KDE Blogs 

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. :)

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

That's the magic CVS tag which allows you to pull the KDE version from CVS which is supposed to become KDE 3.3 Beta 2. Start your build (perhaps with the help of kdecvs-build) and to write your "KDE 3.3 Preview" today so that your story is finished when KDE 3.3 Beta 2 will be announced. :-) Read More

I've been slack, busy and confused. Hence the lack of blog. The one thing that I have done, based on a likely need to refer to it to write up my talk for aKademy is to mostly complete the KFile meta-data tutorial. The bit that got added yesterday and today is on using meta-data plugins in your application. So it is basically a description of the other side of the kde:KFileMetaInfo interface. In some respects, its a bit lame, because I didn't really have a good insight into what you might need beyond kde:KPropertiesDialog in a real application. Maybe I can learn more at Wheels' presentation at aKademy. If anyone has something to add to either of my tutorials, just commit in the SGML docbook source for the tutorial (and CCMAIL: me, if applicable). Read More

While watching a very boring Tour de France remain boring yet another day, I managed to punch a small dent into the gargantuan pile of duplicate, useless, out of date and in parts plain revolting cruft that is KMail's bugzilla area. Now, I remain convinced that bugzilla is a very valuable tool and that there are in fact very important pieces of information buried in there, amidst all the smelly bits, and I also feel that we should be thankfull for each person spending the time and effort to give us feedback, but it's just so much work to keep on top of the buggers and even more work to climb back on on top everytime we've slacked off a bit and let another 100 or so reports accumulate on top of the 400 or so we managed to reduce the pile to last time. Not counting wishes. Be that as it may, we are nearing the 3.3 release, and it'd be great to at least find those bug reports that are genuine KMail issues which are fixable before 3.3 and fix them. It would also be great to give those nice people reporting issues with the betas timely feedback, especially since the same issues tend to get reported multiple times, and often only a friendly "Thanks, we know." is required. If you think you might have an hour or two to spare and would be willing to help with that, stand up and be counted. Like, now. Drop into #kontact or mail me or the kmail-devel list. This is your chance to finally help with the project that was Touched by Zack (TM), $GOD's own Wrapper around GPGME (TM), We put the sin back in sync, Forgotten Attachment Warner with a 50 MB Memory Footprint, the one MUA to rule them all. Yes, that's right, our very own KMail. Don't miss out on this excellent opportunity. Even cartman has recently been spotted contemplating closing a KMail bug. Lypanov has already gone through and solved all ruby related issues. Follow their lead, boys and girls, it will be much appreciated.