KDE Blogs 

So much to code, so little time... I found an older .plan, and was reading through it. It's from roughly two months ago, and it has notes such as "Find all configuration pages that have a sucky UI, and make them suck less." Heh. Was I really that naive so recently? Read More

Seth Nickell wrote a blog entry about the relation between Gnome and KDE. The short summary is that Gnome and KDE are just two flavours of the free desktop(.org) that are technically too different to be merged, but work toward a common higher goal and should thus share as much components and standards as possible. Read More

KJSEmbed can now handle events. At the moment only mouse events, but the rest will come soon. The example below shows how this can be used in practice. Note that I haven't committed this code yet, so it'll be a couple of days before you can use it. Read More

Today I fixed the oldest KOrganizer bug which was in the bug tracking system. The report was more than three years old. It was about the "awkward implementation of the 'add event' use case" and said that it should be possible to select a time range with the mouse and then create the event by just typing the summary. Ok, now it finally works. I was always reluctant to address this issue, because it would have meant to implement in-line editing for events. Other organizers have this and it's confusing as hell, because it means that an event can exist in different modi and it's not obvious how to switch between the modi, how to switch an event that is being edited into a state where it can be moved by the mouse or where it just is selected etc. Other problems with in-line editing are that many events are so small that the line edit would only have room for a couple of characters and that it adds a lot of complexity to the implementation of the event widgets. We discussed this issue in Nove Hrady a couple of times. The relevantive usability study addressed this issue and some people had suggestions. So on the last day I decided to finally give it a try and try to come up with something which would solve the problem. The result is not in-line editing but type-ahead support for the event editor. When the user starts typing in the agenda view, an event editor gets opened and all the typed text is forwarded to the summary line edit. This way it's very easy to add new events, but it avoids the problems of in-line editing. I'm sure there will be people who dislike this behaviour, but after using it for a couple of days I have to say I'm quite satisfied with it. So finally bug 5241 got fixed. Read More

Well, I said originally that I wasn't going to release this, but the reactions have just been too funny so far to pass it up. It's not an official release, yet, of course - I still have to implement the rendering code for the sliders and tabbars and probably a few other widgets too. But the sneak preview is out... Read More

I've been porting the Kopete config dialogs for the plugins for the last couple of days. Man, I knew that I knew very little of what the KDE framework offers, but I had no clue. :( The stuff in kutils (The KConfigureDialog stuff) that Matthias Kretz has wrote is just plain cool. Sadly, I'm sure I've just barely touched the surface. Read More

Long time no posts from me, I have been buried in exams work - but that is now over! A while ago I found a chatlog posted on the web where a few persons obviously close to the Jabber project (or even Jabber Inc.) were discussing ways of promoting Jabber. One of their thoughts was how about setting up a server for the KDE folks? Read More

i've been doing waaaay too much screwing around in kicker lately. there's a few more things that need doing, like alphabetizing the Add/Remove menus and possible splitting up the Applets menu now that we ship with a couple dozen applets, but it's generally in not too bad of shape at this point. i even snuck in a change to the default look of kicker. one less icon. one more background. the custom colour option for butons also looks pretty snazzy IMHO and should be friendly to low-resource machines that still want a panel that isn't completely boring. Read More

This evening there was a great firework directly in front of the castle in Nove Hrady where we are sitting and hacking. That's a stylish ending for a great week at a stylish location. After having sunshine all the days before it begin raining tonight. Seems like it's time to go home. Many people already have left and I'm going back to Germany with the KDE tour bus tomorrow morning. We accomplished a lot of things here. The KDE e.V. membership meeting finally managed to pass the new bylaws, we had a great conference with lots of interesting talks (The highlight certainly was Kalles talk about KDE history with lots of funny and some embarassing pictures) and we had lots of time for hacking, discussing and having fun. One very nice thing is that there were lots of kdepim developers here. The applications and also the developers are moving closer together. This gives kdepim an increasingly strong identity. Even Don and Marc got well along. There is not much reason left for conflicts. That's not surprising. Beer diplomacy works. Kontact is progressing. I integrated KitchenSync and fixed the about dialog with help from Simon. KOrganizer now provides its configuration as KCModules which can be included in the common Kontact configuration dialog. Matthias was ferociously hacking on KConfigureDialog which will automatically integrate all the config modules for Kontact including plugin configuration. It will also serve as a convenient way for other applications to provide a configuratin dialog. David worked on the toolbar problems and Tobias did a lot of work on libkabc and KAddressBook. Reinhold reorganized the KOrganizer printing support and the KMail guys got some improvements and bug fixes into KMail. There still are some issues, but most of them are solvable before the 3.2 release. The biggest problem currently is that the kroupware branch still isn't merged into HEAD. I hope that Bo will take this over and integrate the missing code, so that Kontact will become a fully usable client to Martins Kolab server. As a fallback we still have the option to make a separate kdepim release after 3.2 when the merge is finished. I also spent a lot of time on KitchenSync. Lots of cleanups, integration into Kontact, a new backup/restore part, bugfixes and now I'm trying to get the Qtopia Konnector to work again. But I'm still not sure if KitchenSync will be ready for 3.2 release. Let's see what the next few weeks bring. Josef hacked on KNewStuff and I talked with Frank about providing some of the cool stuff on www.kde-look.org via the "Get Hot New Stuff" feature. This also seems to work out well. Now I'm tired. Thanks to all the people organizing this event and all the KDE contributors who were here and made this meeting such a great success. See you next year :-) Read More

I'm proud to announce quick and miserable death of my Maxtor 120Gb HDD. "Physical destruction of HDD heads. Unrecoverable." Very well, now I can relax and have my dose of Windows XP (wheww) while the HDD travels to Moscow and back and guess what, nothing kde-related in the meantime. Bad one. Read More