KDE Blogs 

@ 800x600 rule So far, I'm not sure if we should go for a fixed maximum size or a maximum default size. There is one good reason for a strict maximum size: It better prevents configuration dialogs from being overloaded. "Designing for 800x600" may be understood as "hey, it fits onto the page!". A tricky developer might reduce the height of scalable widgets like the table in the screenshot below, and argue that users can resize the dialog if they want to have a better overview over the element in the table. Read More

Since last monday, the class KFilePlugin has been removed and all the KFilePlugin implementations have to be ported. As an example of how to port a KFilePlugin, I will rewrite KDviPlugin (h, cpp)as a Strigi analyzer. Read More

I started to write down some guidelines for configuration dialogs in KDE4. The major differences to KDE3 are: Do not overload your configuration dialogs! Avoid the usage of tree views in the sidebar of paged dialogs. Set the dialog's maximum size to 800x600 Pixels. Make sure all dialog pages are sized equally, so the dialog does not resize. Provide vertical and horizontal scrollbars on each tab (hide them by default). This allows users who require big font sizes to reach all contents while they can see the tab titles and reach the OK/Cancel buttons. Separate advanced preferences from frequently used ones. Please review the guidelines and give me feedback. I'm basically interested in everything - if you agree on the contents, the format, if there are parts missing, if you need more examples, more concrete guidelines etc. Also, in the lower part of the page, there are some suggestions for new widgets in the standard sections I'd like to see feedback for (font and color requester). You can either use this blog's comment section or write an email to ellen kde org). Read More

Some time I'm thinking about ways to get rid of the many string comparison when playing a SMIL file in KMPlayer. The flow of a movie is mainly written in tags and attribure values. These documents have hardly any textnodes, so tags+attributes are about halve of the content, remaining is then the attribute values. So sharing these strings for tags/attributes would also be a great memory saving, making the DOM grow at 50% speed. Read More

do you still have CMake 2.4.3 installed on your KDE4 development system ? Then it's time to upgrade to CMake 2.4.5 or newer. Because starting Monday in a week, March 19th, at least CMake 2.4.5 or newer will be required for building KDE4. The last required upgrade (which was to 2.4.3) happened on Sept. 12th last year, which is now exactly 6 months ago. Before this we lived with CMake 2.4.1 for 4 1/2 months. I think that's not too bad and CMake 2.4.5 will again last for several months. Read More

This weeks c't magazine furnishes an article on ThreadWeaver programming as part of their long-going series on articles on concurrent programming. An interesting feature of the article is that is describes ThreadWeaver as a component of the upcoming KDE 4 platform. Read More

It's so weird to start writing Yet Another Networking Framework (YANF) for KDE... It's weird not because it's simply YANF. It's weird because this is the fourth networking framework that I will have written for KDE. So, a little history: Read More

The NetworkManager backend for Solid in KDE 4 is ready to announce. Since writing the frontend in September I hadn't gotten round to making it useful, but after a lot of encouragement from ervin I picked up my tools again. Read More

You may have heard that KFilePlugin will be replaced in KDE4. In KDE4, we will use analyzers to get text and metadata out of files. Since last monday, you can start porting you analyzers and now I have written a tutorial on how to actually go about this. The tutorial uses BMP as a simple example and it should be pretty simple to port the existing KFilePlugin implementations. Read More

I added three projects related to KDEPrint in the page of ideas for Google SoC 2007: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_UI_redesign http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_CUPS_.3E_1.2 http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_Qt-4.3.2FKDE-4 I hope we have an even better summer this year!