KDE Blogs 

I feel it is my happy duty to make all of you code less, by mentioning that the SuperTux people created a new release: 0.3.0. (Note that Berlios seems to have some trouble at the moment, so hopefully it'll still be working when you click the links ;)). They apparently changed most of their rendering engine and physics code, and lots of other stuff changed with it. It looks much better than the already incredible 0.1.3 version that I played a lot. Read More

If you're annoyed by the openSUSE 10.2 YaST Control Center not remembering its last size (but starting always too small/with one column) as me, my home project in the openSUSE Build Service has a yast2-control-center package which does.

I've created a (quick'n'dirty) "klik recipe" for mailody 0.3 (using the SUSE 9.3 RPM made by Guru, to ensure maximum portability). Mailody embedded into one single file, mailody.cmg, with 430 kByte size, running on most current Linux systems; you can start the klik-ed mailody even from CD, or run it from a USB stick.... I tested the new bundle on a SUSE-10.0 and on a Debian Sid system, and it works for both. So chances are, that it works also on most other systems out there (Of course, they need the kdelibs and Qt installed)! So if you wanna run a quick'n'clean test of mailody, just visit the klik page for mailody and click on that blue round button with the klik://mailody -link.... Remember, you need the klik client installed to run klik .cmg files. This is a 30 second affair: just run "wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh" and follow instructions. See also the klik User's FAQ for any questions you may have about klik.

Today's my birthday, this makes me happy because I get presents and cards and I get to tick off another successful year on the chart of life. More exciting though was going to Croatia last month. I gave a talk at the fantastically impressive Monteparadiso Hacklab where some borrowed bandwidth and Ubuntu machines give free internet access to the locals of Pula. In the Mediteranian part of Croatia at least life seems to be very relaxed, and most people seem to only work a couple hours a day. I didn't ask much about the Yugoslavian war, but the general attitude seems to be that it's not a major issue, they'll just stay out of the way of people in Serbia until the memory has passed some more. Read More

When Cyrille Berger last wrote a Smudge plugin for Krita, I noted that it was laughably simple. So I started thinking: how much could I strip away from it, so that it would be a nice example of how to write a plugin for Krita 1.6, and still be useful. I ended up with a 'Simple Smudge' tool. It is a simplified version of the one we have in Krita: no extensive tablet support, no configuration widget. But I think it is still cool enough. So how will this be going? I will write it in a couple of parts. In the first installment, I'll just show a raw plugin for a paint operation. Meaning it will show up in Krita as such, but it won't do anything at all. Pretty useful, eh? ;) The next time, I'll explain what to add, in order to get a basic brush tool. Basic meaning it will do exactly the same as the Krita tool, but without the pretty adjustments for tablets. After that, I'll explain how to do the actual smudging. Then, maybe, I'll show how to port this plugin to Krita 2. I hope this structure will keep the portions simple enough, so that it will be somewhat easy to follow and digest, yet still be a bit interesting. Note that this first part will be pretty generic (also talking about the general plugin framework), so it will also be interesting for other plugin types. (In the end I'll probably merge all episodes into a single file for easier reading, so stay tuned for that if you want a single read. Also I'm wondering if I should hide the big part of the tutorial, so that you'll see it after you click on the link, but I'm not sure. I'll put the break tag at the end, but complain if you'd rather see it more in the beginning next time, like at the 'What is a paintop?' part like it auto-inserted.) Read More

probono [image:2591 align="left" hspace=3 vspace=6 border=3 width=150] has added a few cool hacks to the klik server. One is that all package recipes which are auto-created from the Debian repositories and klik's "server side apt" do now display version numbers. So if you browse the klik recipe repository, you'll now see how much net load you'll get in a minute :-) Read More

In KWord1 we had the concept of text-runaround. This is basically the ability of KWord to detect there are other objects on the page and to make sure the text is not printed on top of other content. In KWord 1 we just allowed runaround of square objects. Which is rather simple. I've been postponing to solve the issue in KWord2 for a couple of months now; being able to rotate text and to have circles, or worse, as objects I have to run text around made me wonder how to even start attacking this problem. Read More

as someone who likes to spend his free time on developing in the KOffice project I am very much interessted in open standards. As we all know, KOffice was the first Office-suite that publicly announced support for OpenDocument. So, why not repeat that success-story again with OpenXML? I say it is possible and at following lines I'll show you how easy it is. Read More

Yesterday, I compiled KDE4 and ported the jstream kioslave to it. This means that now you can open email attachements or embedded files in any KDE application without writing a temporary copy. The screenshot below shows konqueror with a treeview of the testdata that comes with Strigi. You can see that the sizes and modification times of the files are displayed properly. Read More

Now that Krita 1.6.1 has been out for a little while, I think it's time to bring the Search for Artwork under the attention of the public again. In order to have some nice content for the Krita website, we are looking for people that can create some nice artwork with Krita. So if you made some nice drawing with Krita, there's always the possibility that it can get featured on the Krita site. Read More