KDE Blogs 

I'm putting off writing my presentation for aKademy, and working on a really old KOffice wishlist item - bug:24399, which hopes for encryption. The move to the new OASIS format (aka the OpenOffice format) provides the requirements. Read More

Clee, I'm dead set against you (or anyone else) splitting up kdelibs. This is a poor idea for a large number of reasons which have pointed out before.

Aaaah, summer. :) The last few days I've been spending a lot of time on the balcony in the sun, hacking away or just developing my tan. Around this time of year it's really, really nice to live in paradise. I have hardly any commitments, apart from keeping my wife happy and the sun screen layer constant, thanks to some projects which have fallen through, so I can take it easy, get my bike repaired, work out some and look forward to aKademy. Oh, and get last minute bug fixes in, of course. If it weren't for that dreadfull surgery my wife has to undergo soon, life could hardly be any better.

Whenever there's a KDE release, I like to draw up a "QA list" for KStars that essentially lists all of the program's expected behaviors (it's quite a long list). I then go through and systematically check each one. I typically turn up a good number of lurking insects this way, and the current release is no exception. Read More

Boy, I can't wait till the feature freeze is finally over. There are so many useful things that korganizer needs, and I even took the time to implement some of them properly. Only problem is the feature freeze, which doesn't allow me to commit these new features :-( Read More

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. :)

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