KDE Blogs 

Like many I came home from aKademy with a little flu thingy and I fell asleep the moment I got home last sunday night. I slept a lot this week trying to get rid of this bug but also just because I really was low on sleep anyway so I had to replenish :) So next to sleeping and talking on IRC (hi Kat!) I didn't do a whole lot this week. Nobody again say you don't need a holiday if you don't have a steady dayjob! Read More

So I was finally forced to switch to KDE4 (again, but this time for real, apparently ;) ) to start porting my Krita 1.6 stuff to Krita 2. Meaning I now have some new and not completely unrelated things to talk about. Read More

My last last blog entry about Marble covered how Marble is meant to be a generic geographical map widget. It shows the earth as a sphere but doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration (NO OpenGL). So although it might look similar to professional applications like Google Earth or Nasa World Wind it's rather meant to be a small light weight multi purpose widget for KDE. Still Marble comes already with basic Google Earth KML file support and therefore Rainer Endres sat down and did some script magic to convert the data on KDE WorldWide to KML file format.To improve the very basic placemark rendering I added some code to make sure that the labels don't cover each other. So here's the North American KDE Community in all its beauty (Say "hi" to Aaron, Jason, Chani, Annma, Jeff and all the others): Of course the algorithm in place can't compete with more sophisticated automatic label placement methods (like Simulated Annealing), but judging from the result it's a good start - especially given that it's not optimized yet at all. If you want to try it yourself these are the steps that lead to instant success: Make sure you've got SVN and at least Qt 4.1 installed svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/marble cd marble ./buildqmake qmake (make sure that the parameter refers to Qt4's qmake - on Kubuntu you have to type in buildqmake qmake-qt4 "). make Now download Rainer's fresh KDE Community KML file and save it in the "marble" directory that you have just created. As a last step execute: bin/marble ./kde-devel-locations.kml and Marble is ready to roll ... Have a look at the fine work of my coworker Slartibartfast and see the Trolls while you're near. And as you're there already don't forget to register for the 10-Years-KDE anniversary party: You might win a Qtopia Greenphone if you do so ;-) . Last but not least I'd like to thank Joseph Wenninger who did an initial port of Marble to cmake right after I had commited Marble to SVN.

I want to run a survey about Gwenview. I have been googling for some web based surveys for a while, but it would be even better if I could get some real experiences. Read More

We did not advertize it a lot yet, but as a few people already know, kde will have a generic board application :) We did a 0.9 alpha release a few days ago, immediately after moving to kde svn, but development is going on. The features in the release include a very generic board game support (at the moment only C++, but lua variants will be supported very soon, games implemented are chess and a few variants, connect four, reversi and chain reaction. Shogi is coming :)), an animation engine that supports contemporary animations, eye candies, etc, a lua-scripted theme loader that can load SVG, PNG, TTF chess fonts, and create images on the fly, and a move list widget that allows for comfortable pgn editing. Support for playing/observing/examinating chess (and chess variants) games on FICS is almost complete, support for chess engines is at a good stage of development (but it is not very usable, yet). Since the release i've been implementing a generic option framework (with lua bindings), to allow themes, variants, etc to get an integer options from the user (through a spinbox), or a bool (through a check box), as well as a color, font, url, etc. On the other side Paolo (zhw on IRC) has almost finished the port to kdelibs (we were using Qt4 only, but kdelibs really rocks and we will no longer support the qt-only version), and is rolling out a very generic XML settings class set, that will be much more powerful than the alreay available QSettings or KConfig. Ah, as you can see in the second screenshot, i could not resist to use KHTMLPart to implement an alternative move list widget, with less eye candies, but more in the chessbase style and that i also hope will make easy printing games (babaschess has two alternative move list widgets too, so i guess that keeping the choice should be ok in kboard too :)). I think that the option and settings frameworks are pretty good pieces of code that may also be reused in other projects, but we'll have a better idea after using them in kboard for some time. On the down side, we still haven't decided how the user interface will be, we do not really feel comfortable with QDockWidgets, (for instance, the console when detached will always want to stay on top), so we are planning to give a look at the IDEAL mode, but if some GUI guru can suggest us better ideas any help will be welcome :) You will find more screenshot on http://kboard.sourceforge.net (ah, the website is another thing that desperately needs to be improved). [image:2421 size=preview] [image:2422 size=preview] [image:2423 size=preview]

KDE is going to celebrate it's 10th anniversary. We'll have a birthday party on Friday, October 13th, 2006 in the Technische Akademie Esslingen in Ostfildern (near Stuttgart). More information is available at: http://events.kde.org/10years If you register by Oct.11, 9:00 UT you'll be entered in the 10-Years-KDE raffle where you could win a brand new Qtopia Greenphone offered by Trolltech! So, hurry up and let us know whether you'll attend! Participation will be possible for everybody who registers in time and we are happy to welcome the winner in our large community of KDE and Qt developers. Of course you also need to attend the event and be present at the raffle ceremony at 16:00 CET in order to qualify for participation. Excluded from the raffle are the members of the party organisation team, the speakers of the event as well as Trolltech's employees.

There's a long thread currently going on on core-devel about scripting within KDE. Here's the executive summary: Having a "blessed" KDE scripting language for writing complete KDE applications is a good thing and allowing applications written in that language in the main modules would be a step in the right direction A tangent to the main thread is adding scriptability to KDE applications For the first sort of scripting, there's something of a concensus that Python or Ruby are the primary candidate languages There hasn't been much language flaming between Ruby and Python; it seems most folks agree that they're both acceptable OO scripting languages, though there have been plugs a bit for one language or the other There's some debate over what appropriate languages are for the latter; KJS (JavaScript) is currently advocated, but there's some debate over the merits of JavaScript To qualify the first comment, even if your language of choice isn't the one taken, there's nothing lost. Currently all scripting languages are second class citizens in the KDE world. Promoting one to first-class status doesn't demote the others significantly. An "everybody wins, use what you want" solution really is just a way of rephrasing the current situation. Read More

So I am back from aKademy in Dublin, and at first I want to say: I'm feeling very honored that I received one of the three aKademy awards: Best non-application contribution: CMake for KDE4. Read More

Someone on the dot asked about Marcus Furlong -- "I didn't know him, where're his code contributions?". Well. Sometimes I think writing code is so much "safer" activity: you can delay your release, you can keep stuff uncommited or not working, and find at least dozens reasons to justify that. Try to do the same with recent Marcus' task! No way. You need to work in real time. People will not wait. Read More

You, the reader of this blog being an internet user: I have a question for you. Have you ever heard about the topic of "Net Neutrality"? If not, you may want to google for it... Read More