Zander 

As you probably know, I work on KOffice. Have been doing that since before the first release and I did most of the (flake)libs and KWord work in the sprint to the upcoming Koffice2.0 release. Read More

You can find more blogs from here at this space; labs.trolltech.com

KWord in trunk (we recently got an alpha2 out) is not the same piece of software as it was in KOffice 1.x, its gotten such a makeover both internally as externally that its largely unrecognizable (in a good way). This also means that old known functionality may have problems due to it being new code. Read More

Some time ago I blogged about how KWord can now run around the outline of any shape you place in its text flow. One thing I have had on my TODO ever since was allowing a user to create a custom run-around outline that is separate from the outline of the actual shape we run around. Read More

Every now and then I start kbugbuster and browse the bugs database for KWord. I can then happily close a dozen or so bugs without having to code anything. The reason for this is that basically KWord has undergone a rewrite for 2.0; when we switched to Qt4 and the basic text engine was replaced with Qt4s-scribe and the frames were replaced with Flake it turned out it wasn't useful to refactor the code but more to merge in old code when and where possible. Read More

You may have thought about using the excellent Threadweaver from kdelibs to speed up your application a bit, but got scared of the horror stories of multithreading in C++. One common case where things may go wrong in C++ is deleting of objects. For example when you have an object like a "User". Your painting routines quite likely access that user object, for example to show that QImage of the users face. This means that you can't just delete the user object from another thread, it might still be accessed by the painting routines afterwards. Qt calls the paint event in unpredictable ways, for example when the application is uncovered by another window. Read More

If you ever did anything with multithreading you'd know mutexes. They are basically a building block to do any multithreading work in. In java they are better known as 'synchronized blocks'. Your basic hot zone can be protected by a combination of myMutex.lock(); /* do stuff here*/ myMutex.unlock(); Which is equivalent to the Java manner of synchronized(myMutex) { /* do stuff here */ } Read More

One of the things we wanted to do in KOffice is to use Krita when printing images from KWord. The reason for this are a couple, but the most important being that we want to have just one way to do printing of images and not waste time maintaining a more than one. Naturally the option to let Krita convert the images to CMYK while printing (as soon as QPrinter supports that) sounds like a nice to have as well. Read More

Some weeks ago KOffice alpha1 got tagged; but some balls were dropped and it never was uploaded to the ftp site. The good news is that even more new cool stuff is visible in the KOffice Alpha2 which will probably come out end of August. Read More

The last couple of days [1] I've been working on bi-directional text in KWord. KOffice as a whole is aimed to be used worldwide, in all sorts of environments and it has to be usable for all sorts of scripts and languages. I'm proud to tell you that the todo list on getting that done is starting to be really really small. Read More

After a weekend of being slightly ill and not sleeping because of that, as well as the hot and wet wheather, I get up at 7am on Monday morning. I have to get to a meeting at the other side of The Netherlands about the OOXML standardization track in ISO, which starts at 10. Traffic was pretty Ok and I actually get there 5 minutes early! After some 10 minutes with most of the people having arrived we learn that the time mentioned in the Agenda was incorrect and the meeting is actually starting at 10:30. As mentioned in another communication. Well, that explains the confused and surprised looks from the organizer when most of the people arrived around 10 :) Read More

I have been invited to join a subcommittee at the Dutch national institute for standards, NEN. This subcommittee is about document formats, and thus the new OOXML format is being discussed there as that is in its 5 month period for the fast track as requested by Ecma. Read More

Yesterday I watched a talk given by Trolltech on Qt Jambi where we saw the presenter create a widget and use it in QtDesigner afterwards with an ease that is really compelling. This tied in with the points raised on Aarons blog earlier this week: on-mistaking-internet-for-interface. Read More

A couple of days ago I was hanging out on IRC, doing some work on a new Gui widget for KWord. Now, creating Guis is the most boring and annoying thing I can think of, hence the IRC. It still beats kpat as that is mouse-only and RSI is not on my wanted features list. Read More

I just ran into this video from a couple of weeks ago where Eben very eloquently puts the finger on why the Novell/MS deal is happening and how its bad business for Novell. Read More

When KWord 2.0 is to be released we expect it to be on top of Qt4.3 which is in beta right now. As you may know the new text engine for KOffice is based on the one in Qt, which is new in the 4 series. Naturally, the engine in Qt is not feature complete at all for all the complex stuff that an application suite like KOffice needs. Read More

After a discussion followed by someone renaming a class in subversion; 10:54 < b> ok this discussion has lasted long enough -do as you think best 10:55 < Thomas> yeah, I'm going to paint my next bikeshed purple with yellow spots of varying diameters ;) 10:55 < i> Thomas: OMG! Pics! 10:55 < Thomas> LOL! Read More

When I get an email blaming me for doing something wrong, I typically stop and think. Its important to me to be open to feedback from others and 'do better'. Now; when some mails further in the thread you notice all arguments get ignored, and everyone that speaks up gets accused of conspiring with the others, you know you've got a conspiracy theorist on your hands and you know that whatever you say will have zero effect anyway. (yay for KMails 'ignore thread' feature!) I was in a couple of such threads recently, and reading this perfectly timed edition of a rather geeky comic lifted my spirit quite a bit :) Enjoy it for yourself at; http://xkcd.com/c258.html Read More

A great example of grass roots; educate the educators about the brave new world and supporing critical thinking about MSWord and .doc Critical Thinking About Word and .doc Read More

June 21th 2005 was the day KOffice released version 1.4. I highlight that release because it was the first release where KOffice switched its native format to the OpenDocument Format. That would become an official ISO standard in May 2006. The direct gains may be that there is no conversion step required in loading docs from other application in their native format, but the long term gains are much more substantial. Being able to work with all the industry leaders on the creation and maintenance of the format (and there are quite a lot in the Technical Committee of ODF) allows us to level the playing field and let office applications compete on features and ease of use instead of on who uses what suite and what your partners have chosen. This means real competition where the end user is the clear winner with lower prices for better quality software. It won't surprise you that I believe that KOffice has the upper hand due to its superior design and foundation. Read More

eloquent rants are actually nice to read :) This is a nice one on how media spin can not only point fingers at innocent people, it can also mask the evildoings of the real culprits; Read More

Some 18 months ago I decided that I wanted to upgrade from my desktop to a laptop. The machine was really slow, but the most important thing was that I intended to be able to travel with my main machine. So, I bought a really cool looking and pretty fast HP laptop. I didn't want to spent too much on a laptop and this one fitted the bill. Soon after I found that HP does not equal quality; the machine needed a bios upgrade, which actually came out some months before I bought it. But naturally I only found out after installing Linux on it and there is no way to upgrade then. The power supply has been replaced twice in those 1½ years and now the hinges broke so I use duct tape to keep the screen from separating from the machine. All in roughly 18 months. Hint; don't buy HP guys! Read More

If you would have been around in the KWord 1.0 days you would remember that a big influence in the industry was by Framemaker. And for a reason; it has always been the only GUI application capable of holding a whole book, including lots of images and complex features. The set of features was well thought out and based on a decade of experience. Read More

In KWord we always had a very simple way to structure pages. We just stored the height of a page and when there is a frame at position 10000 you can calculate its at, say, page 12. Naturally, this only gets you so far and we had requests for things like differently sized pages and pagespreads. So, in October 2005 ago I wrote a Page class and a PageManager class. Which was released in KOffice 1.5. This already gave features like being able to have a document start from page 10, instead of always from page 1. But unfortunately there never appeared a GUI for it, and thus users could not use it. Read More

I've been a bit quiet lately. Sorry for that, I was more focussing on getting nice things done which was needed for me to make sure my open source efforts stay enjoyable :) Read More

I went to Fosdem this year, mostly to see people I have not seen for quite some time. And that part certainly was successful! Seen so many familiar faces. People I know from Java (Sun) that I met for the first time, people that I know from free-java that I saw again, and naturally quite a lot of KDE people. One of them was Annma, whom cancelled a meeting years ago and she moved a couple of times since then. So it was good to finally see her in real life :) Read More

Since my last blog I've been working on various different projects in KOffice. Most are not really screen-shot interresting so I declined to blog about them. After all, who wants to se that if I type text in a text-frame the frame will grow automatically when the text would not fit anymore. That's soo boring :) Read More

Just the other week I was talking to someone that is a big supporter of the Open Document Format. He was arguing that we need to find a way to get KOffice and OpenOffice to open all the documents made in MSOffice without any loss and any change in layout. He argued, if that's impossible, then what is the advantage of ODF? Read More

Since January 5th there has been a bit of a rush, if not stress to work on standards. If you may recall, in an earlier blog I posted about Microsofts answer to the OpenDocumentFormat. Which got rubber-stamped as ecma 376 late last year. The ecma seal of approval was not enough for Microsoft. Most probably because it was fighting the ISO approved ODF spec, even if they never said so out loud. And it makes sense. The number one request any free office suite gets is that it should be able to read MSOffice docs. Or more accurately, it should be able to read the microsoft invented fileformat. So, MS has the advantage that people rely on their suite because the information stored in documents can only be read by their software. This means that even if KOffice is better than MSOffice for a company, they would have problems if their old docs were not properly parsed by it. In other words; lock-in by fileformat. Read More

I estimate its some 15 years ago I wrote my first address book. On my Amiga, in C. It had a really nice GUI that was task oriented and I kept all my friends addresses and phone numbers in there. One feature I was pretty proud about was that I encrypted the data before writing it to disk. Some months later I lost the key and I wrote another application to brute force the encryption and retrieve my address book. Lesson learned was that I should not have an 8 bit cypher as all possible keys can be tested for correctness in quite a short time. But instead of creating a new encryption or hashing function, I learned that its better to use an off-the-shelf algorithm as apparently its really really hard to write one that others who have access to the actual code of the algorithm can't hack. You may be wondering where I'm going with this, the answer is that whenever someone invents his or her own hashing or encryption algorithm I cringe, thinking that its such a beginners mistake that I place them in the same category as programmers that write for-loops in games with a specific amount of iterations to delay the program exactly 100msec. Something game writers used to do on old computers. Really funny effect when you bought a new computer that was twice as fast :) Read More

The dot story about KWord/KOffice was received pretty well. We hit 100 comments just now :) One thing that people noted was that the screenshots we posted were not the best quality they could be. There are various font rendering issues that show up in them. We basically got lots of people shout at us for promissing better font technology while the same basic problems we had in the 1.x series showed up! Read More

This morning I woke up from the loud sounds of people drilling and otherwise renovating the house. Ahh, the empty apartment upstairs has gotten new occupants! It didn't take long before I decided to leave the house for today, the continues sounds of building are horrible for my concentration. Read More

In KWord1 we had the concept of text-runaround. This is basically the ability of KWord to detect there are other objects on the page and to make sure the text is not printed on top of other content. In KWord 1 we just allowed runaround of square objects. Which is rather simple. I've been postponing to solve the issue in KWord2 for a couple of months now; being able to rotate text and to have circles, or worse, as objects I have to run text around made me wonder how to even start attacking this problem. Read More

For KOffice2 we had a huge todo list. Where various core technologies are in need of basically a rewrite. For KWord the most interresting one is the text-engine. The old one had serious problems and using Qt4 would allow me to write a better one in not too much time. The progress on the new text engine is proceeding nicely, with just some advanced features missing like variables and inline images. The text engine will now support styles much better then the previous one did; with character styles being available as the biggest change. Read More

Since the OpenDocumentFormat (ODF) became a real ISO spec back in May, a lot of things have happened and continue to happen. The industry is really recognizing this open standard and many are already supporting it, where a large section even make ODF mandatory. I expected pick up to be slower, given how Office has such a huge majority of the market. If I look at how slow pick up of Linux on the desktop is (slowly but steady growth over quite some years) its very refreshing to see people recognize ODF as the better format so massively. In the last months I've seen ODF adoption in Malaysia, India, Brazil, the French Parliament [FR|DE], in Finland, The Spanish region of Extremadura, the Belgium Government and soon the Swiss. With some grass roots conversion happening in Holland as well (Dutch)! Read More

Since the Novell / Microsoft deal a lot of people have told stories on how Novell should not have assumed there are patents, and how the deal is written to sidestep the GPL with regards to patents. And all this time Novell was putting out FAQs, press releases trying to state that its not about patents at all, and how Novell is sure that there are no patents on the GPLed software Novell ships. Read More

Reading this funny transcript of bloggers philosophy (aaron, ade, telex). It reminded me of a blog that looks at the same problem from a different perspective, and only published days before this thread started. Read More

Some months back I read about the GPLv3 for the first time. Just like many I was compelled by the arguments of Linus against it more then by the arguments from the FSF for this new license. Reasons for that were that the EU doesn't allow software patents as well as the silly example of Tivo which is pretty far fetched. Read More

The best description I ever had about technical people was this sentence: Technical people find it completely satisfactory to reply to any statement a single sentence: "That's false!". But this yes/no type of communication was not what I was aiming at with the subject. Its about being able to discuss subjects in the digital realms. Typically email and IRC. Read More

The Open document format is meant as a specification that is open for everyone to see, use and expand upon for now and for a hundred years in the future. That is its main goal and its succeeding in that goal admirably. Especially governments love that principle which breaks the chains of vendor dependency. Read More

In Linux land we have an awful lot of choice in distro's. Choice is good as it ensures you have a better chance of getting exactly what you want. In something as big as a linux distro (more often then not it ships man CDs worth of data) I feel that the effects are not helping people out anymore. Choosing your distro is just based on too many things. How hard is it to upgrade packages? Can you upgrade in a year time? Is the directory structure easy to understand? How easy is it to maintain your hardware? Is all the hardware supported? And on the other side of the spectrum you have security patches and package management philosophies. Most people don't look at that when choosing a distro, but in my experience there is something wrong with each distro I saw. And I bet its because the different distros don't steal enough from each other. Stealing package tweaks from other distros because they give a better user experience is a good thing. Read More

I often get the question what Flake is. And as the answer is getting clearer in the heads of the people designing it, I thought I'd write down an introduction. Read More

I really had a good time reading A leap back from Rob Weir. Its about how Ms let an implementation bug live on for years in the application and now its proposing that that mistake be standardized in the new (as of yet unused) fileformat! Read More

Last weekend we had a nice celebration based on the date of the first post about KDE. When we think about birthdays of humans we don't take the first "lets create one" message, but the date its "released" into the world. Which is more practical for several reasons. Read More

Last weekend I was at Gnome Live, Boston to attend the Text Layout Summit. The Text Layout Summit is a meeting intended to further all of Free software text rendering, both to screen and for print. Read More

Like many I came home from aKademy with a little flu thingy and I fell asleep the moment I got home last sunday night. I slept a lot this week trying to get rid of this bug but also just because I really was low on sleep anyway so I had to replenish :) So next to sleeping and talking on IRC (hi Kat!) I didn't do a whole lot this week. Nobody again say you don't need a holiday if you don't have a steady dayjob! Read More

I'm just back from Dublin, and this is the first time I actually grabbed a pen and started doing some blogging. Back home I realize that I really need some more sleep; going out drinking several pints of Guinness every day and still getting up quite early got me down. So now I'm hugging a cup of tea in front of the computer slowly getting through the day. Read More

In KOffice 2.0 (based on Qt4/KDE4) we long ago decided to remove the old text engine and base our new one on scribe which is a part of Qt4. This looks like a simple job; but there are a lot of features an application like KWord needs that are not supplied by Qt. An example of this is numbering paragraphs. That is, Qt supports simple numbered paragraphs, but not nested and certainly not with all the features that the OpenDocument Format specification supplies. Read More

Sometimes you have to let the end-users themselves do the talking on why what we are creating is important for them. And member dylunio did exactly that on libervis.com Since academics don't have time to fight against the norm, which in their institutions are proprietary file formats, the only way I see to fix this problem is to change the norm. If the norm were to use free and open file formats such as the Open Document Format they would not be tied into an operating system. www.libervis.com/proprietary_file_format_lock_in Read More

For KWord I have progressed nicely in the layout department. In my last blog I started researching linespacing. It turns out that are two accepted methods of doing linespacing and the different results was (partly) due to the different models. Funny thing is, the OpenDocument Format spec has a configure setting for it. So I just made KWord do both to honour that config setting. :-) Read More

KWord will get a new textengine in version 2.0, it will be based on Qt4s scribe engine. And I've been working on this for the last week. Scribe gives me the ability to implement just the actual sizing and positioning of lines. Which means a minimum of code needed to do cool things. I like that. Read More

If you develop like me, you will most likely have a lot of 'change source' 'compile' 'test' roundtrips. Each roundtrip will need a 'make install' to actually be able to see your changes. So, after we optimized linking by dumping libtool, installing is the place to look. In KDE4 we use cmake, and its slow on installing. See this bugreport. Apparently someone had the right idea to not install things twice, but for some reason that got implemented using a diff. So my 6Mb kwordprivate.so gets ready byte by byte and compared with the installed one. Ugh, that can't be fast if they are indeed the same. Read More

Red Hat is looking for a diverse group of people to take this survey entitled "what do you think of us?" What about your help?

First of all; I'd like to say that CMake is a nice technology; its cross platform, and saves us from the braindead auto-tools, but most importantly it basically gets the job done. Read More

There are two basic settings for a mailinglist with regards to where replies go to. The one KDE uses is that replying goes to the list. An older standard is that replying goes to the person that send the mail. This distinction is very annoying to make each time you switch mailboxes. KMail already makes it easier for you by having a feature that a mailinglist can be associated with a folder. But that one is not very foolproof, and I like playing a fool when it comes to software :) For example; private emails I get normally go into my inbox, but I still need to archive them, so I move them to the mailinglist folder if they are appropriate. Pressing reply on such a mail will make kmail send my reply to the mailinglist. I already send some pretty embarrassing mails like that to publicly archived places. So, I don't use that feature anymore. Read More

Most graphics applications have a toolbox in one way or another. A floating window that contains a lot of tool buttons for, well, the tools in that application. Karbon was the first in KOffice to have one, Krita followed last year. KWord practically speaking already had one, but I personally saw the toolbar with 5 icons to insert new things never as such. Even while I was the one that made it stick to the left by default, its funny how that works. In KOffice 2.0 we plan to make the toolbox something that is used in all KOffice applications. Read More

In KWord the main library is called kwordprivate. So doing a recompile after changing something inside of kword cmake has this nice gem: make kwordprivate/fast install/fast Works nice in general, except for this fantastic dependency problem: Read More

The 1.5 series of KOffice has been a good one for the suite; with several new applications and a much improved stablity for its main applications one thing became clear, we got new people that started working on KOffice. You have to admit; for such a small team of people its a pretty big suite to maintain. After all we truthfully state we have the suite with the most components on our website!. Read More

In KOffice the flake library for shapes is taking a much clearer form now KWord is actually really using them. Details like shape-configuration widgets have been flashed out. A tricky think considering its plugins based. In the last weeks I've also been working on getting a text-shape operable. Its pretty cool to have a couple of text-frames as you know them from KWord, but you can edit the text even while its rotated or skewed. Much more work has to be done to enable real DTP like features, though. Read More

Open document format is that new fileformat for Office suites, ISO certified and genuinely an open standard. Its been busy in ODF land, since early may the ISO certification came through we have seen the market accept this standard in an amazing speed. Governments are not well known for moving fast, and yet we have this long list of successes. Read More

After working on Flake for the last couple of weeks I refocussed on KWord earlier this week. KWord needs an amazing amount of refactors to get the best out of the new features both Qt4 and Flake provide, so this left me with a dilemma on where to start and how to approach this best. I decided to go for the mechanic ways. You know what I mean if you ever saw a mechanic who took a whole car apart, with a garage full of parts and starts to reassemble it afterwards. I am doing the same in software. Good for me that I don't have to take kword apart first, I'll just copy the parts I need :) Read More

I recently saw a good saying; if I have 4 hours to chop down a tree, I'll spent the first 3 sharpening my ax. All KDE hackers I know are pretty bright and the above will sound true to them; having well working tools gets you better results, faster. Read More

With Blogs we are all publishers, thats the new world and everyone has his or her soapbox. In the good old days the concept of being published was the most important thing you could get. It meant recognition. Nowadays, its getting linked and copy-pasted (with or without attributeion). Read More

I've been blogging about the library flake a little over the last weeks; its a library thats going to be the graphical object handling library for KOffice 2.0. The Wiki page shows the full set of features, but the first feature there lists: Read More

After reading Toms blog I installed and tried Bazaar (bzr). I wanted to anyway since this is Mark Shuttleworths answer to svn and cvs. I tried it and I must say I'm disappointed. Not because of the ideas it has, they are very good and they address the problems cvs and svn have head on, which Tom also noted. Read More

11:22 < elvstone> dfaure: ah. kword recompiled. great to have those two bugs fixed! thx a lot. 11:23 * elvstone changes his footnote styles and deletes chars across images in pure joy. Read More

I had a frustrating hour today, I wanted to install suse on this spare machine here so I can test the KOffice packages on that, and other distros. I choose the small image that downloads everything during the install; which is what I always do for installing Debian. (not that I install that more then ones per machine, but still, familiarity gets you points : ). Read More

The KOffice objects-manipulation library is progressing nicely; since my last blog (2 weeks ago) I have added and fixed lots of things. Not nearly 2 weeks hacking worth, though, with LinuxTag in between. Read More

Last week I was at LinuxTag in Germany which always is a lot of fun! Not only in seeing new people, but just as much in making contacts with the various other vendors / projects there. The event has the subtitle "Where .com meets .org" for a reason ;) Read More

Its a week ago that this happened, but I have not seen any kde-news or blogs about it. So here goes; KOffice native fileformat, Open Document Format is now ISO/IEC 26300 with just some bureaucratic things left, but no real way to stop this from going through. More on Andy Updegroves blog. Read More

The usual suspects of the KDE crew arrived in Wiesbaden/Germany (near Frankfurt) last night; we did some initial work in setting up the booth and finished up this morning before the crowds arrive. Here is a nice pic of what our booth looks like. Yes this is before any visitors were allowed on the floors; I'm pretty sure it will be more crowded after that ;) Read More

Since a week I've delved into a library the KOffice devs are creating; its called libFlake. The goal of the library is to have the best of both worlds from KWords frames and KPresenter shapes down to Karbons vector graphics. To do this we provide a low level object called a Shape and provide hooks for the high level stuff so they can be build on top. This way we can move shape-manipulation and shape-painting (including painting to PDF) for all KOffice applications into one library with the obvious advantage that any cool component build in a specific application will be really easy to reuse in other KOffice apps. Read More

Today I got an email from a friend asking me if I knew about Sun open sourcing Java. Naturally I wanted to reply that thats been a long teaser from Sun where they will never do it, but they let on enough people to hope it might happen one day. Pleases all parties, I guess. Read More

Many years ago I was the maintainer of KWord. I lost interrest in C++ and things went downhill from there (for KWord, not for me : ). The module got reassigned to David, who we all know has more code under his wings then is humanly possible to actually maintain. Read More

I have been away from the blog sphere for some odd 3 months. Unlike most I don't have the excuse of being too busy, I have a rather different excuse. I have been out of the country and mostly away from internet during that time :) Read More

I know it sounds silly, but editing text in KWord used to be some sort of a drag; it was annoying to select text with the mouse, for example. In the upcoming 1.5 release (not all fixes have made the beta) there are a set of changes in how KWord allows you to manipulate text. Tell your friends and family; this release is going to stun a lot of people! Read More

As a KOffice core-developer I am certainly very interrested in how OpenDocument is gaining traction in the state of Massachusetts. After all, KOffice is one of the contenders for the eyeballs of state workers after ODF becomes mandatory Jan-1-2007. Read More

As if you did not hear already, KOffice is more alive than ever. Its honestly brewing with activity. Krita has gotten more new features in the last couple of months then are set to go into Longhorn and the commit rate is growing each week. It shows; there has been commercial interrest in making KOffice stay ahead of the curve. There now is a competition for ideas with a prize for the best or top-3 totalling $1000. Read More

I'm a usability guy, so my first concern with any feature or application is consistency, I guess all you guys and galls know that rule of usability, its the most important one. So, when in one day a couple of questions came up on how to scale a KPresenter object but keep the aspect ratio of the object, and how to disable the grid while scaling, well, I got thinking and I started looking into what all the KOffice applications did. In short, each one invented its own way of doing things. Which, as my introduction states, is not good usability. Duh! I kicked off a research and a proposal based on that to the KOffice mailinglist, and a couple of days later, the KOffice team now has a nice set of what I call interaction policies. All the features that make sense for manipulating objects now have been defined and given a modifier key. So holding shift down while moving or rotating will disable the grid and guides in all KOffice applications. Consistency is good. Read More

Here in Holland we have a 'chipknip' (chip-wallet) that is a very cool invention where you basically carry around electronic money and pay using an 'ok' button instead of giving out cash and collecting too many coins. Read More

After a fight with nature and facing certain death in the face I am safely back home in the warmth with a nice cup of tea. What appeared to be fun and exciting this morning turned out to be more then a little too much. From nice autumn weather to 20 cm of snow in one day. Suffice to say that the only viable mode of transportation tonight is walking. Bicycles are normally seen everywhere here in Holland, but today you will not get 100 meters without falling flat on your face. Cars have an advantage with extra wheels, you'd think. Well, not really they don't have any grip either and going to fast means you will end up hitting the sidewalk. Read More

This morning I woke up and heard the slushing sound of the occasional car and bike driving past through the perpetual open window of my bedroom. Oh, rain again, was my first impression. Sliding open the curtains required just my arm above the covers and I could then see a darkish-gray sky. Ugh, I'm staying in bed a bit longer. Read More

Recently I've been having some photographs that I make and want to share them online. Just one or two when in a IM/IRC conversation for example. So, what I do is take the pic and make it smaller for web publishing (no need to place 750Kb images just to get your point across) and then I upload to a personal webspace it and paste a ULR in the IM window. Read More

Unless you have been living under a rock you have seen that Massachusetts chose for the OpenDocumentFormat in a very open and clear decision process leading to a lot of fuss and accusations, mostly coming from the closed source camp that obviously has a big problem if the number one reason for customers buying Word is eliminated, which is Lock In. OpenDocumentFormat (ODF) eliminates this nicely and has a very cool by-product that all of a sudden KOffice and OpenOffice can again compete on a level playing field with MSOffice. Read More

I'm sure I'm not the only one typing incorrect urls in the location bar sometimes. Typing a .com where it needed a .net or similar. You only find out you mistyped it when you go to the page. So you go back and fix the line. Read More

The weather is changing, but we still have plenty of sun. In other words; great outdoor-photography time! The pictures were taken near Schoorl, which is walking distance from the sea. We did not actually walk to the sea as I had a birthday party that evening and we did not make everything too hush hush. 2 hours walking did do great things for our appetite. Read More

Since some months the accessibility feature of khtml is a lot more aggressive; in 3.4 only sites that specify shortcuts hijack the control key, so you probably never saw the feature this blog is about. In 3.5 pressing ctrl, and releasing it again will show a lot of little windows all over your page on the spots a href is located. The little window has the same yellow background color as a tooltip and shows 1 character. Pressing that character will activate the link. Sounds great for people that don't want (or can't) to use the mouse, and as a workaround for the entirely unintuitive ordering of using tab to access the links. Read More

It apparently is pretty hard to write api-dox for your new classes, as is show by recent blogs from ade and Boudewijn. I fully agree with Boudewijn that it is the least interesting thing to work on, but I have been around long enough to know that dox is just like sex; even having a little is better then nothing at all. And when its good, its really really good, inviting you to give back as good as you can.. Read More

Last week I read the blog of Jes where she addressed the usage of the word intuition on UIs. I found this interresting and wanted to add something to her content here. Read More

Boy, what a week. I spent 2 days at the Krita Hackaton. I went there with the background that I know about KOffice and saw Krita ones or twice so I could contribute at least some technical and usability knowledge. What I found was that Krita is actually the most promising KDE application I currently know of. I did mostly usability consulting and some hacking to fix the rotating of the toolbox so you can drop it to be a simple toolbar, if you want. Didn't do much more hacking since I borrowed an older laptop and compiling was slow. Read More

My first project in KDE was maintaining KOffice. This was years ago already. Later I was forced to use Java at work and have been doing that for some 6 years now. I recently left that job, but I still have a nice chunk of work from that job available as an open source project I started and worked on during that time together with some colleagues and volunteers. Read More

Over the last weeks I have been spending time on KDEPim and KMail in particular. Various usability and feedback issues have been fixed that bothered me before and I find KMail to be a lot more pleasant to use, fixing bugs beats working around them any day! Read More

KDE is growing. And I don't mean in the way programmes think; but we are receiving contributions from non programmers more and more. In the last year we have seen the artists sites grow tremendously, this interview on the dot proves again that more usability experts are stepping into the open source waters and with companies like Apple and Nokia seriously picking up, and working with technologies like KHTML that will only increase. Its baby steps, but watching this is very exciting! Read More

I stubled upon a post about features/usability curve. This article made be laugh; its a very good, highly recommended :) Choice quotes: "Of course you'll lose customers if you stop adding as many new features. "Or will you? "What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? [] In a lot of markets, it's gotten so bad out there that simply being usable is enough to make a product truly remarkable." And this one: "Most of you here know that Don Norman talked about this forever in the classic The Design of Everyday Things, but why didn't the designers and manufacturers listen?" Note that just adding features is not a guarentee of making software unusable (the target link covers more then software); as always software is more complicated then that. Its more the lack of maintainance and attention to workflow that makes things hard in software. But software that just adds features tend to ignore that, so its a save bet :) Read More

Over a week ago we had the pim meeting in Achtmaal, which was a big success. From my perspective it was mostly because of meeting all those new kdepim people in real life for the first time. Read More

At this time, when I upgrade from the old cvs to the shiny new svn; I can't help but compare the experience to real changesetbased and disconnected revision management software. Read More

The comic foxtrot is always really nice to read; and todays comic was showing the common problem of more features meaning less usability in a very clear way; I can't help but talk about it (well, after I stopped laughing :) First here is the comic: The author (correctly) got just about all the big usability rules wrong to make sure this thing display power (its huge!) but be quite useless at the same time; I wrote this down a long time ago in the UI guidelines. To be user friendly, software must be: task-suitable, understandable, navigable, conformable to expectations, tolerant of mistakes and feedback-rich. (follow the link above to get a full explenation) Read More

I'm in Berlin for week, enjoying a city that many friends said is definitely worth visiting. Well, they were right :) The first thing I noticed was the traffic. I took my car to Berlin and the first day (without a good map) I got lost all the time. Totally frustrating since I normally navigate in new cities without any problems. Normally, when I miss a turn, I just take the next one and make sure to go left and right one more to get back to the right road. This strategy completely breaks down in Berlin since almost no road is straight (nor circular, for that matter). Read More

At the last aKademy the openusability website was demonstrated with the idea that usability experts (mostly people that do this for a living) will describe problems in open source projects with suggestions on how to fix them. Sounds great! There was one thing I found less then great; those poor usability experts had to write their report in an XML to make the website understand. Read More

I'm probably a rare example of someone that has worked in the same job for over 6 years already, where the job was the first one I got after finishing university. At birthday parties of friends I know for over 15 years there was always someone that recently changed jobs, and I got a look of unbelieve when I told them I still worked at the same company. Read More

In the recent Poll on KDEPims release schedule I wanted to answer, but realized the answer is not that simple; and KDE has been running in the same circle for too long to see that there have been developments out there which change the release stuff completely; in other words, time for my first BLog here :) Read More