KDE Blogs 

So the Kontact bug squashing day was a big success, I think, with a lot of bugs closed over pretty much all components of Kontact. Quite a few people showed up and especially KMail seems to have a acquired a bit of a bug squad, which is just awesome. Michael Jahn, Tom Albers, Ismail Donmez and others have been doing an amazing job and KMail now stands -65 for bugs and -73 for wishes for the last 14 days, which must be the best fortnight in the history of KMail bugs. Keep up the excellent work, guys, it is very much appreciated. If we're not carefull, Kontact 1.0 might actually rock. :) Read More

I've been doing some work in the last few weeks to get Kasbar ready for the KDE 3.3 release. The code is now looking good, and doing this has given me some ideas for some major Kasbar enhancements for the next KDE release. I've fixed the progress indicator code - you now get a progress bar just below the icon label for any progress dialog. This works even if the window is minimised. The overall effect of this is really quite cool and I've found it works really well. I've also fixed the version indicator in the about dialog, and some minor display problems with the display of the license text. I've also fixed a problem that was reported with the positioning of the popup in some circumstances. To make up for the dull work above, I've created a branch in which I'm working on a massively souped version of Kasbar. I've already done a lot of work reworking the drawing code and added a number of new features: Read More

We will have our second Kontact Bug Squashing Day on Sunday 25th July. As CVS is feature and message frozen for the 3.3 release we are all in bug-fixing mode and want to intensify our efforts to get a Kontact 1.0 which is as stable as possible. If you want to become part of this venture you can join us on IRC and help with reviewing bug reports, creating patches, testing fixes or generally cheering up the developers. Read More

This is another blog entry from the series of "how to improve my code". I was very happy with the response I got to the "delayed initialization" entry. Today I'll show you how to prove your code is working or at least doing what's expected. I'll talk a little bit about unit testing. If you hate "extreme programming" or "test driven development" bare with me as I'll show you how to very quickly and easily write tests. There's quite a few frameworks that were designed to ease testing. If you're into testing you probably have your favorite one. If you're researching those framework there are two things which you should look at foremost: Read More

"Wow, Kontact is starting up much faster now" many of you might say after testing a recent CVS snapshot. While we of course are steadily improving speed, this perception of huge speedup is due to the delayed initialization trick: Kontact starts - the mainwindow almost instantly appears, showing the component icons. The splash screen remains, showing a progress bar, until everything is finished. Read More

Since I mentionend here that the KMail team could use some help with bug work a few days ago, Ismail "cartman" Donmez has started going through the wishlist closing duplicates and stuff that has since been implemented. I thought I'd give him a public thank you for that, it's really, really great to see that list get some love. So thank you, cartman, and keep up the good work. Maybe if a few more people find some time to help him, we might get the darn thing down to where we can actually use it again. On a related note, we'll probably do a bug squashing day on sunday for Kontact and its components, Cornelius suggested it and everyone thinks its a great idea. It'll be interesting to see how many people show up to help. The Gnomes do them regularly and I guess if they were useless, they wouldn't do them, what with the the Gnomes not being stupid and all. :) Read More

so sometime last week I got my Sony Ericsson T610 phone. After the fear that I would be stuck using the default themes on the phone I went out in search of the file format or some information on them. Well shockingly what I discovered was quite cool... Read More

I just read that Aaron is excited to go to aKademy and that he will meet KDE developers (and not few!) there. Let me say that I also look forward to get to know some new faces including Aaron, Fabrice and Waldo. And Eric should be interesting to watch (or better listen?). :-) I also discovered the names of some KDE oldies like Matthias Hölzer-Klüpfel and Roberto Alsina who plan a comeback? All the rest of you please assume that we were either already at same place at same time or that I'm simply not aware of your registration. Read More

After Till kept bugging me, I finally asked David Vignoni to submit his final versions of the icons, which I then committed to CVS. As a result, Kontact has now finally decent icons. Interested people should take a look. Have a look: Read More

KDE has had the same splash screen for the last two releases so I think it is in need of a new one. It doesn't matter if the new one is better or worse than the KDE 3.1/3.2 splash (it's all artistic taste), this is new for the sake of new otherwise it looks to users like nothing has changed. Read More