KDE Blogs 

Akademy, the big yearly KDE conference, is only three and a half weeks away. Novell sponsors at Gold level this year and will by last count be represented by 8 people (me, Dirk Müller, Will Stephenson, Lubos Lunak, Vincent Untz, Danny Kukawka, Klaas Freitag and Cornelius Schumacher) and involved in three talks during the conference part. I am looking forward to show/distribute openSUSE 11.0 to everyone and spread how lot of fun it is to work on/for [open]SUSE :-)...

I've decided to write a series of blogs detailing the work that has gone on behind the scenes for KDevelop version 4, the new IDE that is now 3 years in the making. Like KDE4, KDevelop has seen much work on essential internal mechanisms (much like the pillars of KDE), the power of which will become evident over the next year or so. Progress has been great recently, with the hackathon we had in Munich earlier this year, productive SoC projects and several more/new developers becoming active again, it's looking like we can expect to be releasing a pretty solid beta within about a month. The other developers and I use kdevelop daily to work on kdevelop 4, including writing code; version control; building, executing, debugging, and valgrinding programs; navigating the project with quick open, find in files (grep), etc. Read More

It has been a tough decision, because we had three awesome proposals, but after a period of getting feedback from the community and some conversations between the boards of the KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foudation we have settled on the Gran Canaria bid for holding Akademy and GUADEC as co-hosted event in 2009. Read More

I've been in Berlin since Thursday, where we're having a meeting and hacking session about language bindings and Kross scripting. I like Berlin - it's a bit like Amsterdam - plenty of hippies on bicyles although without the canals, the Dutch or the narrow buildings. Read More

I got some Ruby Plasma bindings working a while ago. They wrapped the complete C++ api and allowed you to write a Plasma KDE plugin entirely in Ruby, which just looked like an ordinary C++ plugin to the Plasma runtime. However, that isn't the preferred way to implement non-C++ language support in Plasma. Read More

The first day of the KDE-Bindings / Kross Meeting in Berlin at the KDAB Office is still going on. After starting slowly this morning, because of staying up very late after having fun at a restaurant here in this area where were waiting for all the people to gather together, we caught up very quickly with doing bugfixing and discussions about how to plug hot technologies together. Which ended up with a commit by Richard Dale who made an impressive demo on how to create a smoke lib and a ruby extension within 20 minutes. The example allows to script Ruby applications using QtScript. In the afternoon and evening we had presentations about the particular projects and languages of the developers, from Lua, Python, Ruby, C# and PHP to the Kross Framework and Kross Plugins as for KDevelop or Krita. So far I can tell this meeting seems to be coming together well, and we are all looking forward to having fun during the next day or two and end up filled with new ideas and solutions.

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.

Our famous Oxygen folks have brought a taste of things to come for the weather plasmoid. This mockup is a work in progress. Credit goes to Pinheiro and Lee Olson from Oxygen for getting things started! Read More

Thank $DEITY for feature freezes. It's only after the bulk of the KDE libraries are frozen that bindings people can come into action and franticly update everything before the RCs and the final release of a shiny new version of KDE. It's not much time and it only takes a last minute update to one of the C++ headers in the KDE break the bindings build. (That is the risk you run when you use almost every part of an API). But I can report that Python support is ready for 4.1. yippie! \o/ Read More

It's been a long time since my last entry here, so I think I'll start by giving an update of my life lately. I've been a bit away from KDE development for too long (but not from the KDE community fortunately). Some of you probably know what it's like: long work weeks that makes the recent EU proposal of a 65 hours work week look as a game (my personal record is around 96 work hours in a week and never below 50 hours), deadlines, more deadlines ... you know how it goes. Read More