KDE Blogs 

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

The elections that took place in the Netherlands last Tuesday were about more than the government. In the province of Noord-Brabant, there was an additional question. This question was about a unique aspect of the province: the absence of an anthem. The Queen's Commisioner decided this should change. Three songs were proposed, all less than a hundred years old. One of them, from the same composer of the emotional song 'kadeng kadeng', is a disgrace to good taste. The other two are nice to sing along in the pub. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week happens next week and has a plethora of intersting looking IRC sessions on how to develop for Ubuntu. Among talks specific to one of the Ubuntu teams is the Kubuntu talks being done by Brandon, which should be really interesting. Read More

Strigi is moving along at a nice pace. To keep you all posted I'd like to report a bit on what exactly is the progress that has been achieved. Part of it is in SVN and will be in 0.3.10. Part of it has been released in 0.3.9. (0.3.10 is not too far away). Read More

We had an IRC meeting about Portland's DAPI today and while most people seemed to have joined to discuss API related things, it more or less turned into a session to clarify positioning in relation with other projects cleaning up some misconceptions. Read More

Ok, time for another screenshot. It actually shows most of the recent improvements in kwin_composite: [image:2548 size=original] At the bottom-left there's KWrite with the file dialog open. The dialog is transparent because I have MakeTransparentEffect enabled - it makes moved/resized windows transparent and it also makes dialogs transparent (hey, I need to test the stuff somehow). The KWrite main window is de-saturated and has reduced brightness - that's DialogParentEffect and support for saturation/brightness, patches from Rivo Laks. Read More

After a few weeks of hunting for mentors and projects we proudly declare the Season of Usability opened: Season of Usability 2006/2007 - Call for Student Application Season of Usability 2006/2007 is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Freee/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Read More