KDE Blogs 

Well, I finally got around to implementing my pet pieve with KJSEmbed. When you imported a UI File, you would just get the top level widget. Now after my modifications, it will add the child widgets as JavaScript properties of the parent. This is nice because now you can just call a UI file as: var Form1 = Factory.loadui("Form1.ui"); var text = Form1.TextGroupBox.NameLineEdit.text; instead of var Form1 = Factory.loadui("Form1.ui"); var TextGroupBox = Form1.child("TextGroupBox"); var NameLineEdit = Form1.child("NameLineEdit"); var text = NameLineEdit.text; Much clearer no? Read More

Well Following the tuff days at Conectiva ( company restructuring is always tuff ), we are finishing our next Conectiva release. Many people know how insane and massive split package policy we have, and adding new packaging features like automatic i18n subpackages generation and auto detecting i18n install by language ( all thanks to LUA language embedded on apt ) looks like the things are become harder to manage, no ? Really no. We reach a good technology stage and a good efficiency with our small team and we do this things easily. BUT ( always have a BUT ), there is such beasts as KDE i18n Packages... I and my trainee suffer a lot every time we need create de KDE i18n packages. Why ? We package whole KDE, Koffice, Quanta, Kdevelop, etc.. As a distribution, we always choose a branch stable bugfix release ( of course ), so let's use branch i18n packages, right ? Terribly wrong... Let me enumerate such points: Read More

Been busy at work, hasn't led to much hacking at night - too tired. I did manage to finish off the Sony Memory Stick projector converter. Just a command line mockup at this stage - integration into KPresenter is the next stage. I was really happy to see how powerful Qt/KDE is. My command line tool takes the names of graphics files as arguments, and resizes them and converts to 1024x768 baseline encoded JPEGs. Doesn't matter what the input file format is - three lines of code later, its written out in the right format. Read More

I think for about 6 months now I have been toying with a KJSEmbed IDE and failing at most turns... I'm still not convinced this [image:203,middle] although now I have more Javascript language support [image:386,middle]. It still falls short of my expectations. From what I see there are two modes that people will use KJSEmbed 1) as a macro language for KDE apps and 2) as a "visual lets get something out in the next 2 hours" language. From what I see here KDevelop is just not going towards either direction. Read More

Ok, it's been a really long time, so this is just a list of random junk (both OSS, CS and less geeky stuff): TagLib - I'll probably be doing a new release soon. There have been a couple of new features, so I'm debating between the version number 1.1 and 1.0.1. I've been generally very happy with the reception that TagLib has gotten -- I get quite a few mails from developers thanking them for freeing them from id3lib. Read More

I recently watched A Knight's Tale for the Nth time, which got me thinking about improbable dreams... Like many open source developers, my fondest wish is to be able to sit at the computer all day and all night hacking KDE and other free code -- no punishing deadlines, no extraneous worries, just me pushing my limits doing what I love best... and getting paid for it. Read More

A friend of mine got access to a Sony projector. One of the things that was interesting is that it has a memory stick slot on it, and it can project directly from the memory stick. Turns out that you have to process the presentation to make it work though, and Sony provides such software. For Microsoft Windows + Microsoft Office. We'll have to see about that! Read More

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