KDE Blogs 

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

Can Ruby do for Qt and KDE application development what it did with Rails for web development? With the Qt on Rails project we're attempting to achieve this - using the clean domain logic and conventions of Rails combined with the brilliant application framework and widget set of Qt. An early 0.1 version has just been released; rough around the edges but enough to show the potential of the idea. We've focused on making Qt on Rails easy to install so that you can experiment with it for yourself. Now that it's easy to do so, go do it! We need your help and ideas! Read More

This is my first blog entry about my GSoC project for Krita. Because i was busy doing a school project until June 11, i actually began working on the transformation tool last week. The aim was to rewrite most parts of the old transformation tools, in order to continue the project on a solid base, and with my own code, to make the job easier. I also wanted to make the tool perform transformations in real time, not just when the user releases the mouse button. Read More

The pictures say it all. If not, see here and here. As always all that would not happen without organizers: Alexandra and Inge!

Kubuntu Tutorials Day is back, and this time it's with special guest star speakers. Incase you missed it in previous years (check out the logs, there's some interesting sessions in there), Kubuntu Tutorials Day is a few hours of interactive IRC sessions on topics around Kubuntu and KDE development. If you've always wanted to get started in helping out Kubuntu or programming in Qt this is the perfect opportunity. Read More

When I started blogging in the end of last year, I thought I would write much more frequently than I do: if only I had better marketing abilities, there would certainly be many more posts about what's going on the Ark, KDE's beloved archive manager, and KDE on FreeBSD fronts. At least I seem to be in good company in the occasional bloggers department. :) Read More

After all the blogging about our (as in KDE PIM developers) Akonadi porting, I thought I'll address a couple of things other application developer might consider for the next release cycle. Read More