KDE Blogs 

Shortly after the Marble OpenStreetMap integration I'm happy to report that Simon Schmeisser has managed to integrate Marble as a Flake Shape into KPresenter. As a flake shape you can change the map according to your liking even after it has been embedded into the KOffice application. So it's not just a simple image but rather a component that allows the user to adjust the content: Which other Free Software office application has a virtual globe that it can embedd into the documents across plattforms? So that adds another successful application of KDE technology to Marble's capabilities: It's only a few weeks ago that our weather man Henry de Valence has started to work on a Marble WorldClock plasmoid: Of course apart from a Marble Qt Designer Plugin and the Marble KPart (which gets used by the Marble Desktop application itself) you can use the MarbleWidget in your very own application -- like Gilles Caullier has done for Digikam: The Marble Widget has no KDE ties, so even if your application uses only Qt you can still take advantage of Marble. So what's the next showcase that people will come up with? A Marble Netscape Plugin? I'm curious. In other news Shashank Singh has just joined us for GSoC 2008 and will provide Panoramio support for Marble. Welcome Shashank! Right now the Marble Team is heavily working towards KDE 4.1 Beta2: Jens-Michael is working on further improving Marble OpenStreetMap support, Inge is working on the Mercator Projection, Patrick is working on further improving KML for his GSoC 2008 project (which actually deals with vector rendering in Marble), Claudiu is working on his Satellite Plugin and Henry is working on texture colorization and Temperature / Precipitation maps. I'll continue to work on GeoPainter and Marble's new plugin architecture which will enable other developers to write Qt-Plugins for Marble to render their own layers and their own data. These are exciting times for Marble. Can you feel the Earth spinning?

Ubuntu Developer Summit is winding down here in the tallest building in Prague. You can preview the Kubuntu specs and I'll write more about them when I get back. Now we're off to dance at an Ubuntu music jam. Read More

Since some years I have the pleasure to maintain KArm, the friendly KDE timetracker. KArm allows users to find out how much time they spend on which task since longer than 10 years. For KDE 4, it was time for a big renovation. Read More

A bunch of exciting things have happened to Konqueror in preparation for 4.1 Beta 1 this weekend. First of all, KHTML guru Germain Garand has committed the bulk of the designMode/contentEditable editing code. It's not 100% done yet, but it's a monumental amount of work, and it should enable the various rich-text editor apps to work in KHTML. Read More

I would post a screenshot of what this is going to be about, but the screenshot would look remarkably similar to other KDE3 screenshots I could post. Unless I switched the decoration to Oxygen/Ozone, but then yours truly is still quite happy with the KDE2 decoration (and then, also not quite happy with all those people who think that anything that's older than a year, especially if it's not shiny, must be oh-so-bad), so let's just skip that. You can try yourself after all. Read More

The hero of the current Marble KDE 4.1 Beta1 release is Jens-Michael Hoffmann: He has successfully worked on getting OpenStreetMap integrated into Marble and KDE 4.1! This means that once you start our free software virtual globe and select "OpenStreetMap" as a theme then Marble will directly start to download OpenStreetMap tiles from the OpenStreetMap server: If you want to try it you can either wait for KDE 4.1 Beta1 packages to appear on the KDE Website next week. Or you start to compile current Marble SVN yourself. It's pretty easy: You only need just Qt 4.3 (or 4.4), or alternatively KDE >= 4.0 and Qt >= 4.3 including headers. Then you can start to build Marble according to our HOWTO. Once you have compiled Marble from current SVN you can start it either from the menu or from the commandline. You'll be greeted by our globe. If everything went well, you'll see that Marble now features a starry sky plugin (notice the constellation "Orion" right next to the earth in the following screenshot): If you have compiled the KDE version then you can adjust the quality settings for "Still image" and "During animations". We'd suggest that you use "High" for "Still image" and "Low" for "During animations" however you can adjust the values according to the performance of your hardware. Read More

There are a few scattered updates in the world-o-wheels of late. The biggest of which, as a number KDE folks are already aware is that I'll be leaving Native Instruments, where I've been for the last couple of years and starting my own company with a friend or two rather soon. I'll post a link once we're to the point of launching a public beta. It's not desktop software, and it's not a consulting service, but this will mean that my primary (professional) development platform will be Linux once again. Read More

Well, a few days ago, I attended the release party for Fedora 9. There was a lot of people who showed up a few Red Hat folks who work on Fedora and packages. There were also a few users who showed up to try Fedora out for the first time. It was a big success! Thanks to all who came out Read More

[image:3467 align=left hspace=16 vspace=5 size="original"] Akonadi is hot. I completely realized that when I saw the fantastic submission by Nuno and Thomas for the Akonadi logo contest. This logo captures the essence of the Akonadi architecture in a very beautiful way. I remember well when I drew the first version of the Akonadi architecture on the whiteboard at the Osnabrück 4 meeting more than two years ago. The round shapes made it hard to put it in digital form, though. So after taking a tour through the drawing applications of the free software world without lasting success, I decided to write a program to create the diagram. When I saw the Akonadi logo contest and some of the submissions there, I thought it would be great to have a three dimensional version of the architecture diagram, and now Nuno and Thomas just did that. Wonderful! Read More

I took the train to Prague, much more relaxed and environmentally friendly than flying. Went through Berlin where I found a curious memorial to the Glorious Soviet Union and stopped off for an executive power breakfast at Trolltech's new office, which seems to still be in the process of being built around them. Read More