KDE Blogs 

Recently I became part of the exclusive invite only club of KDE Dot News editors. It's surprisingly time consuming to proofread and filter all the articles into a constant stream of high quality news for the world to learn about KDE from. The submitions queue gets some oddities from spam to rants to an article about how to start kppp, and various completely off-topic stories. Then there's questions like do we link to theKompany when they release a new proprietary product (if it's KDE related) or a new commercial GPLed product (yes) or to Linare with their cheap laptop which happens to come with KDE (I let that one through but has anyone heard of these Linare people? what is their distro based on?). The Dot doesn't tend to cover program releases, that's what kde-apps is for, the trick is to accompany it with an article or review. Anyone who wants to write an article is very welcome, we're always looking for more. Read More

Just wanted to share this with you, someone on #kde-devel discovered it: http://kdedevelopers.net/ I, for one, welcome our new Air Purifier overlords ;)

Hans Oischinger talks about how he found it hard to learn about programming the Qt/KDE api. All of his comments apply to ruby Korundum programming; in ruby you can use slots/signals, KConfig XT .kcfg files, Qt Designer .ui files, KXMLGUI .rc files, DCOP, KDE::Parts (KParts) or subclass KDE::Command (KCommand). But the problem with total ruby/KDE integration is that the docs, if they exist at all, are for the C++ api. Read More

At first, as this is my first posting to kdedevelopers.org, I'd like to introduce myself. To avoid writing the whole stuff again, please take a look at this page. Now, after you know who I am, I can start... As noted on the page above, I'm working on effects in Kexi. This really is for the eye-candy department. On the shot you can see a nice gradient that fades with a background pixmap and a label that has a drop-shadow below the text. Looks nice, eh? Read More

Well, Konqueror (khtml) has been proven to have the fastest free HTML renderer available for Linux. So why is it that the people on slashdot refuse to not only mention it in the "article", but with the default settings and no user account, I can't even find a mention of it on the entire page (with the comments). Read More

I have long time not blogged but now that KDE 3.4 Beta 2 code-named "Keinstein" (blame me for the name) was released this week and with it the feature and i18n freezes in place this might change. :-) Also this week Slackware 10.1 became available. A small hobby of me is to test distributions (see history). My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0 as book appendix, which I quickly had to replace with Walnut Creek Slackware 3.0 CDROMs because I needed ELF support. Since then I didn't use Slackware anymore, so it was time to revisit. Read More

This week I'm rewriting the kicker handbook and I'm wondering how one jazzes up documentation about the absolute basics. How do you not send your audience to sleep explaining the concept of a taskbar? It's fairly obvious but it has to be documented somewhere. We can't expect the mac users to pick things up by themselves. They might start to make a habit of it, and anarchy would ensue. Who would we torment? Read More

DataKiosk is a JuK-like database interface tool for generic SQL databases. What does that mean? Essentially, DataKiosk provides a series of wizards (anyone familiar with Qt Designer's database wizards will find them familiar) that allow you to build a custom Juk-like interface for any SQL database with a QtSQL driver. It now resides in kdecvs in the kdeextragear-1 module. Screenshots 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and Flash demo here. More below the fold... Read More

One of the cool features of KMail I discovered while running the current development branch is the support for X-Faces. These are small black-and-white pictures which are sent in the mail header. They are popular on the Usenet and when reading mailing lists it's fun to see who sends these X-Faces with which mails. In KMail it looks like this: That's refreshingly old school. It reminds me of the 80's when I did strange things like spending time on drawing pictures on checkered paper, converting them (of course manually) to hex codes and typing the results into a BASIC program on the C64 for finally showing them as sprites on the screen. In KMail it's naturally a bit easier to create an X-Face header. Just go to the configuration dialog, select an identity and activate the "Picture" tab. There you can specify a picture which is converted to an X-Face header: If you prefer to do it the 80's way you can also type in something like that: Read More

The news of a GPled Qt for Windows today let in a round about way to a discussion on IRC about funding Free Software development. Would people pay for easily installable software? Maybe apt could include a payment system, after all that's what Lindows is trying to do. Mobiles seem to manage something similar with ringtones somebody pointed out. And then we realised KDE could do the same thing. KNotify+KNewStuff+Paypal. Genius. 1 euro for a new login sound. 2 euro for Schnappi (the semi-official song of KDE 3.4 beta 1) to be your KMail new mail notify. The plan can't fail. Read More