KDE Blogs 

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

Beside being a developer I consider myself part of the KDE support team. I have been doing developer and end user support for a couple of years now, for the last two years almost exlusively (read no development). Read More

KOffice 1.5 Beta 2 has been released together with binaries for SUSE Linux 9.3, 10.0 and Factory. Please help to test it to make the release rocking stable and install the provided debuginfo rpms for best crash reports if you can afford to download them. Read More

People have been wondering what I have been up to all the time. Now let me tell you: For one uni and a project consume most of my time at the moment. It should get better as the time of exams has passed by (which is on the beginning of april). But even then expect me to have only limited time available until may. Read More

Well, after a long break I've finally had a chance to work on KDE again. As a start, I've been trying to get KPassivePopup into a sane state in the KDE 4 libraries. The first step was moving all the internals of the class into the internal data class, which was a bit of a pain but pretty easy. To make things more interesting, it turns out that the API that worked fine on X11, is actually ambiguous on win32 and macos X due to different definitions of WId in Qt, the fix was to remove the ambiguous constructors (which I'd planned anyway as part of making a more Qt4-style API). The question moving forward is if this class needs to allow subclasses to define new visual representations (probably via a decorator of some kind), or if it's better to say there are the following presentation types and that's it. Does anyone who's using the class have any thoughts on this?

Novell today announced SLED 10 at CeBIT. Apparently there is some confusion caused by bad coverage: it's the successor of Novell Linux Desktop 9, a rebranded NLD 10 - if you like to say so - which gives you the choice to use either KDE or GNOME. As Nat Friedman stated to some press you will not lose functionality when you choose to use KDE: every desktop's applications will run on the other desktop, OpenOffice.org will integrate into both equally, desktop search is available under both and Xgl/Compiz (if supported on your graphic card) is desktop-agnostic too. Also the KDE desktop inherits from SUSE Linux 10.1 nice stuff developed at SUSE like kpowersave and knetworkmanager which other distributions maybe will only adopt in their next but one release.

Hiya, the results of the 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award are there. Although the announcement: "Among the winners are Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL and OpenOffice.org." doesn't sound too good for KDE, here's a (only slightly) closer look at the result :-) Read More