KDE Blogs 

In an attempt to follow up on my blog about Akonadi porting xplained I am going to write about Akonadi migration. It is basically the data storage related cousin of porting: Porting is, as we learned, about adapting applications to a new way of handling data. Migration is about adapting data to new ways of being accessed. Read More

The Smoke based QtScript bindings are progressing well, and are now called 'JSmoke' in the style of 'JQuery' the JavaScript library or 'JScript' the .NET JavaScript implementation. In KDE promo-like words, I hope this will 'raise the brand recognition' of the state of the art KDE Smoke dynamic language bindings technology. Read More

Today we enjoy 11th anniversary of disclosure of Microsoft's best business and development practices: The concept has been reportedly in development since early 90-ies: The practical and consistent extension of that achievement is introduction of the MSOOXML format: It is not compatible with ISO standard Office Open XML But those that use MS Office exclusively and upgrade frequently do not really care; moreover it is not a problem even for them to hear the mistyped OpenOffice XML name from time to time Office Open XML unlike MSOOXML has no implementation so far It is not clear whether Office Open XML is even implementable because of contradicting parts There is no something like MSOOXML specifications, instead there is something like "report from the current state of implementation", which has already been updated at least once and will be again for MS Office 2010 MSOOXML is advertised as a dump of the binary DOC/XLS/PPT formats into the XML layer, and thus is a great advantage according to the creators The advantage is so big that as authors suggest, breaking XML principles is not a big problem (there is no known attempt to address the issues) Since MSOOXML, unlike ODF, was created behind closed doors, there was no planned or possible harmonization between the two; now since it is too late (there are implementations of ODF and MSOOXML) "interoperability" term is the new modern buzzword, but at least in Poland noone knows what this word really means (and yes, this is an apparent advantage) For making the binary->XML dump extensive documentation of the former was needed; so since finally Microsoft created docs, and the binary formats got declared as obsolete anyway, publishing is a double PR win ("we are so open", and "we're now OK in court cases") The binary DOC/XLS/PPT formats are now somewhat documented in the public but this is not the end of the story. I've been mentioning this before and I'll trow this chair again: there are still MS Access file formats, as closed as in 1992, except for the huge work of never finished reverse-engineering. The current attitude is as follows: Read More

For quite some time almost every blog by a KDE PIM developer is about Akonadi in one for or the other, often about "Akonadi porting" or "porting to Akonadi". Akonadi itself can already be difficult to explain, combined with "porting" it probably has only meaning left if you are a developer. Read More

I just have to say it, I'm thoroughly impressed by Burkhard Lück's determination to improve the user-documentation of KDE applications (particularly the kdebase ones). This is much needed, a huge undertaking, and probably also not very rewarding work. This being said, I'm sure he would appreciate some help -- if you can speak English (you can, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) and want to contribute to the KDE documentation, subscribe to the kde-doc-english mailing-list :)

Recently a number of nice coincidences happened: I received my second-hand Intuos3 A5 tablet just day before the new shiny Qt 4.6 has landed with QTouchEvent (among many other features). Also I conducted my 3+ hours of trainings on APIs designing to my coworkers (based on Jasmin's document) just week before we had some essential KOffice APIs discussions based on the same material thanks to Olivier Goffart (QtDF). Read More

The Ubuntu Developer Summit happened in Dallas last week with 200 developers from every part of Ubuntu as well as upstreams and hardware vendors around. Naturally the best looking of the lot was the Kubuntu contributors who turned up to discuss the next six months in the world's finest KDE distribution. The Lucid Lynx will be a Long Term Support edition and it's exciting that KDE 4 is now at a stage of maturity where this will be possible to do for the first time. LTS means fixing, completing and assuring over and above any new features. The Doctor is in the house. Read More

If you've been paying attention at the back there, you'll know that openSUSE started using a new community-driven online update administration process for 11.2. As well as Novell employees, community people are taking care of the workflow of examining and approving online updates to buggy packages. Now I have a favour to ask of you - the online updates that are ready to go out need testing to make sure they don't inflict gross mischief on users' systems. Read More

So, openSUSE 11.2 is out, and that means a lot of people start using it and, well, occassionally run into bugs and sometimes even report them. As much as 11.2 appears to be a fine release, this is bound to happen now too, and that means that the number of KDE bugreports for openSUSE in the Novell bugzilla will grow again and will need to be handled. Read More

If you have no idea what this means, don't worry, neither do I. What I do know, however, is that a lot of people around KMail and are extremely happy about this :) Read More