KDE Blogs 

It is quite normal, in Free Software initiatives, for people to come in, help out, become proficient, maybe even moderately famous, then eventually move on or drop out. Often life gets in the way, parenting, post entry level jobs and growing responsibilities reduce the available time something fierce and once one is no longer really familiar with the code base, it becomes hard to make an effective contribution in those short time and motivation windows that open up. Somewhat ironically, since a large part of my job revolves around KDEPIM, this is very true for me as well. Over the last two years or so, apart from lunch discussions over architectural issues with my colleagues, I've been able to do little more than ensure things build and work on OSX, my current main platform. Much to my delight, this has recently changed. After many years, our efforts to build and transition to the Akonadi platform are coming together lately. Although we've decided to delay by a month, relative to the normal KDE 4.5 release schedule, with KDEPIM, we are nearing production quality of all of the components of Kontact now. KDEPIM from 4.5 branch is fully based on Akonadi and usable for my normal business and personal email, calendaring (Kolab, of course) and contacts management. In this current phase, there are a myriad smaller things to notice, analyze and fix (or give someone else enough information with which to fix). Many rough edges need to be filed away and regressions in the functionality and usability identified. Especially for the later it's really useful to have been working with Kontact for many years and to know the history behind why certain things work the way they do or whether those reasons still make sense. I find this to be very satisfying work, as it allows me to throw in my experience and my odd hour of hacking time and make a meaningful difference. This got me thinking that it would be awesome if we could re-activate some of the other old KDE hands to help make our next generation PIM infrastructure and apps all that they can be. So this is a call to arms for the KDE veterans, whether they've worked on PIM in the past or not. You all know KMail and friends very well, you know deep down you really wanna be coding again, at least a bit, and you all want KDEPIM to rock the world again. The platform and tools are excellent to work with, these days, and the code base is pretty clean and modular. The community is large and friendly, it's an enthusiastic and highly motivated group that is a joy to be around. So saddle up, you weary warriors, and ride with us once again ;). Read More

As already mentioned, I have this certain tool in works that can do various magic when it comes to creating packages, especially for people who have no idea how to do them themselves. And since Read More

KOffice is a huge chunk of a code and a whole family of subprojects. Multiply this by (growing!) number of supported operating systems. Then you get the idea: yes, we need your help with maintining the newly created UserBase page on where to find KOffice software. Read More

It is interesting to notice what is sometimes seen as difficult. "It's too hard for me, I can't do that." "I'll never be able to do that, that's nothing for me." Like if most things could be done instantly just by snapping one's fingers. They instead require all these tedious things like effort, trying, learning, practicing and so on. The funny thing is, figuring out things in the IT area is not really that demanding. Wanna write a Plasma applet? There's a step-by-step tutorial at Techbase, just follow it blindly and with a decent skill in reading and typing, tadda, there's a Plasma applet. Wanna a package in the build service? You can use another one as a template, find a tutorial on the wiki or just google for it, and if you'll be just a little lucky, a tool can even do the work for you. Read More

Hi, this year I'll be again at Akademy, for me it will be the third time after Dublin and Mechelen. I'm already looking forward to meet all you KDE guys again :-) Read More

Today was a day of style in the OdfKit Hack Week. Enjoying the sun with style. Watching a soccer game with style. Watching the chicken spagetti races with style and most importantly adding a touch of style to OdfKit cum suis. Read More

It's Friday and day three of the OdfKit Hack Week. So what did we do all day besides folding balloons, talking to men in wooden shoes and eating pancakes? We actually implemented the style inheritance I blogged about yesterday. Background images are now supported too. There was some philosophizing over APIs and we published some code (recommended if are interested in (Qt)WebKit or ODF). Read More

Today is day 1 of of the OdfKit Hack Week. We wrote a list of things we want to achieve this week. In order to avoid embarrassment, we'll spare you the details and go straight through to an explanation of how you can use WebKit (or any modern browser) to visualize ODF documents. The general idea is to incorporate the ODF XML into a live HTML document. Step 0: load content and styles into an HTML document ODF files come in two flavors: single XML files and XML files in ZIP containers. Most people use the ZIP form exclusively. In both cases there are two XML elements of importance: <document-content/> and <document-styles/>. These are comparable to HTML and CSS respectively. We'll avoid the details of how we load these elements into the DOM tree for now and simply state that we have two javascript variables: var documentcontents; var documentstyles; Step 1: put the document contents in the web page. Let's start from a simple HTML document with a <div/> element where the ODF element <document-content/> can be imported. Read More

Some things are really really tiny details, yet they can be annoying in way. Something that's been occassionally bugging me is that fact that KDE uses the same wallpaper as KDM background, the splashscreen background and desktop background, yet depending on the screen resolution it may not be exactly the same background - during login the picture may stretch or shrink at certain points. The times when decent monitor screens had a 4:3 ratio are a thing of the past, starting with LCD makers making 5:4 "narrow-screens", then changing their minds and making 16:10 or 16:9 wide-screens. The choice of screen resolutions is not that limited either and that means that the wallpaper has to be scaled ... and that was the problem. Plasma has code to select how to do the scaling, KSplashX has code for that and KDM has code for that, and yes, you guessed it, it's always a different code. So unlucky resolutions get different wallpapers from different code. Since I actually spent some time in the past trying to make the login as seamless as possible, this indeed made me twitch whenever I saw it. Read More

OdfKit is a project that reuses WebKit technology in a toolkit for working with ODF office documents. KO GmbH is sponsored by NLnet to work on OdfKit for three months. This week, Chani, who is on her way to Akademy, is working with me on OdfKit and since she's here an entire week, we're calling it OdfKit Hack Week. Read More