KDE Blogs 

during the last week of moving house (while still working, of course..) i haven't had much contact with my usual "peer group", including the KDE people. let me just say that in their absence from my life i'm beginning to remember how amazing all those guys are. instead, i've been in contact primarily with people who randomly pop up or who come in through the office during the work day. with Linux and KDE taking off, education is definitely lagging behind. ignorance is frustrating, but at least it (unlike stupidity) is curable. some examples of the ignorance i've run into this week: Read More

I've been thinking about C's control statements (if, while, switch, for etc) for a little while, and I think there's some room for improvements in the later two... switch The C# guys have made two interesting modifications to C's switch statement: fall-through is only allowed when there's no statement after the case (thus if a statement follows a case, there must be a break or similar jump statement). And it added the 'goto case' statement that can be used for fall-through effects. Here's a C# snippet: Read More

Recently, I've decided to find something else in the KDE project that interests me, familiarize myself with its inner workings, and start hacking on it. I've come up with a couple of things, mostly KIO, and KOffice (KWord, KSpread, and Kexi to be exact). The problem that I've run into is one of time management. Now that I have a full time job, I don't exactly have the amount of time that I can devote to hacking KDE that I used to when i was still in university. I'm curious to know how people manage their time with working on more than one piece of KDE at a time. Read More

Last time I worked on Kugar Report Designer I've noticed that I need to have a property editor similar to what Qt Designer have. Further I've discovered that such a property editor can also be usefull in KDevelop. Existing implementations were too tied with Kugar Designer and Qt Designer and Qt Designer's version was GPL'ed. So I decided to wrote my own "generic" property editing library (partially based on my property editing classes from Kugar) which I'm happy to present. The core of the library is formed by Property, PropertyList and PropertyEditor classes. Property has name, value (stored in QVariant), description and a list of possible values. Library supports (i.e. provides facilities to edit them visually) several property types by default: String, Integer, Double, Boolean, StringList, Color, List, Map, ValueFromList, Symbol and FontName. Class PropertyList is a way to store properties together. It is worth to mention that properties can also be grouped into a smaller lists within property list. For example, such properties as "x", "y", "width" and "height" can be grouped into "Geometry" group. Your object should include a PropertyList. This way it is simple to pass the list to PropertyEditor and display them in GUI. PropertyEditor cares about displaying a grouped list of properties and creating property editor widgets when necessary. Sometimes there is a selection of objects in program and you want to display properties of those objects. You can't simply pass a list of properties to a property editor, you should "intersect" them first and pass only properties that are common to all objects. Property editing library takes care about this too. Property lists can be intersected and the result of intersection can be passed to PropertyEditor. The use of properties and lists can be illustrated by this example: Read More

i was going to be working on NX stuff today, but will do it tomorrow instead. i've been driven to work on kcontrol ideas today. i'm about to go out and get some groceries and a new water gun for my son (he broke his beloved water shoorter today and was rather disapointed by that). i also have some recycling to drop off. i'm about to take a break to do this stuff. but before i go, here's a bit of stream-of-consciousness verse to all those who like to pester me about what a shitty job i'm doing with regards to KDE's usability. Read More

Once in a while, i need to write a formatted text document for printing, for example a letter, a job application or, like to day, a table for checking the boats in my local sailing club. Every time, I optimistically launch KWord, because it is fast and lightweight, and have the features I need -- would it just work... The table I had to write today a little bit complex, it has some rows with 3 columns, some with 2 and some with one. So I created a table with 3 columns and borders, and started to join the columns in the rows where I needed it, and here the problem starts. All the rows with joined columns looses the right border, and there seems to be NO way to get that back, which alone makes the document useless, I can't provide a nice looking document this way. After adding all the rows I wanted, saving screws up the formatting COMPLETELY. Why does kwork reformat the document in the event of saving?? Autosave will cause kword to reformat my document at what feels like random times while working, and I could find no way of turning autosave of, setting the interval to the maximal 60 mins also seemed to do nothing. So, I can change a few things and then save, after that i have to Read More

I've been thinking about some of the stuff that Frans English has brought up about KDE Control Centre. While I don't agree with some of the things he's written, there is certainly a case for cleanup in some of the hardware settings. Read More

Annoyed at the lack of directory image browser for Konqueror and the primitive image viewer I turned Gwenview into a Konqueror KPart. You can get it from kdeextragear-1 CVS, all comments are welcome. Read More

usability is one of the last avenues of software development to have it's methodologies challenged/changed using open source mechanisms. even many practicing/promoting usability in design in Free Software projects usually attempt to do so using draconian and/or closed methods. let's stop the insanity and open source usability. and here's your chance to join the revolution. read on to see how you can change the face of usability studies by doing what so many have jabbered on about but so few (if any) are actually doing. and it'll only take a few minutes of your time. Read More

Okay, so I made some progress implementing the Google search bar. You can now find it in CVS in kdeaddons/konq-plugins/searchbar. As it's just a simple Konqueror plugin, it doesn't have to get in your way. It uses the default searchprovider as selected in Konqueror under the Web Shortcuts settings, so it's not limited to Google only. I hope to get some feedback from you so I can improve on it. Read More