KDE Blogs 

I'm a usability guy, so my first concern with any feature or application is consistency, I guess all you guys and galls know that rule of usability, its the most important one. So, when in one day a couple of questions came up on how to scale a KPresenter object but keep the aspect ratio of the object, and how to disable the grid while scaling, well, I got thinking and I started looking into what all the KOffice applications did. In short, each one invented its own way of doing things. Which, as my introduction states, is not good usability. Duh! I kicked off a research and a proposal based on that to the KOffice mailinglist, and a couple of days later, the KOffice team now has a nice set of what I call interaction policies. All the features that make sense for manipulating objects now have been defined and given a modifier key. So holding shift down while moving or rotating will disable the grid and guides in all KOffice applications. Consistency is good. Read More

Simple as should be: Merry Christmas for everyone... No exceptions... :-)

What should one do if someone spreads FUD about a part of open source. Lets try the "why?" question. So one bashes qt on #maemo, channel for this GTK based platform used by the N770. Names are mangled if not me. Read More

Work was having a clean up and I got my hands on a bunch of old videocards: 2x nVidia TNT2 (one with TV out, with is handy), 2x S3 (old school AGP, so I'll have to reassemble my old Pentium 2), 1x Diamond something (AGP 1.5v & 3.3v) and a Rendition chipset based Diamond card (PCI!). This expands the number of chipsets and configurations that I can use to test the displayconfig part of Guidance. I whacked the PCI card into my other computer along side the AGP card that was already in there and it quickly exposed a problem in displayconfig. (Only one card appeared on the hardware tab). Another interesting thing was that the BIOS chose the PCI card to use during boot. While the existing xorg.conf file still worked fine and used the AGP card. Maybe displayconfig also needs a way of choosing between two cards, even for singlehead configurations. Read More

Well, holidays have started, and it is about time since the last months of work were very busy. Now I am taking a small break from ksvg2 hacking to work again on KOffice and Karbon, fixing bugs and small annoying problems. I think I'll wait with large redesigns/ui changes until after the next release though. Read More

Here in Holland we have a 'chipknip' (chip-wallet) that is a very cool invention where you basically carry around electronic money and pay using an 'ok' button instead of giving out cash and collecting too many coins. Read More

Today I watched a rerun of the Daily show on the comedy channel (Canada) .. and they were talking about the FCC hearings about the cables channels and the profanity they were airing on the "family hours " .... And I was think what is closer to the real christian values than a guy who is fucking a woman or a guy who is killing another one??? I will let you think about this in the holidays time ... merry xmas and happy new year to all Read More

Being in the N770 developments program and their great SDK/emulator, I really couldn't resist to try some programming for myself. Obvious choice is of course a port of kmplayer. The SDK is great and has both an i386 and arm target. The arm target uses qemu and is not capable of running GUI clients, but does run the console stuff, like configure scripts!!, this way. Having a 220MHz arm + 220MHz dsp dual core CPU and 64Mb of memory makes this device something that was standard about 8 years ago. The dsp chip adds additional video/audio decoding. Nokia added herefor a few closed source gstreamer modules. I haven't been able to pipeline those properly so that they would play video. But I guess that should be possible, also because I've managed to get mp3 playing with it. Given a pda with wifi/bluetooth 800x480 px sreen and 64Mb RAM/128Mb flash plus rs-mmc extention slot, I makes sense to go for a full blown x-server. They've chosen for gnome, though stripped down versions. Actually I don't know what's gnome about this because it mainly gtk/d-bus/gstreamer/gnome-vfs/.. stuff plus a so called hildon application framework (but what do I know on this subject). I don't think there is an alternative given this hardware other then using framebuffer instead of X. Read More

Today I reworked the QDS architecture so it doesn't require the application developer to delegate QApplication creation to QDS. The main reason for this requirement has been the desire to use a KDE service implementation, which needs a KApplication instance. Read More

Having released a few too many Kubuntu flight CDs without testing the powerpc builds I bought a minimac. I did intially think I would keep MacOS X on it since it's always useful and interesting to be able to play with another operating system. But by the time the Kubuntu powerpc CD had downloaded I'd had enough of it and wiped the whole hard disk. The graphics in macOS X are of course lovely, and the search engine spotlight is just right, but this is also an operating system that is unable to minimise or maximise windows properly and that doesn't even have an applications menu so you can find what programs are installed. Further problems: Read More