KDE Blogs 

As we near the first release ever of KDE-PIM for KDE4, I want to take this opportunity to thank the many folks who helped the kdepim team move to a stable release in a short 6 months. Read More

I took a sneak peek at Kdevelop. I did so before, but after waiting a month or two and reading Andreas' announcement I was curious to see the progress. I've been impressed at how great the definition-use-chain (that David Nolden is working on) is becoming (it seems to know more about my code than I do ;)). Hovering over a variable highlights all occurrences of it, pretty helpful sometimes. It gives you auto-completion, shows all uses of a function and probably does a whole lot more fancy stuff that I haven't discovered yet. [image:3547] Another thing I that is extremely useful is the quick open (file/class/function) dialog which helps jumping around in the code. This is already available in Kdevelop 3 though I never noticed until it was demonstrated to me. Some easy-to-remember key combo like ctrl-alt-m will take you there, just give it a try. The Kate part is very nice, though it's a bit too color full maybe. I've been taught to choose cmake and simply point to the root folder of my project and let Kdevelop do its magic. Adding a build folder will allow compilation too. With the new version it is possible to have more than one project open at the same time. That rocks. There are lots of things that are not done yet. The class view for example opens the declaration instead of definition of a function by default. But I could already use it productively :) I chose the smallest project I could think of - the soc branch containing only Parley and its lib. I decided to be brave and let the entire project be parsed in the background. That option is off by default and already took quite some time on the few files I have, so that might be a wise default. Usually Kdevelop parses files as they are opened and at reasonable speed too and then goes for the includes. Nice! Keep up the good job Kdevelop guys, I'm really happy to see Kdevelop taking shape! Useless proclaimers are fun and useless, so here it goes: Kdevelop is in alpha state, so unless you have strong nerves and a reflex to save every minute, you'll have to step in and get Kdevelop ready (or wait a little longer). Testing the new Kdevelop I finally got around to fix a bug in the Parley summer of code branch. Since I introduced it, I guess it's only fair that I fixed it ;) Read More

As a next step in my SoC project this week I've worked on getting Plasma to run on a maemo based device. Getting KDE compiled for this platform provided some new challenges, mainly caused by the old compiler used by its SDK (gcc 3.4.4), but apart from some compiler issues I didn't have many problems to get it to compile. Overall compiling stuff for maemo seems a lot easier that cross-compiling it for openmoko, as the scratchbox environment maemo uses nicely hides all the complicated cross-compiling issues, so it appears as if you're compiling normally (scratchbox even transparently uses qemu to run any ARM binaries that are build and used in the same build process). Read More

Two micro blogs while I wait for ibuprofen to stop my wisdom tooth from hurting so much... Kubuntu 8.04.1 has been released, featuring a large bunch of updates. I can now edit the planetkde configuration file. If you're too lazy to e-mail clee, feel free to ping me on IRC.

Hi! We, at KOffice, are looking for volunteers to make screenshots for 'visual changelogs' of each release. It's really welcome especially alpha and beta stages. Someone would just interview the devs on time, asking about important features, make the screenshots and publish them. Read More

O woe is me, your poor systray. I work so hard to show you statuses, and even then I get no respect. I make your panel shine with glee, O please say a prayer for me. Read More

Two great pictures brought to you by Wordle in combination with my blog and Planet SUSE. <a href="http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/49581/My_Blog" title="Wordle: My Blog"><img src="http://wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/49581/My_Blog" style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd" ></a> <a href="http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/49578/Planet_SUSE" title="Wordle: Planet SUSE"><img src="http://wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/49578/Planet_SUSE" style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd" ></a> Beautiful. Read More

The World Wide Web Consortium is looking into the feasibility of standardizing desktop widgets. They have done a survey on the widget frameworks available in the market. The frameworks they have surveyed are Konfabulator, Windows Sidebar, Google Desktop Gadgets, Opera Widgets, Mac OSX Dashboard, Web-Runtime by Nokia, and Joost Widgets. Read More

An issue I encountered while running plasma on my Neo1973 is the lack of a right mouse button (the screen can't really distinguish between ends of the stylus/which finger I use). A situation where this lack of an RMB is most clear is when you want to use some functionality that is only available in a context-menu. I've implemented one way this is sometimes handled on other devices: if you hold your 'left' button for more than a certain delay (without moving more than a certain distance), the widget will receive a context menu event instead of the original left mouse button down and up events. I've implemented this by installing an event filter on the application object that intercepts all mouse events and when it detects a left mouse press, this event is saved and not immediately passed to the program. Instead a timer is started. If the left mouse button is released or the mouse is moved far enough before the timer fires, the original event will be send, so the application will just think a normal click or drag happened, however if the timer fires before the button is released or the mouse is moved, both the press and release events will be eaten by the event filter and instead a QContextMenuEvent is sent. Read More

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I'm working on making KDE and plasma behave better on systems that are quite different from 'normal' computers, specificaly small devices. As currently the only physical device I have access to for this project is a Neo1973 Openmoko phone, most of my initial work will be for that device. Read More