KDE Blogs 

Photo applications such as KPhotoAlbum have shown that navigation by histograms can be very convenient. Prerequisite of such navigation is that you have fast access to numerical properties of the items you want to navigate. In Strigi, many numerical properties such as modification time, size, embedding depth, width or height are indexed. This enables Strigi to quickly make histograms of these properties. By clicking on a bar in the histogram, the user can quickly and intuitively focus on a subset the items that are shown. Read More

I'm sure every reader of this blog has at least once encountered the myth that Linux users, or more generally users of free software platforms, would not consider spending money on software. Read More

In the CLucene backend of Strigi, I was being conservative about allowing concurrent reads and writes to the index, hence making indexing slower if you were looking at the status. So if you were monitoring the indexing speed, it would be slower. Read More

Flavio Castelli added a nice feature to Strigi: the ability to include or exclude files from the index based on their file name. This feature has been in Strigi since the last two releases. And while Flavio has been busy writing a report about it, I have smoothed out the feature a bit and made it more universal so that it now also works on names of files that are embedded in other files. Here is a screenshot that shows the dialog for configuring these filters. (input from the usability teams is welcome ;-) Read More

Last sunday I released version 1.4.1 of Gwenview. This version contains quite a few bug fixes. Most important for me is that the rotating bug is now fixed. This one has been bothering me for a while. Read More

At aKademy, David Faure presented a script for calling make from emacs when you write code in a different directory from the one you build in. Since I use vim and bash, I had to adapt it to work for me. One important aspect for vim users is that if you call ':make' from vim, it calls the first 'make' it finds in the path. This call is associated with niceness like jumping to the right error lines after calling ':make'. The script I paste here should occur in your path before the real make (usually /usr/bin/make) and it should be called 'make'. When called, it will move up in the directory hierarchy until it finds a directory called 'build'. It enters there and calls the real 'make' with the arguments you passed. Read More

For the next generation of KDE's file manager, we want a better handling of removable drives such as USB sticks, USB and firewire drives, CDs and DVDs, ZIP (does anybody still use this??) and flash memory. We set up a short survey to answer the questions that bother us most: How many removable drives are usually connected to a computer and what are they used for? Read More

An interesting read: Joel Spolsky argues that too many choices lead to user unhappiness and looks at the Windows Vista "OFF" feature as an example. In a response on his own blog, former Microsoft programmer (now Google employee) Moishe Lettvin who worked on exactly that part of Vista for a year describes how the development process inside Microsoft worked for his group. Read More

I was feeling a bit poorly today so I decided to spend the day doing something fairly easy but productive and beneficial for openSUSE: re-familiarising myself with the Build Service by packaging some software. Read More

In less than two weeks openSUSE 10.2 will be released with really edgy components. And you can download and try its release candidate today and help to find the last bugs! You will experience a complete system management suite and the best-engineered and most improved KDE and Gnome desktops available - with desktop search, 3D effects and interface usability improvements in both desktops. Read More