KDE Blogs 

It's a really boring time.. too hot, too much things to study at university.. and very few free time. So i had to stop working at kmobiletools (hope i'll work again on it soon.. maybe at the end of july), since it's too complex to develop now.. instead i'm working on some patches here and there on kde (i'll publish them soon, in another post), and to very smalls applications. First i've done CheckCalls, a little daemon based on some kmobiletools code, that checks incoming calls, and do some actions depending on the number. I'm using it on my little home server, to make it turn on the desktop PC while i'm not at home, by wake on lan. Then i also made a replacement for video preview, MPlayerThumbs It's based on mplayer only, instead of the default one that's based on xine and arts. So on x86-64 systems it can use the 32bit version of mplayer, which can load win32codecs. On the university side, i'm trying to finally pass math, so it seems i'll be still very, very busy for a long time :P

The Ubuntu Developers Summit is now happening by Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris. We have a bunch of KDE developers here to help with the specs for Kubuntu Edgy in four months time. We've made our own Kubuntu schedule because the automatic BoFicator didn't schedule anything for us. If you're near Paris do drop in and say hi. The sessions are supposed to be broadcast on teamspeak so anyone can join in but in practice this doesn't seem to be working too well. Read More

This morning, I went to Tegel Airport by bus. On one hand, this is becoming a routine fast. On the other, it is always enjoyable, because I love the city in the early morning light. The bus (TXL) goes past the Reichstag building and the brand-new Hauptbahnhof (central station). What struck me is the new, open culture when it comes to integrating the government buildings into the city never, a fact that never appeared to me earlier. When I first came to Washington DC, I was amazed at how the Washingtonians played baseball and flew kites right in front of the capitol. I admired the Americans for their openess. Today, there are bars and restaurants at the river Spree located right within sight of the big wigs. How is this for a change in political culture? And yes, you can have a beer outside in the sun and enjoy the view (this is Germany, remember, no brown bags required). Read More

In recent months I wrote various blog entries (no, they were rather "rants", and even tagged as such; [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]) dealing with Ubuntu's crippled CUPS 1.2 configuration. (I'm not complaining about the feedback -- but I was rather surprised how many emails on that topic I received; also how high a number of abusing messages by anonymous writers sought to annoy me. Seems (K)Ubuntu followers have a higher ratio of "fanboy" type users than most other distros... :-) ). Read More

Recently, I remembered this button: [image:2103 width=200 class=showonplanet align=center] Peter from the KOffice team seems to know what it is about. When he started to rewrite Kivio, the KDE flowcharting application, he immediately informed the usability group and asked for input regarding the user interface. Even before the first line of code was written - and ergo nothing could be tested. This was a good decision out of two reasons: Read More

Boy, did I nearly miss the news! Was it because of the soccer world championship? Anyway, the news rocks. I wonder why it was not picked up by any of the major news sites. (Heh... I'm sure they will now.) Read More

Michael Larouche writes about the new KDialog api, and how it is simpler to understand than the old KDE3 one. It reminded me of one of my favourite talks at the 2004 Ludwigsberg aKademy, when Mathias Ettrich discussed similar usability improvements in Qt4. I'd like to describe a couple of features in QtRuby and Korundum that make such constructor code clearer still. Read More

I recently saw a good saying; if I have 4 hours to chop down a tree, I'll spent the first 3 sharpening my ax. All KDE hackers I know are pretty bright and the above will sound true to them; having well working tools gets you better results, faster. Read More

For most people the KDE Four Multimedia Meeting (K4M) was concluded on Sunday, May 28th, almost two weeks ago. Sebastian put up his picture gallery during the event, Claire has put up her pictures as well. Read More

We knew that some big companies like Adobe or Google developed some of their applications for MS Windows with the Qt toolkit. But they didn't take full advantage of Qt's cross-platform sweetness. Until now. Google released yesterday Google Earth Beta 4 and if you look closely at their download page there is a Linux version available. This is not using some Wine wrapper as Picasa before but is a native Qt 3 application. Time for other companies to wake it? Hello Adobe! Read More