KDE Blogs 

Today KPhotoAlbum entered message freeze, and is now ready to be translated. The release will happen Dec 31th 2006. To bring a bit of attention to the great work the translators do, I've started a small prize drawing contest which those who have made a complete translation of KPA participating. The prize is $100. Read More

Since the OpenDocumentFormat (ODF) became a real ISO spec back in May, a lot of things have happened and continue to happen. The industry is really recognizing this open standard and many are already supporting it, where a large section even make ODF mandatory. I expected pick up to be slower, given how Office has such a huge majority of the market. If I look at how slow pick up of Linux on the desktop is (slowly but steady growth over quite some years) its very refreshing to see people recognize ODF as the better format so massively. In the last months I've seen ODF adoption in Malaysia, India, Brazil, the French Parliament [FR|DE], in Finland, The Spanish region of Extremadura, the Belgium Government and soon the Swiss. With some grass roots conversion happening in Holland as well (Dutch)! Read More

To all students of usability, ui design, interaction design or related: Three weeks ago we announced the Season of Usability, a series of sponsored student projects. We want to inform you that the application period ends in one week, on December 15th. So if you are interested to participate, send us your application now - including a short cv/resume and a few paragraphs about your prior experience with regard to usability. Read More

On the #kde IRC channel tonight there was some discussion about how bad english spelling rules were. I found out via google that there is a 'Simplified Spelling Society'. From the site, here is a description of how English spelling was invented: Read More

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