KDE Blogs 

I decided a couple of weeks ago to sort System Settings out and here is the first result: I reworked the views using Qt4's InterView framework, reusing the KCategorizedView from Dolphin. This gives us a better quality view than the hard coded view used until now - item layout should work at large font sizes or high res displays. It will also make it much easier to improve the UI with custom delegates and category drawers in future - just by reusing code. I was able to chuck out a couple of classes entirely which will make System Settings easier to maintain. Read More

Many a year ago I decided it was worth sacrifising something in the name of freedom and switched from the frustratingly not quite free Pine e-mail app to Mutt. Mutt is free but has the most insane keybindings and is generally not as slick a user interface as Pine. Plus it doesn't have the nice feature of keeping your main inbox open while you look at other e-mail boxes, and if your inbox is as large as mine that means a bunch of time lost just for reading a mailing list. So it was a lovely surprise to see Alpine, a free Pine from the original authors at Washington University. So back to integrated editor, sensible keybindings and being able to read mailing lists without spending 10 minutes opening my inbox again. Yay freedom. Read More

I was reading a blog post on beautiful code about different styles of programming earlier this week. The author was comparing the 'ruby style' of direct access to member variables with the getter/setter pattern common in Java code. His basic question was is this simply a matter of your programming background? Read More

Too many KDE folks refuse to use http://techbase.kde.org/ because it breaks blocks of code. You can however make it usable. A hint just for you: [jstaniek] btw, I've improved http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM a bit, and have 'windows port' column [jstaniek] does not use oxygen wiki style which actually causes usability problems with blocks [marc_kdab] oh, you can switch the style? [marc_kdab] how? [marc_kdab] that could actually make the wiki readable :) [marc_kdab] hates fixed-width formats in websites [jstaniek] marc_kdab: ah, so I should blog about this; too many folks complain... and I talked to danimo @ akademy but... well... [jstaniek] (same for websvn, btw) [marc_kdab] yes, and the apidox [jstaniek] marc_kdab: login -> my preferences (on the topbar) -> skin tab -> monobook [marc_kdab] oh, sigh, login... [jstaniek] marc_kdab: y, you can set permanent login [jstaniek] hacked his wiki page with readable breadcrumbs, eg. "News->Kexi Releases-> Kexi 2007.1" and forced reasonable width (http://kexi.pl/en/News/Kexi_Releases/Kexi_2007.1) [marc_kdab] ahhh :) [marc_kdab] mediawiki look [marc_kdab] files a request for mediawiki to remove styling :) [jstaniek] the oxygen style is great but also breaks mediawiki skin rules a bit - e.g. we have even no kde logo defined for the web site... :)

As one of my colleagues notes, this statement holds true on its own. However, for those like me too blind to see some things, there are two things about Flash you should know: Read More

I've spent some time recently trying to get Konqueror's JavaScript debugger in a shippable form for 4.0. The debugger was changed heavily from the 3.x version in a SoC project, making ground for much nicer UI. Unfortunately, it also barely worked. Read More

I've just checked in the start of a new class - KCabinet. Its in playground/libs/kcabinet for the morbidly curious. I'm not sure if it is really going to be right for kdelibs - need to get it a bit more mature before needing to make that decision. Read More

The Bazaar team released version 1.0 of the world's finest revision control system. Congratulations to them all. I think the best explanation of the power of Bazaar is the workflows page, you can use it in the old central repository mode if you wish but there's a number of others ways of doing revision control and bzr's strength is that it works well with all of them. Read More

Two weeks ago I moved again and it took until yesterday that I got internet access again, now using cable. This actually rocks, it is really fast, 6 Mbit/s. I still can remember, I think it was in 2001 I still had an analog modem with 100something kbit/s. That's really an incredible increase in speed in just 6 years ! Read More

After my previous blog about openSUSE News numbers I became curious and installed StatPress. Of course the site is mostly visited by SUSE Linux users (~53%), followed by just under 30% MS Windows users (XP outnumbers Vista by factor 7). But the positive surprise is that 40.4% use Konqueror to visit the site beating all Firefox versions by 0.3% (Internet Explorer 6+7 sum up to 12%). An outstanding number: 96% of the visitors use Google as their search engine. Among the most popular search terms are "opensuse 11[.0]" and "kde 4". :-)