KDE Blogs 

The comic foxtrot is always really nice to read; and todays comic was showing the common problem of more features meaning less usability in a very clear way; I can't help but talk about it (well, after I stopped laughing :) First here is the comic: The author (correctly) got just about all the big usability rules wrong to make sure this thing display power (its huge!) but be quite useless at the same time; I wrote this down a long time ago in the UI guidelines. To be user friendly, software must be: task-suitable, understandable, navigable, conformable to expectations, tolerant of mistakes and feedback-rich. (follow the link above to get a full explenation) Read More

The Ubuntu Down Under conference is now closed. Mark gave some closing thanks which I noted down, again completely un-proofread and spellchecked. Finally on the last day I found a fellow KDE coder. sebr the elite Amarok hacker. Jeff Waugh explained how #gnome-hackers had been laughing at the scary Amarok setup wizard, I'd like to get rid of that for Kubuntu, infact if Amarok could be simplified by default and keep the fancy features for those who want them that would be great. Read More

KDEPIM meetings appear to be successful for the progress of KDEPIM/Kontact. So the Dutch local KDE group, KDE-NL, decided to organise such a meeting as well. For this we needed money. Although KDE-NL has some budget of its own it was clear that we needed some extra money for funding the accomodations and for some people help them pay for the travelling costs. Read More

Qt4 is really progressing well. The only problem at this point is that it still changes a lot even after Beta 2 which originally meant to end the phase of rather radical changes, according to the trolls. But that's fine. Let them get their APIs sorted out, let them react to the extensive feedback and let them time to do it right. So what's new in Qt land since Beta 2? First thing to notice is the introduction of "Plastique", which is, as you certainly suspected already, a Qt-only version of the KDE 3.4 default theme "Pastik". The clear advantage is that Qt finally has a decently looking style for Linux, which is available even to statically-linked Qt applications. This is good since I never liked the rather sharp-edged windows style mixed with rather smooth styles like Plastik. The next topic is an improvement (at least I suppose it's new, Maksim wasn't sure either) regarding tool windows handled by QWorkspace (aka MDIs). The window decoration is now completely under control of QStyle, and it might be possible to implement a bridge in KStyle that maps the current KWin decoration on a KDE Style for MDI Widgets. That said, Maksim warned me that it would be hard to do, so I don't take that for granted. Anyway, Plastique provides a nice (hardcoded) Plastik Window decoration, you can get a good impression on how things could look like in the future. Oh yeah, and another one: It will be possible for Qt-only application to make use of at least parts of the KDE icons now. Qt has a standard icon set, which depends on the style. KStyle can map them to KIconLoader, or whatever its equivalent in KDE 4 will be called. Ideally everyone is going to use KDE libs for all platforms once the Qt4 port of the KDE libraries is done and available for all major platforms (Unix, Linux, OS X, Windows) even for Qt-only apps, but we will see if that is going to be accepted amongst Qt developers. Anyway, this will work in any case :). Designer started to get a usable resource editor component. Qt4 resources obsolete the qembed concept of Qt3, making things significantly easier: Simply add files in the editor (i.e. graphics), i.e. /images/mypic.png. Add the resource file to your Qt project and run make. Qt will handle the rest for you. Accessing the resource e.g. from within richtext is as easy as label->setText( QLatin1String( "... ; ..." ) ); The richtext engine itself still has some bugs, but I'm confident they'll get sorted out soon. That's today's little Qt4 tour. We hope you had a pleasant trip!

I found this great little ruby program on isaac's random rants blog - it takes the contents of the klipper clipboard, sends it to rafb.net which is 'code snippets temporary storage' site. You put your clipping there, and it returns you the URL back on the clipboard that you can paste into an IRC channel or whatever. I added a 'lang=Ruby' attribute too so the snippet gets labelled as a Ruby one. Read More

I just wish to weigh in on debacle to clear up some mistakes. First of all I would like to say I agree with Zack. The annoying part is not that Apple don't cooperate as much as they could. They are actually helpfull in answering questions and tries at least to separate OS X specific features in the code (allthough they fail miserably at it). No, our problem are users who think Apple does more and underestimate the effort it takes for us to implement patches from WebCore. We are doing this for free and for fun, all we really want is appreciation for our effort. Read More

KDE sources now blacklist gcc 4.0.0 because it miscompiles KDE but that shouldn't be a reason to do no compilation benchmarks, or? :-) My test machine was an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512MB and SUSE 9.3's gcc 3.3.5. The other gcc versions were pure gcc. My first test was to compile Qt 3.3.4: Read More

It's a sad thing to read intelligent people uttering frivolous and unsubstantiated affirmations, harpooning around with caustic near-to-arrogance addressings and pulling a Demostene from the "height" of their perceived more inner understanding of the "grand scheme". Read More

kdedevelopers.org hosts different content categories: polls, stories and blogs. As user roles "authenticated user" (working email address, hello spammers) and "KDE developer" (has to be manually verified as such) exist. Every "authenticated user" can submit stories to the story submission queue on which "KDE developer"s have to vote about whether they should be published - in practice nobody does. Stories even don't appear on the kdedevelopers.org homepage anymore, for story publications you better go to dot.kde.org. Read More

You can't even imagine how I hate that question. The truth is "most probably never". I just read the article on /. about Safari supporting the "all crack Acid2" test and people raving how great it is for KHTML. The truth is that KHTML will probably never get those patches. What's most probably going to happen is that one of us will simply reimplement it from scratch (and at the moment the reality is that if it's not going to be Allan or Germain it's not going to happen). Read More