KDE Blogs 

In KOffice the flake library for shapes is taking a much clearer form now KWord is actually really using them. Details like shape-configuration widgets have been flashed out. A tricky think considering its plugins based. In the last weeks I've also been working on getting a text-shape operable. Its pretty cool to have a couple of text-frames as you know them from KWord, but you can edit the text even while its rotated or skewed. Much more work has to be done to enable real DTP like features, though. Read More

Open document format is that new fileformat for Office suites, ISO certified and genuinely an open standard. Its been busy in ODF land, since early may the ISO certification came through we have seen the market accept this standard in an amazing speed. Governments are not well known for moving fast, and yet we have this long list of successes. Read More

With Qt-4.2, we finally get back the flexbility of adding arbitrary widgets to action containers like toolbars and menus, via the new QWidgetAction class. For QToolbar, there was already a workaround for this in the addWidget() function, but there was no way to add a widget to a menu. Read More

So, for me the KDE four core meeting in Trysil has finished today. It was an amazing experience, meeting people for the first time and seeing what we could do when we concentrated (most) all of our efforts on improving KDE4. Read More

I get so seldom to blog about such an important topic as Accessibility, but I think this is worth noting: Gunnar's IRC client is reading incoming messages alound using kttsd and it's puzzling the first time you hear it, but after some time you notice how much fun is related to it. Just see here (slightly edited) Read More

In the last post I blogged about database table schema (design) altering features of the forthcoming Kexi 1.1 (to be released soon in alpha version). I promised to extend that story by presenting how all of this plays with GUI. In the meantime I've decided to take a break from this laborious task and finish the long standing TODO: implement the Object data type allowing to deal with binary data and force the Image Box widget to accept such sort of data. Read More

I'm in Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) this week for work. I'd hoped to catch up with Hamish Rodda, but he's in Norway. Sounds like the flights (36 hours?) might have been a bit harsh, but there is certainly a lot of interesting stuff coming out of Trysil. Read More

Last week I went to UK Unix Users Group's Linux 2006 conference to talk about KDE and Kubuntu and watch a bunch of other talks. First talk was from Tethys who tried to convince us that sed was good for more than s/foo/bar, seems not worth the hassle to me. Torsten Spindler showed off his video masking privacy feature which detects when someone has walked into a CCTV shot and pixilates that are so you can't see who it is. A loud person from Novell talked about their desktop work by starting his talk saying he didn't mind what desktop people used and then went on to talk about Gnome, he didn't even have KDE highlighted in the list of projects Novell hires key people in, the other Novell attendee didn't pretend and just said that they had picked Gnome as their desktop to promote. That there are people in Novell who deliberately ignore the excellent work their company puts into KDE (like sponsoring KDE Four Core) is a shame and they'll loose out because of it. Read More

This evening in Trysil we had a long meeting to discuss goals for KDE 4.0, both generally and specifically. Topics covered did not contain many surprises, most issues were already covered in the planning documents already existing in the wiki and svn. Prioritising our time is of course important, and in rough descending order they were thought to be: Read More

Got into Trysil, Norway for KDE Four Core at 10pm and it was still sunny. Now (00:17) it's still quite light outside which is playing silly beggars with my head, I've lost the ability to speak German. Anyway, I'm here to work on Akonadi, Solid's networking support and any other jobs that come up. The team that the Technical Working Group have assembled here are a highly motivated group and we're going to work our socks off for eight days to get kdelibs to a position where the rest of the KDE community can pick it up and start to write KDE 4 apps without the rules changing every week. Read More