KDE Blogs 

i wish we designed KDE for 4 year olds. well, today's four year olds growing up in computer-centric societies, anyways. why? because they GET IT. watching my son use KDE, i realized that the Home metaphore for "your files" works very nicely. tonight he said, "i want to go to the home ..." and clicked on the little house icon to pull up the file manager. he loves looking at photos on the computer of people he knows. the whole "My Documents" thing or the claim that "the concept of a Home directory is so foreign and weird" is just a bunch of crotchety old people yammin' their lips. Home makes sense and it works when you don't come into it with preconceived notions, and My Documents requires the internalization of all sorts of preconceptions such as what a document is and that someone actually owns them. we all understand the concept of a "home" and how that thing works (we put our stuff there, sometimes other people's stuff goes there too, it's our base of operations ,etc), so it's a pretty damned good metaphor. Read More

In short: Xizzle. xserver gained another DDX (Driver-Dependent X: essentially anything for an X server that isn't the definition of an atom, or any other core, shared functions) - Xizzle. It's a fork of XFree86, autotooled, and with other goodness. The loader is going away. The cruft is being kicked out of the tree. This will form the crux of the first stable xserver release, which will be made before the end of the month (tick, tick, tick). Read More

After wasting a few hours converting some old C++ GUI code to UI files for easier management I decided to write a small tool to move C++ based GUI code to Qt's UI files. Read More

I am watching the static vs dynamic typing wars with some curiosity. On the one hand, I can't understand how to write any large application without the help of static typing. The lack of information in the code, especially the imprecise and fuzzy specification of APIs, reduces the confidence that my code will work in all situations. It also does not fit my usual coding style for large programs and applications: I tend code for days, weeks or even months until I have a usable state, without executing the code even once. I RELY on the compiler's ability to find all typos during that time. On the other hand, I see that there are many people who prefer dynamic languages. Most of them have a write-a-little/test-a-little style, which I know from writing JSPs, so I can understand the style at least somewhat. I think I found a very simple concept to allow dynamic typing in a Java-like statically typed language. The following examples are based on Java, but with two additional features: Read More

I upgraded to KDE 3.2.1 when the RPMS appeared on kde-redhat's repositories. It seems snappier, and a lot of my pet peeves with 3.2 have disappeared. Here are some notes... some may be kde-redhat specific, or may actually have already been in 3.2. Read More

KDE artists is an interesting project limited by the number of people who are actually talented enough to create high quality artworks (not me). There isn't much coherency to the group, people who know what they're doing are often too busy to reply to those who don't and posts to the list can go unanswered. The website is quite limited too. Changes to improve this include a wiki page and hopefully the bugs.kde.org entries will soon point towards the mailing list. There's also an IRC channel #kde-artists on freenode which may or may not catch on. Read More

One thing that recent dicussions about usability have highlighted is how much our decisions are currently based on personal opinions rather than hard facts. Aaron has recently been trying to address this by asking people how much they use the various buttons in the konqueror toolbar, but this is both labour intensive and inaccurate. So, I've written the 'Usage Monitor' plugin. The Usage Monitor is a KParts plugin that records a log message whenever a KAction is fired. The log simply notes the action that was activated and how it was done - eg. was it via the toolbar, a menu or a keyboard shortcut. By analysing this log it is possible to measure which parts of an applications GUI are being used, and which are not. If a reasonable users can provide sample data using this tool, then we can build up an acurate picture of things we could previously on guess at. The plugin itself is tiny at around 150 lines of code, and works with any application that supports KPart plugins (which covers most KDE apps these days). No modifications are needed to the application itself, and you don't need to tweak the monitor for your app either. The code is a good example of the power of the XMLGUI framework as it shows how easy it makes creating tools that can apply throughout KDE. In this case, it even lets you track the use of actions provided by plugins and embeded kparts as well as the main application. Here is a sample log recorded from Konqueror: Read More

Well now that I have been working with getting Kolab to handle my spam and virus issues I think I have finally found a nice solution. A few weeks ago when I was testing my email spam filters here I went out on usenet and posted my name a few times. Now that I get about 1500 spam messages a day I have a very nice test set ;) Read More

A common complaint I get from developers is that their work isn't showing up in the digest. I'll explain how the whole thing is done, and then get to the question. I go through the 2000 or so commit emails from kde-cvs list, and select commits that are either bugfixes, new features, optimizations or security fixes. With bugfixes, any that have a bug number are selected. I then run a script that builds the html, statistics and other stuff, edit, add a few things here and there, then publish. This works reasonably well, although there are imo too many trivial bugfixes highlighted. Read More

Aaron has posted a blog entry about developes 'fearing' usability teams, I've replied to his post itself by a comment but I'd like to provide a fuller view of things here. Read More