KDE Blogs 

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

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