KDE Blogs 

Today I have the pleasure to announce that Marble is the first popular virtual globe that ships and visualizes the Behaim Globe. The Behaim Globe is the oldest surviving terrestrial globe on earth. It was created between 1492 and 1493 - yes at the same time when Christopher Columbus made his first voyage towards the west and "discovered" America. This fact makes the Behaim Globe very special and also subject to scientific research: It documents European cartography during that era and it's probably the only historic globe which completely lacks the American continent. These days the Behaim globe can be visited in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Germany. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) has kindly granted the Marble project permission to release the photo scan material of the Behaim Globe under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license and they have supported us in bringing it for the first time to the users of a widely deployed virtual globe: Marble. Right now our users can immediately download the Behaim Globe from inside Marble by entering File->Download Maps (or download it via our maps download website.). Read More

This week database apps builder Kexi that competes with MS Access and Filemaker has been released with cool new features. Version 2.9.8 finally fixes world's issues with SQL! 22 typical scalar functions now work portably across SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL. No other general purpose software I know does this. Read More

Supplemental to what we reported previously about the work in Randa [1, 2] there was a session on the future of Kontact, KDE’s personal information manager (PIM). Over the years this tool has evolved into a monster making both development as well as usage sometimes tricky. It’s time to cut hydra’s arms. Read More

One of the goals I've had with Konsole was to combine all the configure dialogs: 1) Configure Konsole; 2) Manage Profiles; 3) Edit Profile. Currently, in the branch config_dialog, the Manage Profiles is now combined with the main Configure dialog. The only downside is that the Konsole part can't open the Manage Profiles dialog. If and when the Edit Profile gets combined, I'll have to make sure the parts can open those dialogs. Read More

KSnapshot is getting an overhaul. It's actually a little more complicated than that. I started to work on the KF5 port of KSnapshot (EDIT: no, contrary to what Phoronix claims this port is not my work; I simply wanted to fix anything that needed fixing) sometime in early March this year, before I realised that the codebase, while perfectly in order for being a X11-only screenshot taker for KDE (yes, KSnapshot actually has a complete and fairly decent KF5 port in its frameworks branch on KDE Git), was in need of a major overhaul if we were going to get proper Wayland support in. Read More

[Skip if you're not a git user] You will often want to have more than one build environment in parallel, for example if you want to work on stable and various feature branches. Recommended way so far was to use a git-new-workdir script. This solution saves space (e.g. ~300MiB for a calligra branch instead of ~1200MiB) and time. Read More

I am happy to say that Pre-Alpha edition of ‪Kexi‬ 3.0 runs nicely already after like 3 weeks of porting! Especially its tabular view work out of the box for me after fixing the last compilation error with zero fixes needed in the functionality. Read More

Many pre-university students have participated in Google Code-In (2014) again and for many of them it has been the first opportunity to make contributions to Free Software and Open Source projects. In opposite to Google Summer of Code the GCI program is organized as a worldwide contest where students at the age of 13-17 years take the challenge to complete as many software development tasks from their mentor organizations as possible. These software development tasks are provided by Open Source Projects that are approved as mentor organizations. And at the end of 2014 KDE has participated as a mentor organization for the fifth year. The most recent edition of Google Code-In, GCI 2014 has again been very successful: As Heena Mahour described in her Google Code-in 2014 wrap up with KDE there have been more than 277 tasks created by KDE mentors for the students which covered all aspects of the software development cycle and which ranged from creating source code to documentation, research, quality assurance and user interface tasks. It was amazing to see how the students solved nearly all of them and helped to improve KDE applications significantly. As in previous years the top 24 performers became Grand Prize Winners and won a trip to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California! In the KDE community the Marble Virtual Globe developers are usually actively involved with GSOC and GCI mentorship. Two of our students - Mikhail Ivchenko and Ilya Kowalewski - have made extraordinary contributions to Marble: They had worked very hard and contributed several important features to Marble - see e.g. Mikhail's blog post about the Tour (don't miss to watch the video!) and Ilya's blog about the Measure Tool improvements. And since they also earned most points they became Grand Prize Winners. This year I was the happy one who went to Mountain View as a KDE mentor between June 7-10. And the trip was a great opportunity to learn more about the other mentors and the winning students (they were accompanied by a parent each) and to share more about our Free Software work in the KDE project. The Grand Prize Winner trip was lovingly organized by Stephanie Taylor and other members of the Google Open Source Programs Office: It began with a meet-and-greet event on Sunday evening in San Francisco to get to know everyone. On Monday we visited Googleplex in Mountain View. And on Tuesday we had a fun day in San Francisco where we had the choice to visit the Exploratorium, Alcatraz or went on a Segway tour through San Francisco. Being a science guy I picked the Exploratorium. On Wednesday it was time to say goodbye already after enjoying another round of Googler talks, delicious food and swags at the Google San Francisco Office. The whole experience was just awesome and I'd like to thank Stephanie, Carol, Cat and all the other Googlers for organizing this event and for giving us the opportunity to join it.

In later versions of Plasma 4, the Folder View widget adopted a special appearance when placed in a panel: It would arrange folder contents in a simple list instead of the usual icon grid. Folder View had to be rewritten completely for Plasma 5, and while there were various improvements along the way, the list view mode unfortunately went missing. Until now - on popular request, this feature will make a return soon in Plasma 5.4: Read More

Being accustomed to use of big frameworks like Qt, libraries like Boost, or smaller like OpenSSL it can be astonishing how difficult can be referencing external (but still native) library from C++ code. Read More