KDE Blogs 

This week is hackweek at SUSE and people are frantically hacking on all kind of stuff. Fun. My project is the Social Desktop, which is the buzzwordy title for an implementation of the Open Collaboration Services API (see specification on freedesktop.org). Frank Karlitschek has joined the fun and is at the SUSE offices for hackweek, so server and client implementations go hand in hand. The idea is to bring the community to the desktop and take benefit of the fact that free software projects are not only about software but also about community. This can provide a lot of extra value for our users, especially as the desktop is the place where all the social web data from different sites comes together and the user is in full control of what happens to the data and how it is combined. For some more background have a look at Frank's Akademy keynote. Read More

When thinking about how to implement a client for the Open Collaboration Services API which Frank presented at this year's Akademy keynote I came across the question of how to generally access a REST web service on a client. Read More

Back from FrOSCon. I followed the frog grasshopper. It was great to meet so many nice people again :) The KDE table (booth just doesn't fit) was shared with Kubuntu and Amarok. I think we all fitted together nicely, not really appearing as three projects that much. Thanks to the Kubuntu people for helping a lot in keeping the table/booth running! The blue table cloth we had (kudos Kubuntu) gave us extra appeal. And if it hadn't had a little too much beer in the evening that would have included Sunday... Apart from talking to visitors and other projects and listening to talks, Saturday evening was all about being social. Or it was all about beer, I don't remember clearly. I think we did fairly well on the dance floor also, I enjoyed bouncing around with Sebas, Danimo, Markey, Sven and all the others, though I do hope, no photos of us dancing around professionally are around ;) Thanks a lot to Valerie and Jörg for giving me a ride, that was awesome. And the Grasshopper. Read More

I got a bit bored this weekend (ok, ok, I had to do a lot of cleaning and so and needed an excuse) and had a look at two performance related things in KWin. First was fixing the CPU usage problem caused by using vsync, now that Thiago found out why I couldn't reproduce it (I build Qt without Glib support, it just messes the backtraces up). Interestingly it was code that was supposed to save CPU that by mistake caused the increased CPU usage. Oh well. Second improvement is unredirecting fullscreen windows - that is, if a fullscreen window is not covered by something else, such as a game or a movie, that window is excluded from compositing and allowed to draw normally. This lets it draw at the full speed and should also help with avoiding tearing. The simplest way to see this is to maximize a glxgears window and then compare its reported number of frames to also making it fullscreen using Alt+F3/Advanced/Fullscreen. I could post a video, but it would look quite similarly to the previous performance joke. This one is for real though. The small downside of unredirecting a window is that it no longer has a preview e.g. in Alt+Tab (could be handled with some more code, but not a very high priority now, unless somebody else feels like doing that or I get bored some other weekend). Read More

Akademy finished, it was great. Next week is feature freeze in Ubuntu land, so we are working hard on filling the distros with the necessary features, if not always beastie-free. Read More

Just a small announcement. Development version 1.1 of my little network routing configuration utility is up on my website for your testing pleasure. There is no new functionality. I've just ported it from KDE 3 and C++ to KDE4 and Python, saving it from ravages of bit-rot. It's a neat little utility and it would be a shame to let it get lost on the migration to KDE 4. It is also in Python now which should make the code a lot more accessible for contributors. If you've written a few shell scripts in the past, then your skills a probably high enough to hack on Guidedog and fix any bugs which show up. Read More

I could no longer resist, in spite my notorious lack of spare time... It began with installing SUSE 11 via KDE4 Live CD on my eeePC. On my desktop PC I had been trying KDE4 since the RC's where released with a special user and was quite happy I could come back to 3.5 for daily use. I was really astonished how very well even 4.0.4 was looking and behaving on the eee 701. Since the release of kde4.1 RC1 I switched my default also for the desktop mashine from 3.5.9 to 4.1 and am very fond of it. All that did commit to KDE4 did and still do a great job. Read More

blah blah blah who took away the delete function for kdedevelopers.org blog entries blah blah blah

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

With all the recent interest in Nokia's N810 device among KDE and Qt developers I think it is important to note that Qt/X11 painting performance is badly broken when running under Hildon. I've been porting a QtWebKit based browser to the N810 for awhile now and have noticed a steep drop in performance when compared to the same browser running under Qtopia Phone Edition on the very same device. Read More