KDE Blogs 

So today I tried to optimize some code using std::string from the Standard Template Library and found something interesting. Let's say you have strings to assign which sometimes get longer and then again shorter. To avoid unnecessary memory allocations you can use std::string::resize(size_t n); so you create the string and then resize it so that it is big enough for the longest string: Read More

One of my pet hates in GUI widgets is the 'spinbox', and I especially dislike the idea of a floating point spinbox. I think for technical reasons I had trouble wrapping the KDE3 floating point spinbox in korundum, and couldn't get particularly worked up about fixing it. But I was a bit depressed to find out that Qt4 has a floating point spinbox widget (although I didn't obstruct its inclusion in Qt4 QtRuby). Read More

I put up some packages of the KDE 4 first tech preview for Edgy. i386 only at the moment but they're sitting in Edgy's NEW queue and will be compiled for everything when they pass through that. They install to /usr/lib/kde4 so it's quite safe to install them alongside your existing KDE 3. I compiled Umbrello and was very happy to see that it compiled and worked without major problems. Thanks to Oliver and Kleag for getting that to happen. Having text under buttons is going to be an interesting challenge for a lot of programmes. Read More

Summarising the comments on the previous blog entry and my own consideration: Top-to-Bottom – Users do not want to think about the proper sequence of options. The layout should therefore support the workflow. Top-to-bottom is mostly perceived to fulfill this requirement. Read More

Despite being very tired from my day job, I managed to get it together enough to put together a kfile-plugin (metadata support) for the XML Paper Specification format. It pulls out whatever data is available (sometimes not much, but thumbnails are reasonably common). It is committed into trunk (in kdegraphics/kfile-plugins/xps) Read More

There was a lawyer and he was just waking up from anesthesia after surgery, and his wife was sitting by his side. His eyes fluttered open and he said, “You're beautiful!

Charles Nutter writes in his blog The two core JRuby developers, myself and Thomas Enebo, will become employees at Sun Microsystems this month. Our charge? You guessed it...we're being hired to work on JRuby full-time. Read More

After being a bit disappointed that Bluez-utils 3.x simply doesn't accept old pin-helpers, like kbluepin from kdebluetooth, i thought about the best solution for this. Of course, we should develop a new pin helper, which can communicate with bluez over dbus.. and with kde4 supporting dbus it will be very easy.. but in the meantime, you can enjoy this patch. It modify the standard pin agent, so that, instead of giving it the pin as argument, you can give it the path of the pin-helper to execute. I'm using it in the new version of the live cd of kmobiletools. Hope you like it!

In KOffice 2.0 (based on Qt4/KDE4) we long ago decided to remove the old text engine and base our new one on scribe which is a part of Qt4. This looks like a simple job; but there are a lot of features an application like KWord needs that are not supplied by Qt. An example of this is numbering paragraphs. That is, Qt supports simple numbered paragraphs, but not nested and certainly not with all the features that the OpenDocument Format specification supplies. Read More

openSUSE 10.2 Alpha 4 has been released and it includes the new Kickoff start menu for KDE: As you can see we changed some things because of the usability tests performed with the prototype: some users didn't find the search functionality, so we made it appear more prominent. Users didn't use the built-in menu help, so we removed it completely. Users didn't discover "Lock Screen" on the main slab so we moved it into the "Leave" tab and decided to put additionally the lock/lockout applet by default into the right panel corner. The "All Applications" browser gained an all-columns back button for easier browsing. Read More