KDE Blogs 

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

I recently read a Mac magazine (borrowed from the local library - I wouldn't have bought it :)) that had an interesting idea about extending iCal into an associative tool. Read More

The most annoying thing when writing public APIs is that it's a lot of redundant typing. A good API implementation should check all arguments and return a useful error message if an argument is invalid. Good API documentation should document which arguments values are valid and which return values are possible. Both tasks are work-intensive and annoying for the developer, which is probably one of the reasons why there so many bad APIs. Here is a Java snippet with Sun-style argument handling: Read More

Anyone who is interested in database systems integration may know ODBC can be usable. Currently, development of KexiDB integration with ODBC functionality is started. So, I've updated Kexi Developers Wiki Pages with a small research on ODBC in KexiDB Drivers context. Read More