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I watch since weeks output like this: Starting Subversion commit 371950 / 409201 Starting Subversion commit 371951 / 409201 Starting Subversion commit 371952 / 409201 Starting Subversion commit 371953 / 409201 Starting Subversion commit 371954 / 409201 Read More

Yesterday I suddenly realized with horror that I missed a trend: everyone seems to rewrite kcontrol or create mockups how it should look like but not me. :-) First I had to find a project name, I chose kcontrol5 because kcontrol3 and kcontrol4 already exist in kdenonbeta. After having this difficult task finished I created these mockups which meanwhile incorporate first feedback from #kde-usability. Read More

I asked Basse to make a nice logo and banner for the upcoming KDEPIM meeting. The cool little dragon seems to be crazy about KDEPIM (so are the PIM developers about Konqi I heard). Read More

The month of May has started with a big milestone: the approval of the OpenDocument 1.0 specification as an OASIS standard. Part of the credits for that go to our very own David Faure who has done a great amount of hard work in the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Commitee. The importance of a truly open file format for office documents can not be understated and the OASIS OpenDocument standard helps to bring competition back to office applications. I expect the OASIS OpenDocument standard to make headlines in the near future as it has been eagerly awaited by governments around the world. Read More

I just had a problem with Knowledge, which as you might know, is my attempt towards a Wikipdia offline reader: I needed to disable lots of GUI stuff in my QMainWindow-derived class as long as no offline image is loaded. Some of the widgets werent even available as object members. All widgets need to be deactivated and then activated again after the book was loaded. The obvious choice would have been to add a bunch of members, one for every object in question, and then call setEnabled( true ) or setEnabled( false ) for each of them respectively. Result: lotsa code. Lotsa members, sucks. So what was my solution? Obviously, all relevant classes in this case are really QWidgets (except for QActions, I'll get to them later). So what I did is having a private member QList < QWidget* > mStateWidgetList. Every time a widget shows up I would add it to the list. Tackeling a bunch of them is just as easy: Read More

Dave Hyatt asks this question in his blog. First of all let me just say this: KDE developers who worked on KHTML are simply really attached to it because historically it was the "rendering engine done right" and for people who worked on it, well, it's their baby. Read More

So over the last few weeks I have started work on the new KJSEmbed that will be in KDE 4. In a change of heart that is an entirely different blog all together I have decided that I will push to have KJSEmbed in the core of KDE 4. Read More

Today, Fab confirmed my accommodation for the KDEPIM meeting in Achtmaal, Netherlands. There are at least three reasons why I'm really happy to go there: "Speaking Usability" During the last two or three weeks, I've spent a lot if time thinking about how to facilitate the usage of Kontact for less experienced users. Cornelius, Danimo and me discussed some ways, and I finally managed to create a few screenshots and wrote explanatory lines. The problem with such usability proposals is that they are mostly too long - so every developer pitches on the sections that are of concern for him. But without reading the whole document, the context does not become clear and some suggestions simply seem to be stupid =| And even if everybody agrees with the suggestions, they often do not fit in the current project plan and after a few months they are obsolete or forgotten. Meeting each other and "speaking usability" face to face is the best way to avoid this =) Visiting the Netherlands Well, I haven't been there for at least five years!! After the KDE meeting, I'll straightly head to the sea, lie down in the dunes, and enjoy being there *happyness* Seeing some of you guys Lastly, I'll see some of you guys. Always a good reason to travel a few hundred kilometres =)

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