few (most hardcore/lowlevel) KDElibs directories. Beside Kexi, that's what I am playing with since march 2003. Everyone is invited to contribute. Read More

Yeah, it looks for me like deja vu: one day Sun introduced OpenOffice.org, more recently IBM presented Eclipse (development environment). Why I am talking about this here, you may ask? Read More

"One little feature that would make Kexi a next step to be a killerapp", said Lucijan to me today. Yes, I hope so. What do you think about following feature that works database-transparently?: [image:358,middle] Read More

Anyone who is interested in database systems integration may know ODBC can be usable. Currently, development of KexiDB integration with ODBC functionality is started. So, I've updated Kexi Developers Wiki Pages with a small research on ODBC in KexiDB Drivers context. Read More