KDE Blogs 

D3tails... See 4lso: P0w3r C0mb1n3d ;)

Reading the GNOME 2.14 feature guide you are told that "several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster" - which is nice. As example the GNOME Terminal is mentioned which a graph says is three times faster than the previous version and now being four times faster than xterm. If I remember an early draft of this document correctly it was measured with "time cat /usr/share/dict/words" so what do you think was measured? How long it took to print all the characters in that file? Likely by no means. Read More

Once upon a time there were some dwarfs who wandered around the earth and told everyone who liked to hear that they would produce a desktop including the distribution of their handcraft every sixth months. And some people believed them and the dwarfs' business grew a bit. But the dwarfs wanted to grow further and so they continued to praise themselves as the high lords of fixed release schedules - and it worked some times somehow. People who had an own project or business to place on the desktop started to trust the dwarfs' telling. The dwarfs were happy and built bigger and bigger furniture... Read More

Last week was the Kubuntu and Ubuntu UI sprint in London where kwwii got strict instructions to turn up the bling on Kubuntu's artwork. The Gnome Clearlooks developers were also there to turn Ubuntu orange. Read More

This is a hilariously good movie -- apparently from inside Microsoft. It outlines how MS would have marketed the iPod "the MS way". It is meant to be self-joking about the company's own marketeers; and indeed it is.:-) Read More

September 23nd to 30th 2006

Ever since Matthias Ettrich joked about it in the early history of the KDE project, focus-follows-mind has been a recurring meme in the KDE lexicon. Well, it looks like it's finally coming! Do you think the kernel will ship "thinking cap" drivers by the time we release KDE-4.0? :) Read More

Recently I went to Ohio to interview young students and their parent about a client's home schooling education system. They were surprised (although I wasn't) how the students were actually using the system (software, materials, teachers, etc.). It just reminded me of how important it is to identify your audience in order to have success. Here are a few things I took away from my trip which could be applied to KDE-Edu (grades K through 6)... Read More

This weekend I've done a bit more playing around with InterTag, a small application I mentioned recently. The goal is to provide something of a demo app for some of the Qt 4 Interview related stuff and as a bonus come up with some classes that can become central to JuK in KDE 4. I've now got alternating background colors, a status bar and a very small file menu ("Open" and "Quit"). Read More

It really does seem that we're beginning to emerge from the 10 year long Java nuclear winter, when excellent dynamic languages such as Objective-C or Smalltalk were kicked out of the mainstream. I've nothing against Java, and have probably spent a couple of man years or so working on the Qt/KDE Java bindings as some kind of 'public service' combined with a sincere desire to attempt to kill the Swing GUI toolkit. But I could never get at all excited or 'passionate' about it - Java has always just seemed another programming language to me with some pretty serious design flaws, some terrible frameworks and apis (cf Calendar class, the reflection api, and ..umm Swing). Read More