KDE Blogs 

Szymon Stefanek's KMail GSoC project was merged into trunk today. Stunning. You've got to try it. KMail has been re-launched! r881321 To quote the commit message: "... New features include grouping, multiline items and the ability to customize just about everything of the look of the message list. Also, we have a tabbed interface for opening more than one folder at once now..." Read More

The KDE BugSquash team is holding another testing and bug triaging day tomorrow, Sunday 9th of November, to help maintain and improve the quality of KDE PIM applications. Especially versatile applications like KMail and KOrganizer can potentially be tested numerous times by its developers without finding any issues because it requires a certain workflow or data set to trigger them. Therefore help by as many volunteers as possible is hugely improving the situation, because every person will have different goals, preferences on how to do things (e.g. mouse v.s. keyboard), data sources, amount of data, etc. Read More

The hard-working Danny Allen put out a new Commit Digest, and the resulting discussion on the Dot raised a few comments about Microsoft Exchange support in kdepim. The short version is that it isn't going to make it for KDE 4.2. Maybe 4.3. Maybe not for 4.3 either. Sorry. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week talks are happening all week on IRC. Today includes Kubuntu man Jonathan Thomas on "reinventing QA the resource-limited way" at 18:00UTC.

Here we are on the steps at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. From left to right: Igor Trindade Oliveira, Bertjan Broeksema, Stephen Kelly, Ingo Klöcker, Kevin Krammer, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause, Will Stephenson and Tom Albers. We had a very intense and productive couple of days filled with presentations, knowledge sharing and of course dawn till dusk hacking. As usual Volker, as the Akonadi visionary and lead, was mobbed by the rest of us with questions, which he answered with his trademark infinite patience and good explanations. Read More

As usual the middle day of a developer sprint is the most productive one since all people are here the whole day. We managed a couple of our agenda items in the sense of discussing the current state, roadmap and delegating jobs to those who still have time to do something beside their own important TODOs :) Read More

I'd say we had an extraordinary good last day since nobody had to leave early and the majority didn't have to leave until late afternoon. After plenty of breakfast we started with a bit of blog reading, email checking and warm-up hacking. Read More

Discussions about the usefulness of the Plasma desktop toolbox arise regularly. Usually it focus on the "Zoom Out"/Activities feature which as also Plasma developers admit is not as far implemented and nicely integrated as of KDE 4.1 as everyone wants it to be. If one removes (maybe even irreversible) the "Zoom Out" button, nothing is left in the desktop toolbox which is not also available in the panel/desktop context menus. So why not make it optional completely? For openSUSE 11.0 we offered that as a hidden option. For openSUSE 11.1 we decided to ship with the desktop toolbox disabled by default. This takes effect with Beta 4 (it's not announced/released yet because of the week-end but ISOs are propagating to mirrors). Technically this is done by adding a desktop containment implementation without toolbox (as possible since Plasma/KDE 4.0) and backporting the desktop containment swicher from KDE 4.2. As result users who want to experiment with Plasma activities can easily switch the desktop toolbox on again: Also please take note of the third desktop activity type option. :-)

“Perfection is reached not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to remove.” - Antoine de St. Exupery I have been frustrated with the UI of Flo now for the past week. As mindmaps grow larger, I keep feeling the UI get crowded. Now maybe there is nothing that can be done to fix this. I don't know, but I wonder what you in the audience think. I feel my input is now rendered useless because after 2 years I am so trained on how it works I don't notice the UI braindamages. Read More

Day one of the second Akonadi developer sprint for this year started quite early for me, since I had to get up at 5:00 to pack and catch my plane from Graz to Düsseldorf. Read More