KDE Blogs 

A short story about using the right tools: Factory is the development distribution of the openSUSE project, currently at version 10.3 Alpha 2+. The SUSE-powered Dashboard tells you what is compiling - or not. If it's a good day the KDE 4 packages in the openSUSE Build Service can be updated. And finally KIWI allows you to create operating system images, eg. Live-DVDs. Read More

I just added a proposal for an interesting project to KDE's Summer of Code Ideas page. It's about kxml_compiler, a tool to automatically generate C++ code for parsing XML data from XML schemas. There is some existing code, but it only barely works. Improving this code to become useful for a wide range of schemas and applications would be a great project. The proposed XML based KOrganier holiday description format provides a nice benchmark for this. The code is used in KDE, but it's pretty much self-contained, so working on it will mainly require solid C++ knowledge. kxml_compiler is part of the Kode suite. Read More

Andy Koehler has created some nice animated Kickoff buttons in case you don't like the one that your distribution ships. :-) They look best at their native size but can be used with any: when you change the panel size the animation is not resized initially but a "dcop kicker Panel restart" will fix that.

Kubuntu Feisty now has a Beta. We need testers for the Edgy to Feisty update tool, please give it a shot and comment on the bug mentioned. Take a look at the beta release page for what's new. Read More

The geeko is hungry, so for the past few days Coolo and I have been feeding it the carcasses of many of the more serious bugs in KMail. Our focus has been on online IMAP, as that has had the most egregious bugs in our opinion, but we're also after low-hanging fruit anywhere else in KMail. We're basically doing it because We Care A Lot, but we also want some tangible improvements in KDE 3.5 in openSUSE 10.3, besides all the KDE 4 work we're doing at the moment. The fixes are all going into 3.5 branch, of course, and are being ported to the enterprise branch and 3.5.5+, so rest-of-world benefits too. Read More

After the GNOME team made a big splash about their openSUSE involvement some people thought it would be a good idea to found #opensuse-kde to not flood other #opensuse-channels with KDE talk anymore. So join for a more direct way than via the ever existing opensuse-kde mailing list (subscribe) to involve in or stay up-to-date with KDE on openSUSE development. Read More

At last year's Akademy, I had the chance to ask Bill Hoffman, one of the key figures behind CMake, a couple of questions about it. One of them was the availability of the full CMake documentation, which seemed to only in print. It turned out that this is not the case: CMake is well-documented and easy to learn. Read on for more. Read More

Yesterday I blogged there were 4 days left. Today there are 5 days left: Google extended the deadline to March 26th. So you now have the weekend to finish your proposal. But I still would like to see submissions earlier than that. Read More

[image:2731 height=200] I'm trying to create some interest in this curve widget for a wider audience. For almost two years now Krita have had it, though it originates from digiKam where it adjusts colors. I took the original code and pretty much rewrote it to be more generic. And that was a good call, because a year later Bart Coppens used it for something completely different namely the pressure sensitivity of tablets. Read More

As happens the registration for Akademy has been delayed because the one we were looking at didn't work. If you need a visa to enter the UK (UKVisas tells you here) and you are a known KDE dude coming to Akademy then contact me to get your invitation letters sorted.