KDE Blogs 

Before everyone starts to spread his opinion about KDE 4.0 let me spread some reminders: KDE 4.0 is not KDE4 but only the first (4.0.0 even non-bugfix) release in a years-long KDE4 series to come. KDE 4.0 is known to have missing parts or temporary implementations (eg printing, PIM, Plasma). Most changes happened under the surface and cannot be discovered in a "30 minutes usage"-review anyway. User interfaces being unchanged in 4.0 compared to 3.5 may be still changed/improved during KDE4 life time. KDE 4.0 will not be the fastest KDE4 release, like for KDE2 most speed optimizations will happen later during KDE4. Most applications (many are not even fully ported yet) will take advantage of new features which the new Qt/KDE libraries offer only later. Don't measure portability success (eg MS Windows) by current availability of application releases, they will come. KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt [btw said to have only 6 months support for its packages]). KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big technology jump 4.0, expect 4.1 later this year. Last, again: KDE 4.0 is not KDE4. :-)

This xmas I was given a watch. It's pretty geeky one LCD Lexon E8, but for me still easier to accept than real binary counters. If we're at watches, Adam Pigg apparently got something like this hardcore LED BCD watch. In terms of usability I prefer Lexon's LCD to (otherwise cool) LED display, because in the latter case you need to use your second hand to press a button to turn the power-hungry diodes on for a few seconds to read the time. Read More

Okay so I can say 2007 sucked the big one, but 2008 is looking good so far. 2006-2007 had been a pretty rough time for me. In 2006 I set aside my consulting company and my wife left me. It was a little too much drama and change for me. 2007 was pretty much set dealing with the crap that followed all the changes of 2006. I would like to apologize to everyone for letting KDE Developers fall by the wayside at that time. Special thanks for jriddell and beineri for picking up the slack there. Read More

Thanks to Marc Mutz's idea, one can now set their application debug area by telling the C++ compiler about it and then never having to remember that debug area again. "Set it and forget it" Read More

From KDE4-enterprise-functionality dept.: As already noted in the Commit Digest, another database driver (i.e. data provider) has been built on top of Kexi's database abstraction layer (KexiDB 2, codenamed Predicate). It is Sybase driver, also aimed at handling MS SQL Server connections. Read More

The week saw this Kubuntu announcement being posted which mixes two news, reasons the one with the other and left some users imo rather confused as shown by this user comment: "IMHO this is a nice present by the Kubuntu Community and Canonical to the KDE Community". So what was announced? Read More

Now that OpenOffice.org does make some splashes in the IT press for the sole achievement of having created a "portable" version that can run from an USB stick (on Windows only, that is) -- isn't it time for klik to get ready for gaining its own share of public fame sometime soon? That's because klik does not only turn OpenOffice.org, but many thousand Linux applications into "PortableApps". And does not need painstakingly recompiling portable binaries from modified source code, one by one. But will re-utilize the marvellous work and special knowledge of all the dedicated Debian, RPM and Slackware packaging heroes out there and repackage 95% of its supported klik bundles fully automatically, including dependency resolution... Read More

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