KDE Blogs 

I haven't been blogging for a while. Mainly because I simply haven't felt like it and I've been going through some things lately. But I promised that I'm going to show some movies of things I've been doing. There's really no good way of showing OpenGL effects, vns2swf just doesn't handle it. So those will come later. Read More

Aaron writes: haavard announced that by Q1-06 they'll be releasing a tech preview of java bindings for qt4 that will be officially supported. wow. I'll be interested in how the java bindings are implemented, and whether they are auto-generated or not. Will it be easy to extend them to wrap the kde libs? I hope they are successful. I think it needs a big company like Trolltech to do the marketing to make a java binding a success - I never managed to make my version very popular. The QtRuby ones seem to be getting more traction than I ever got with QtJava. Read More

This weekend I finally finished writing my review for KBruch. KBruch is an Edutainment application which allows students to practice fractions. It has several modes of operation: Evaluation of multiple terms, Factorization of numbers, Comparison between two terms, and Conversion to decimal. Read More

No matter whether it's Tango or Salsa (I'm addicted to Salsa dancing) there are some important things to know about dancing: Of course your attention needs to be 100% on your partner and the enjoyment of dancing that song together. But to be a successful leader it takes more than just trying to force her into something that the "leader" had his heart set on. To make the lady truely shine on the dance-floor a good leader will allow her these essential playful moments of creativity and give her the freedom of expression. - The same is true for icons! ... And leads us directly to the pros & cons of the Tango Project: The good thing about the Tango-specification is that it already uses the common icon names from freedesktop.org which can be shared across desktops. This is a concept which will certainly be shared by all future iconthemes as well (including KDE 4's default iconset Oxygen). The result is a desktop which gives a much more consistent look and feel for the user and iconthemes that are easier to develop. Now we only need to manage to create suggestions for common metaphors for all the iconnames. That way we can pull the whole icontheme thing to enterprise level. People who offer support or write documentation will be able to say stuff like: "To select this part of the screen press the select-icon -- the one with the LASSO depicted" .. and they can be 100% sure that as long as the icontheme is an "enterprise icontheme" (opposed to a fun theme) it will depict a lasso -- no matter which icontheme is chosen. There will always be different iconthemes around as many projects, many distributors and even many free and commercial applications are promoting their own default iconset (think of Linspire's Clear-e, Redhat's Bluecurve, etc. who try to promote their own Visual / Corporate Identity). As mentioned in my introduction: For us leaders there's an important part to make the Tango-specification successful! Let's drop the suggestion for the colorpalette and style! Otherwise all "Tango"-spec-compatible iconthemes will just look like one single icontheme and the freedom of expression for the artists who might want to start a completely new innovative icontheme (maybe based on the visual identity of the respective project) will be close to zero! These days innovation and diversity is the motivation that makes people buy new products and try new stuff. So the way too restrictive rules for colors and styles in Tango would definetely hinder adoptance and would just weaken it as a standard. The whole topic was already covered on freedesktop.org as well as the Appeal-mailinglist. Ideally the Tango-specification will just consist of two requirements that iconthemes will need to fullfill to be a good choice for the default/enterprise: The freedesktop.org common iconname standard and the yet-to-create standard for common metaphors. If we keep this in mind then watching the dancefloor of different iconthemes on kde-look.org will be a joyful experience: diversity will be preserved and a smooth, consistent and beautiful appearance of the desktop will be guaranteed.

Ricoh USA just delivered to me (as representing KDE) a nice color laser printer (CL4000DN). It looks very impressive and it prints like a fairy tale charm. The hero in this is George Liu, Linux engineer at Ricoh, believes in KDE's technologies and wants Linux to succeed (printing aspects withstanding). He energically advocates Linux at Ricoh. Read More

Featuritis is a condition in which the functionality of an application increases with each revision (and such, complexity increases). The functionality that aggravates this condition is usually that which a single user (or group) requests (or is given) without consideration of the implications it has on the rest of the users, interface, and experience the application is meant to address. Read More

/\ndy Hunt one of the pragmatic programmers interviews Caleb Tennis, author of the new book Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby in this podcast. Caleb has just done a long overdue new release of Qt3 QtRuby and Korundum on the RubyForge site, although we haven't announced it yet. I hope to do a first relealse of Qt4 QtRuby in the next couple of weeks, and put it up on RubyForge too.

KDE 3.5 Beta 2 has been announced and the full range of testing possibilities is available: My small "Klax" Live-CD has been updated to KDE 3.5 Beta 2 and KOffice 1.4.2. The CD made news on Distrowatch and led to some screenshots on OSdir.com. For building from source the "Unstable KDE" edition of the Konstruct script has been updated. And there are packages for SUSE Linux 10.0 and 9.3 available (packages for 9.2 and 9.1 do also exist and may be uploaded if there is demand and once the KDE mirrors have fetched the current distributions' packages). And of course KDE 3.5 Beta 2 will be also on SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 2 which will be published on Thursday. Read More

I spent last week in the Canary Islands seeing a company called Fotón Sistemas Inteligentes in Santa Brigida, Gran Canaria. I stayed with Gonzalo, Marianne his girlfriend and their 11 cats and their very 'woofy' dog. They showed me the mountains with spectacular views of the island, although it was a bit windy high up. It really is a very pretty place. Wednesday is a public holiday in Spain, so Foton had a barbecue Tuesday evening on the roof of their offices. They did some 'Sardinas' for me just like the ones we had at the Malaga beach party - nice! Everyone is very friendly and I'm really looking forward to learning Spanish, and working with them. Read More

... is so useful for UI design. Other than a GUI builder it allows for quickly changing input widgets and even whole dialog sequences without programming efforts. It is fast, efficient, and you can put many elements next to each other - till your table or whatever pad you use is full. Still you can easily overlook everything without a zoom that decreases the font sizes. Read More