KDE Blogs 

No, the Portland Print Dialog isn't about design by committee. It's about letting the platform provide the print dialog (as opposed to the toolkit). If you run a GNOME desktop that will probably mean a Gtk Print dialog. If you run a KDE desktop that will probably a dialog based on KDEPrint. Incidentally, there already is a Portland file dialog, and no it isn't designed by committee either (give it a try!). Read More

Since I've already written a very long on-topic entry today, I feel I can get away with an utterly off-topic personal entry, and a shameless plug. After years of translating fiction from English to German, writing articles and being a romance magazine editor, my wife managed to sell a couple of short stories to an American e-book publisher, and they were released on Monday. They've indicated that they'll be wanting to publish more of her stuff. I'm insanely proud of her and happy to see her succeed at what she loves doing. It's cool that she chose my last name (with an added "s", since the Americans always append that anyhow) as a pen name, after refusing it when we got married. ;) Check out her website for details. Gotta love a woman who writes smut for a living and codes her own CSS. :)

As some of you know: When I implemented text-shadow for KHTML back in 2004, I added the ability to draw multiple shadows, because it was just a minor addition in my implementation, but one that meant we followed the entire spec. unlike Safari. Read More

My new HP Pavilion desktop system "jiffy" arrived yesterday (exactly as FedEx promised). Fedora Core 4 Linux installed painlessly without even 1 hiccup last night. Today I am putting the finishing touches on the system: installing extra RPMs; configure printing and scanning; etc. Read More

For the past few months (or should I say years) I'm trying to get rid of this feeling that I'm born in the wrong era or maybe aeon and in the current society I'm more than worthless ... it's hard and since this morning I'm asking myself why bother trying to improve myself and feel better if nobody care about me anyway (ok it's not quite true it seems there is at least one living being that care about me ... only because I feed him and clean his litter box ... so basicly he's doing like everybody else he uses me ...) and something that really piss me off is some people take me for granted for their development projects even when I'm not sure about the viability of it ... this is really helping me to feel better about myself Read More

With commit 546830, KDE says good-bye to one of its longest friends: DCOP. The technology has served us well for 6 years, to the point that has become one of our most proeminent features. Many KDE applications are given an edge over their competitors by supporting advanced functionality through DCOP: you can tell a Konqueror page to evaluate a JavaScript code snippet (think document.write...), tell a Kate window to raise itself, Kontact to check email or Kopete to send an automated message, etc. Read More

I eagerly await the delivery of my new baby... err... my new desktop system (the system is a "he" and we've already named him jiffy). According to the FedEx tracker, jiffy will be delivered tomorrow. I'm having the heebee-jeebies waiting to do KDE-development again. Sure the computer is good for email and web surfing and keeping your checkbook, but the real fun is using the computer for software development. I'm sure we all agree with that. Read More

As announced I summarised the results of our Accessibility meets Usability weekend in a (long but interesting) report available on OpenUsability (PDF). We did usability tests with several KDE features for partially sighted people and the Gnopernicus screen reader for Gnome. The goal of the usability tests was not to achieve statistical data, but to gain an understanding of the needs of the represented user types. Read More

After a long time I have updated my Distributor KDE Patches Collection during the last days. It now contains the latest release or release candidate tweaks and fixes of the most actively patching distributions like SUSE Linux, Kubuntu, Mandriva and ArkLinux. It should be of interest for maintainers of applications in KDE modules, packagers and users which are curious how much distributions patch the KDE releases. Read More

Short reading hint: this week's issue of Distrowatch Weekly features an interview with Andreas Jaeger, the project manager of SUSE Linux about the 10.1 release process and more.