KDE Blogs 

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

For KOffice2 we had a huge todo list. Where various core technologies are in need of basically a rewrite. For KWord the most interresting one is the text-engine. The old one had serious problems and using Qt4 would allow me to write a better one in not too much time. The progress on the new text engine is proceeding nicely, with just some advanced features missing like variables and inline images. The text engine will now support styles much better then the previous one did; with character styles being available as the biggest change. Read More

Novell Open Audio has a new half an hour episode about the openSUSE 10.2 release featuring openSUSE evangelist Martin Lasarsch (and also a new mention of the missed KDE episode).

This evening I've created a new klik recipe, for Opera 9.1. It makes the klik client fetch from Opera's download site their current weekly snapshot of the upcoming 9.1 release and transform it into a typical "1 application == 1 file == 1 click to download+run" klik bundle. Read More