Till 

At KDAB we spend all of our time working with Qt. As with any software development, much of that time ends up being focused on understanding, debugging, profiling and bug fixing rather than implementing new functionality. To help us with that we constantly improve the tools available to us and other Qt and KDE developers. That is what has brought us awesomeness such as massif-visualizer, verktyg or various bits and pieces in Qt Creator and KDevelop. The latest result of our tinkering with tooling was released at Qt Developer Days in Munich last week under the name GammaRay. It's a comprehensive collection of high level introspection and debugging utilities specifically tailored for the various frameworks in Qt. You can find out more about it and see some screenshots here. The whole thing, including all plugins, is released under the GPL so it can be useful to as many Qt developers as possible and in the hope that many of you will pitch in and help us make it even more useful for us all. <a href=http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=131997790827755&w=2>Here is the announcement email to the KDE lists sent by Volker Krause, who has been leading this effort since its beginnings in the Kontact Touch project. Enjoy! Read More

It is quite normal, in Free Software initiatives, for people to come in, help out, become proficient, maybe even moderately famous, then eventually move on or drop out. Often life gets in the way, parenting, post entry level jobs and growing responsibilities reduce the available time something fierce and once one is no longer really familiar with the code base, it becomes hard to make an effective contribution in those short time and motivation windows that open up. Somewhat ironically, since a large part of my job revolves around KDEPIM, this is very true for me as well. Over the last two years or so, apart from lunch discussions over architectural issues with my colleagues, I've been able to do little more than ensure things build and work on OSX, my current main platform. Much to my delight, this has recently changed. After many years, our efforts to build and transition to the Akonadi platform are coming together lately. Although we've decided to delay by a month, relative to the normal KDE 4.5 release schedule, with KDEPIM, we are nearing production quality of all of the components of Kontact now. KDEPIM from 4.5 branch is fully based on Akonadi and usable for my normal business and personal email, calendaring (Kolab, of course) and contacts management. In this current phase, there are a myriad smaller things to notice, analyze and fix (or give someone else enough information with which to fix). Many rough edges need to be filed away and regressions in the functionality and usability identified. Especially for the later it's really useful to have been working with Kontact for many years and to know the history behind why certain things work the way they do or whether those reasons still make sense. I find this to be very satisfying work, as it allows me to throw in my experience and my odd hour of hacking time and make a meaningful difference. This got me thinking that it would be awesome if we could re-activate some of the other old KDE hands to help make our next generation PIM infrastructure and apps all that they can be. So this is a call to arms for the KDE veterans, whether they've worked on PIM in the past or not. You all know KMail and friends very well, you know deep down you really wanna be coding again, at least a bit, and you all want KDEPIM to rock the world again. The platform and tools are excellent to work with, these days, and the code base is pretty clean and modular. The community is large and friendly, it's an enthusiastic and highly motivated group that is a joy to be around. So saddle up, you weary warriors, and ride with us once again ;). Read More

We are collectively elated, in the KDEPIM community, by the news that all four of "our" applications for Google's Summer of Code have been accepted this year. There'll be work on bringing the wonders of plasma to Kontact's summary widget, improving Akonadi's SyncML support (mentored by last year's student in that area, awesomely), porting KMail to use Stephen Kelly's very cool Grantlee templating library (which will allow much easier themeing and probably attract 1000 elephants) and on infrastructure for import and export of data and settings. All this is exceedingly useful and much needed stuff, and exactly the kind of work by new contributors that we were hoping to facilitate by building a strong, flexible, nice to work with foundation in the form of Akonadi. As the core Akonadi team continues to improve the machinery under the hood and as mobile versions of our applications emerge (watch this space for news on that hopefully later today), new contributors and those who have been waiting for a while for their moment can get to work improving the overall experience and bringing KDEPIM and Kontact to its full potential. The summer of code projects are part of that, but by no means the only such efforts. It promises to be a very exciting summer. I'm personally especially happy to see several applicants succeed (in KDE overall) who failed last time. Some even failed twice but continued to learn, improve their proposals, get involved in other ways the community and have now reached a personal goal in getting accepted. I applaud their perseverance and spirit, that's what makes our communities great, I think. Speaking of perseverance, it warms my heart to see no less than 11 successful applications from India, this year, much more than ever before. Maybe we in the Free Software world are finally starting to bridge the digital divide and truly engage contributors from more diverse backgrounds. Read More

It is raining massively, outside, again. It does that every day here, in Manaus, what with it being the rainy season and this being the Amazon jungle. The negativity ends there, though, since it takes about 15 minutes, is very refreshing, and everything else here is Awesome (TM). I have really enjoyed the past few days, Bossa Conference has been a great experience. The presentations were generally of high quality, I had many very good conversations over many excellent meals, and by a luxurious pool, met several impressively talented individuals and the equally impressive INdT teams. There is a lot of very nice work being done here in Brazil in Free Software in general and around Qt and KDE in particular. I'm proud to have been invited to come. Read More

Given the pile of awesome that was Camp KDE 2009 in Negril, Jamaica, how could I not attend this year as well? I'll be presenting and doing some Qt training sessions again, like last year, on whatever topic the audience wants. There'll be sun, there'll be hackery, there'll be merriment. You must not miss this, so make sure to sign up now and meet us in Sand Diego in January. Read More

On a related (to my other blog post today) note, while I'm giving credit where credit is due: my personal KDE hero at the moment is Anne Wilson, who has been helping KDEPIM users for years on our lists and at meetings and has been a voice of reason, courtesy, constructive feedback and positiveness that makes a huge difference in the atmosphere of our community. I much admire her work with the documentation team (userbase, anyone?) and the community working group and ever since I first met her in person (in Glasgow, I think) I have been impressed by the fearless and all embracing manner in which she has found her way amongst us weirdos and become a gentle, well respected leader and wrangler of geeks. I don't know when exactly it is, but happy 70th birthday, Anne, all the best from us PIMsters, we thank you and look forward to many more Akademy meetings with you. Read More

With all the excitement and energy surrounding Akonadi and the ongoing porting of our main applications to it at the moment (over 100 commits to KDEPIM yesterday alone!), it's easy to get the impression that we've collectively abandoned our stable versions and the many users relying on them today. Not so. While Volker Krause and his team at KDAB (currently Kevin Ottens, Frank Osterfeld, Sebastian Sauer, Leo Franchi, Stephen Kelly and Laurent Montel, with various others pitching in occasionally, like Marc, Guillermo and Romain) are ripping through KDEPIM trunk, Allen Winter and Thomas McGuire (again aided by Marc and others) are faithfully watching over the stable branches. They are making sure that all relevant bugfixes found by the Akonadi port make it back into the 3.x and 4.x stable branches and are doing many bugfixes and features in those branches themselves, every week, which are then merged into trunk. This results in a steady stream of improvements into both the 3.x and 4.x series, all of which make it to our users (i.e. you out there, probably) via the Linux distributions and via the KDE Windows and Mac packages regularly. This is mostly unglamorous and sometimes boring work which they carry out with great professionalism and personal commitment, both during their KDAB work time and well beyond, in their personal time. They hardly ever get any recognition for what they do, so this is an attempt to remedy that a bit. Rock on, boys! Read More

I'm back from the awesome Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. It feels good to be back in Berlin and with my family, but I'm very scared of the backlog that now awaits me. Before I tackle it (and potentially blog more about the event) I need to get something off my chest, lest it is forgotten. I'd like to publicly thank Klaas Freitag, who's term as a member of the KDE e.V. board of directors just ended with our general assembly a few days ago, for his contribution to our project. He stepped up to help out with the more mundane and every-day tasks that are required of the board, thus freeing up people like our beloved bouncing ball and poster boy Aaron (who's term also ended, but who'll get plenty credit anyway ;) to do what they do best. I really admire the effective, quiet and ego-less way in which Klaas has carried himself and represented us. He's done a lot of work behind the scenes that benefits KDE greatly and helped get e.V. and its operational side up to a sustainable level. So thank you very much, Klaas, and enjoy the extra time you can hopefully now spend with your family again. :) Read More

I'm currently sitting at a table in the still empty Qt Software / KDAB booth, listening to the awesome KDE Linuxtag team get the KDE / Amarok / Kubuntu presence behind me ready for another day. Throughout all of Linuxtag they have been, and will continue to be, proudly showcasing what we have collectively already achieved and helping new contributors make their way into our community so we can do even greater things in the future, with their help. Today the conference program features a KDE track, full of diverse and interesting presentations for a wide range of audiences. Claudia, Luca and their team have done an amazing job getting this conference presence and the many talks lined up. KDE is again making a very good impression, I think. Yeah, us! :) The joking and chatter behind me has reminded me how much I'm looking forward to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. It will be great to catch up with everyone, like every year, but unlike every year, this time I'll also be able to catch up with friends from outside the usual KDE circles, since many friends from Gnome and related projects will be there. I'm sure this co-located event will be awesome and will bring our two communities, which share so many of their core goals and ideals, even closer together. I'm going there a few days early to do some hanging out on the beach, diving and general R&R. Good times. But now I need to get going, the KDE track starts in a few minutes and my presentation on transitioning from Qt/KDE 3 to 4 as a developer is the second one. Read More

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the key contributors to KDE on Windows for many years is unhappy with the way we, KDAB (and our partners at Intevation and g10code) have handled our collaboration with them. In particular, Christian writes: Read More

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 <a href=http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2009-April/011207.html Read More

Since I was in the US anyway, I thought I'd fly to North Carolina and verify something that has had the KDEPIM community wondering for years. Does Allen Winter, in fact, exist, and look like the picture, since no one has ever met him in person. Well, after a 2 hour plane ride from Chicago and another 2 hours in a car, I can attest that he does, in fact, exist, and is as nice in person as he is online. Photographic proof below. Your reporter will write more as events develop, now it's lunch time. :) Read More

When I got home, late last night, I was greeted by a parcel addressed to me that contained a book. This is unusual, as out of the 5 or so books that are delivered to our house every day, 5 or so are addressed to my wife, who works as a writer and translator of fiction and advises publishers whether to buy the German language rights to a certain book and then have it translated. Since she also advises me on what to read, generously saving me the time to scrounge the internets and local bookstores (those few that are still left) for stuff that I might like, and then buys it for me, I just about never receive books in the mail. Already elated by such rare fortune I proceeded to open the parcel, to find in it my very own copy of O'Reilly's recently released "Beautiful Architecture". Read More

I'm currently on my way back home to Berlin from a hit-and-run visit to the Osnabrück 7 KDEPIM meeting. It's just close enough for me to take a very early train in the morning and still be back home before midnight, which was the best I could do this year, due to other commitments. I'm really glad I did, as I'm leaving the others hacking and discussing with the kind of warm, joyous feeling of fulfillment one gets when a long and slow process seems to be coming together nicely and things align beautifully. Read More

Did some tumblin' a few days ago, as a result of me and some tram tracks at Hackescher Markt disagreeing as to the general direction of the front wheel of my bike. This resulted in a banged up wrist and rib, but no damage to the laptop or head. So while I'm still able to perform my primary function at work, namely talk, I am somewhat useless in my primary function at home, namely as a holder of hands while our daughter learns to walk. She has decided that this dire situation necessitates desperate measures and promptly started standing by herself. This works ok, as long as the realization does not hit her that no one is holding her, at which point we're back to tumblin', this time into a pile of cute making happy gurgling sounds, which I am convinced mean "Dad, check out what I did!". Read More

Like every year, so far, and as befits a patron of KDE, KDAB is covering the travel and lodging expenses of all KDABians who want to attend Akademy. Yeah, for Kalle :). A few of the KDE folks in KDAB have chosen to stay behind, this year, and keep the customers happy, but most of us will be there. The current list includes myself, David Faure, Kevin Ottens, Laurent Montel, Andras Mantia, Volker Krause, Pradeepto Bhattacharya, Thomas Moenicke, Thomas McGuire, Andreas Hartmetz and Marc Mutz. We thought of renting a bus, collecting everyone in Berlin and then driving over, but the logistical aspects of that seemed dauting, for a bunch of geeks. So planes and trains it'll be. The talk schedule looks particularly interesting this year, but the best thing, as always, will be to catch up with old friends, make new ones and generally hang around the nicest, smartest, most enthusiastic and engaging group of people ever. Magically diverse, but filled with a common spirit and love, this community continues to fascinate and inspire me, as it does, I'm sure, all of my colleagues. See you soon, at Sint-Katelijne-Waver. Read More

As Tom announced a few days ago, the Akonadi team is looking for a logo and an icon for the little system tray application. So far we have three submissions, but us kdepim hackers at KDAB thought we'd give folks an extra incentive by donating a Canon Powershot digital camera, new and unused, to be given to the creator of the work we will chose in the end. This fine and only slightly out-of-date (as digital cameras are doomed to be the moment one takes them off the shelf) piece of gear can be yours, yes, yours, if you add your submission <a href=http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/PIM/Akonadi/Logo>to the techbase page and we end up selecting it in a process that will very likely be utterly subjective, unfair, unprofessional and morally objectionable. So there. Keep those submissions coming! Read More

speaking of logos, and while I'm in 1:N communication mode and have your kind attention, large and lovely N that you are: we're in need of a vector version of the current Kontact logo, for purposes of blowing it up indecently in size for use in a poster or two (for Linuxtag). If you, dear k \in N, happen to be in possession of such, or happen to know j \not\in N, but the creator of said artwork, or happen to be j \in N, said creator, yourself, please get in contact with me at your earliest convenience for the overall furtherance of the ascent of the K (assuming |K| > |N| without loss of generality). Read More

Lily Aimée Adam, 2955g, 51cm, healthy, impossibly lovely. Publicity shot here. Righteous.

FOSS.in 07 continues to be a great conference experience for me. I had no talks on the first day of the main conference, which meant I got to listen to other people's presentations, chat with many interesting people and generally hang out and hack. In the evening we went to a downtown restaurant with a bunch of folks for a traditional south Indian style meal, which was excellent. After a good night's sleep we headed out to the conference venue again, through the utter insanity that is the Bangalore traffic, and Volker and I spent most of the morning finishing up and polishing our slides for our two Akonadi talks. Read More

Today is the third day of FOSS.in, the first day of the conference proper. The past two days have seen the "project days" for Gnome, KDE, Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and IndLinux. These are full day tracks, organized by the community, each packed with technical and non-technical talks. The KDE PD was a success, I think, our talks were well attended and people seemed interested in what we had to say. The whole event so far is a blast, just like last time I was here. The organizers somehow manage to keep a 2500 people event very personal, the whole team is extremely dedicated and nice. Read More

Now that it's getting closer, I'm getting really excited about being able to go to Bangalore again this year, for one of the most fun conferences in the world, foss.in. It's extra special for me to get to return there, for several reasons: I get to go with friends and colleagues from KDE and KDAB this time, Volker Krause and Kevin Ottens (yes, he's been assimilated too), get to meet friends from Trolltech (who are sponsoring the event this year), I get to meet the wonderful KDE.in community and we get to present to them and all of Free Software-dom in India the wonders that are KDE 4 in general and Akonadi in particular. It's just great to see how far KDE in India has come, largely because of the amazing job done by a little guy who was following me and Taj around at foss.in 05, bothering us to do BOFs and meet various people, my friend and colleague Pradeepto Bhattacharya. Dude is famous now, as this poster clearly proves, and he has become a great leader of the KDE community in India and an inspiration to future contributors from his country. The KDE project day at this year's foss.in will be amazing, and a long, long way from the 7 person BOF we had two years ago. I'm also looking forward to picking up many conversations with various folks from other projects, Indian and otherwise, again. Can't wait. :) Read More

Once again we have friends visiting, here at the KDAB Berlin office. So far Will Stephenson, Bruno Virlet, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause and Kris Koehntopp have arrived for a weekend of Akonadi hacking. Kris (of MySQL) has kindly agreed to have a look at our usage of their system and point out the various errors of our ways. It's already been very productive, we now have a much better idea of what not to do and how to debug what we are currently doing. The rest of the guys are working on benchmarking the other layers, with the goal of proving that Akonadi can actually deliver the kind of performance we need. Bruno has been doing great work on the models for Qt4's model/view framework, on top of Akonadi, as part of his Summer of Code project, and it's great to meet him in person. The picture below shows him in animated discussion with Kris. More exciting things to come as the weekend progresses, I'm sure. Read More

Since Ellen's wish is my command, I'm happy to report that as of yesterday I can be considered a bonafide Berliner, having received the keys to our lovely new apartment in what is rapidly becoming the KDE capital of the world. My wife and I are looking much forward to having about twice as much space as before, 17 million times as many decent food and coffee places, galleries, bookstores, concert venues, clubs, and friends and KDE hackers within walking and biking distance. Of course there's the actual move to take care of first, which is about as much fun as debugging random memory corruptions without valgrind. It is for the greater good, though, and the prospect of spending my working days at the brand new KDAB office in Berlin soon, with a bunch of friends (most of them fellow KDE hackers, yes, we're hiring ;)), is an exciting one. Good times. :) Read More

Since the Osnabrueck IV meeting where we came up with the core of the Akonadi concept and design, the implementation and fleshing out of these concepts hadn't progressed quite as quickly as we would have hoped. We're all madly busy with real-world concerns and other KDE stuff, so that wasn't really surprising. To finally lift it off the ground and get it to a stage where hopefully more people can start to see the potential and contribute, we decided a few days of meeting face-to-face and hacking around the clock would be best. To keep it effective, we only wanted a small group of people who know the PIM stuff (old and new) intimately. Initially Nuernberg, Germany was to be the location, what with SuSE/Novell, Cornelius and Will there, but that didn't work out for logistical reasons. Ingo, who has recently moved into a larger apartment, then volunteered to host the meeting in Aachen. Cornelius and Will couldn't make it, in the end, so it ended up being Ingo, Volker (who lives in Aachen as well), Tobias and myself. Details and pictures after the jump. Read More

Since I've already written a very long on-topic entry today, I feel I can get away with an utterly off-topic personal entry, and a shameless plug. After years of translating fiction from English to German, writing articles and being a romance magazine editor, my wife managed to sell a couple of short stories to an American e-book publisher, and they were released on Monday. They've indicated that they'll be wanting to publish more of her stuff. I'm insanely proud of her and happy to see her succeed at what she loves doing. It's cool that she chose my last name (with an added "s", since the Americans always append that anyhow) as a pen name, after refusing it when we got married. ;) Check out her website for details. Gotta love a woman who writes smut for a living and codes her own CSS. :) Read More

I've got a bit of an unusual reason to blog today. My mom recently upgraded her machine to SuSE 10, being an avid KDE user, and now the driver for her pesky builtin USB wireless LAN card is not working anymore, which means she can't go online anymore, which sucks. Sound also seems to have broken in the upgrade, and the X-server only wants to start every 4th or so time. Sometimes it just freezes up completely, which I guess means some driver is borked. Unfortunately I'm on the other side of the country and can't log in remotely to fix things, what with the network being broken. So I'm wondering if there's anyone in the Saarbruecken, Germany area who either knows someone local to hire to come and fix it, or maybe even feels like helping out themselves, in exchange for my eternal gratitude and one of my dad's meals (he's an excellent cook, my old man). So, if you think you can help or know someone who could, please drop me an email at adam@kde.org. Thanks a lot. Read More

Since today Kieler Woche started, here in Kiel, the largest sailing event in the world, and it's an extremely beautiful day, 20 degrees Celsius, a warm breeze, and clear blue skies, I decided to go outside (yes, outside, meatspace, I am not kidding you) and finally take long promised pictures of the KDE logo with our local tourist attractions as part of Cornelius' brilliant "KDE Everywhere" series. So here goes: [image:1176][image:1177] I've also submitted the UBoot one to kde-look. I wonder whom to send the logo next? Any volunteers? :) Read More

Over the last week and this weekend I've finally gotten around to making good on my promise to implement as much as possible of the suggestions in the excellent usability analysis of KMail's folder properties handling done by the OpenUsability.org (http://www.openusability.org) team. They've (again) done an outstanding job of analysing the weaknesses in the old interface and coming up with very clean and nice replacements. I love that about the Relevantive people, they don't just complain, they make suggestions how do improve things, and they explain their suggestions, so we can make an informed decision, and present them in a highly professional and digestable way. Have a look at the cleaned up folder RMB menu, for example: You can now move folders around the same way you move messages around, right from the RMB menu via a cascading menu (Carsten implemented that, btw.). Often used entries are towards the top. The folder creation dialog has been massively simplified, we no longer use the big properties dialog for that. Much better. The expiry settings have moved to their own dialog, which has also been simplified quite a bit: And finally, here's the one I like most, the massively cleaned up folder properties dialog itself. Compare it with the old one, if you have the stomach for it. :) Overall I'm very happy with the way this has turned out, and I hope these changes, along with Cornelius' excellent composer and address picker changes, make KMail a bit less overwhelming for new and casual users. Read More

I spent a few hours yesterday finally implementing something I've been meaning to do for a long while. Basically since I switched from mutt years ago. You can now assign shortcuts to folders, which means when I hit Alt-I KMail now selects my Inbox. Rather convenient if you have many folders and visit some of them regularly. Of course it also opens subtrees and moves the viewport so the selected folder is visible. After using it for half a day today I really would not want to miss it again, so I imagine a few folks out there will like it as well. :) You can also put the actions on your toolbar, but that is currently not remembered across restarts. I'll fix that and maybe also make a "Favorites" menu which lists them, which I know people have also requested. Feels good to actually scratch your own itch again, for a change, instead of taking care of other people's gripes. On a related note I gave in and actually read many of the /. comments on the eweek KDE/Gnome comparison and was really positively surprised to see that the vast majority of comments was very appreciative of KMail and Kontact. People do seem to like it after all. Nice. Read More

Just a quick completely KDE unrelated personal note: My wife's heart surgery was very successfull. They found out what was wrong and were able to completely fix it. Hats off to the debugging skills of these electrophysiological cardiologists, the amount of information they can read out of a few meters of EEG output paper is astonishing. Everyone is confident that she will be better than ever and free of heart related troubles for the foreseeable future. Thanks to everyone who sent good wishes and words of encouragement, they were very much appreciated. :) Read More

Back from Ludwigsburg and things have settled down some at last. It was very nice to meet the rest of the PIM team again and of course all the other KDE people. I had a great time there and I'm glad I spent comparatively little of it hacking and quite a lot of it talking to people, having beer and meals with them and just generally hanging out. The downside of that is that I got none of the things done I intended to do there. :) Sadly I couldn't be there for either the social event on Saturday or the talk I was supposed to do with Ingo on KMail on Sunday, but I'm sure he did allright on his own. I'm pretty happy with the HP nx5000 I bought there at reduced price as part of HP's generous sponsoring of the event, it actually suspends to disk nicely and the keyboard is just great. I'm spoiled from my old Compaq's 1400x1050 display, but I've already mostly gotten used to being back to a smaller resolution. It's very quiet and light, which is a rather nice change from the bulky Armada E500. Oh, and the headphone out doesn't frizzle and hum, which makes listening to music on the plane/train much more pleasant. /me pets HP. Cornelius wrote a few days ago: "In addition to that I’m also happy about the progress kdepim made as a project and as a team as well. We had a kdepim meeting yesterday and it was amazing how easy it has become to find common ground and constructively work together into one direction. I really enjoy being part of this team." In short: So do I. What a team. And when I look outside of kdepim I find there are even more amazing people doing amazing work. And I'm happy and proud to be part of that larger team as well. Makes you feel all Olympic and fuzzy inside. Am I hearing the neighbor's kids hum the Free Software Song down there? Read More

Aaaah, summer. :) The last few days I've been spending a lot of time on the balcony in the sun, hacking away or just developing my tan. Around this time of year it's really, really nice to live in paradise. I have hardly any commitments, apart from keeping my wife happy and the sun screen layer constant, thanks to some projects which have fallen through, so I can take it easy, get my bike repaired, work out some and look forward to aKademy. Oh, and get last minute bug fixes in, of course. If it weren't for that dreadfull surgery my wife has to undergo soon, life could hardly be any better. Read More

So the Kontact bug squashing day was a big success, I think, with a lot of bugs closed over pretty much all components of Kontact. Quite a few people showed up and especially KMail seems to have a acquired a bit of a bug squad, which is just awesome. Michael Jahn, Tom Albers, Ismail Donmez and others have been doing an amazing job and KMail now stands -65 for bugs and -73 for wishes for the last 14 days, which must be the best fortnight in the history of KMail bugs. Keep up the excellent work, guys, it is very much appreciated. If we're not carefull, Kontact 1.0 might actually rock. :) Read More

Since I mentionend here that the KMail team could use some help with bug work a few days ago, Ismail "cartman" Donmez has started going through the wishlist closing duplicates and stuff that has since been implemented. I thought I'd give him a public thank you for that, it's really, really great to see that list get some love. So thank you, cartman, and keep up the good work. Maybe if a few more people find some time to help him, we might get the darn thing down to where we can actually use it again. On a related note, we'll probably do a bug squashing day on sunday for Kontact and its components, Cornelius suggested it and everyone thinks its a great idea. It'll be interesting to see how many people show up to help. The Gnomes do them regularly and I guess if they were useless, they wouldn't do them, what with the the Gnomes not being stupid and all. :) Read More

While watching a very boring Tour de France remain boring yet another day, I managed to punch a small dent into the gargantuan pile of duplicate, useless, out of date and in parts plain revolting cruft that is KMail's bugzilla area. Now, I remain convinced that bugzilla is a very valuable tool and that there are in fact very important pieces of information buried in there, amidst all the smelly bits, and I also feel that we should be thankfull for each person spending the time and effort to give us feedback, but it's just so much work to keep on top of the buggers and even more work to climb back on on top everytime we've slacked off a bit and let another 100 or so reports accumulate on top of the 400 or so we managed to reduce the pile to last time. Not counting wishes. Be that as it may, we are nearing the 3.3 release, and it'd be great to at least find those bug reports that are genuine KMail issues which are fixable before 3.3 and fix them. It would also be great to give those nice people reporting issues with the betas timely feedback, especially since the same issues tend to get reported multiple times, and often only a friendly "Thanks, we know." is required. If you think you might have an hour or two to spare and would be willing to help with that, stand up and be counted. Like, now. Drop into #kontact or mail me or the kmail-devel list. This is your chance to finally help with the project that was Touched by Zack (TM), $GOD's own Wrapper around GPGME (TM), We put the sin back in sync, Forgotten Attachment Warner with a 50 MB Memory Footprint, the one MUA to rule them all. Yes, that's right, our very own KMail. Don't miss out on this excellent opportunity. Even cartman has recently been spotted contemplating closing a KMail bug. Lypanov has already gone through and solved all ruby related issues. Follow their lead, boys and girls, it will be much appreciated. Read More

Hm. So clee tells me the world wants to read my thoughts on KDE development. The thing is, I usually don't bother with thoughts of my own, I mostly just ask Zack, or David. :) Ok, I have one thought: It seems the progress handling infrastructure and dialogs David and I did for KMail are being adopted by some of the other pim apps, namely KOrganizer and KAddressbook, which is nice, because it means we can now show cross application progress info in Kontact, for example. If you are in the mail part and KOrganizer starts downloading calender data, you'll be able to see the progres of that as if it was an operation performed by KMail. Spiffy. Zack is using it in KConfigEditor as well now, apparently, so once 3.3 is out the door I'll likely add a few missing features and make it a bit more generic so it can go into kdelibs. KMail seems in pretty good shape for the release already, stable and all, so hopefully we'll be able to incorporate some of the usability input from the fine folks at OpenUsability.org and fix some of the remaining annoyances before the release as well. clee, is that enough thoughts for now? Read More