KDE Blogs 

A feature that has been floating around in a few places but hasn't been a significant feature in KDE is web slicing. This is the ability to take a piece of a web page (commonly a div) and render it as a standalone object. It's useful for stuff like putting a weather forcast on your desktop, watching new comments on a forum etc. This weekend I made a start on implementing it as tool for Project Silk. Read More

This Sunday, I gave a presentation at UbuCon 2009, the German Ubuntu Developers and Users conference, held at the wonderful historic town of Göttingen, in northern Germany. The conference covers a variety of distribution development topics, with about 250 participants, and a 5-track presentation schedule (!). The talk I submitted was about a topic that fascinates me a lot lately - the convergence of Free Software desktop technologies under the hood, which makes Qt developers get in touch with GTK based technologies more and more, and vice versa, and about our experience at KDAB with developing such technologies. It was called "Qt for GTK Developers", purposefully slightly on the provocative side, with a smirk. After all, I am used to working in areas with unusual risk conditions, so why the heck not? Also, this comes not even close to the stress levels created by parenting. The talk was about how Qt and GTK are both used for developing base desktop services, which toolkit dominates in what areas, and what our guesses are on what the future brings. The central part was an overview of Qt technologies and practises, presented in contrast to GTK. The talk consisted of four sections dubbed "Everything was better in the old days", "Everyone does what he wants", "Qt is not what it used to be", and "This is as good as it gets". There were quite a few good laughs between the audience and me. Read on for more details. Read More

Not at the Akonadi sprint. Shame! (You can find Tom's blog about it here and here) Missing out on the API discussions would have been already bad enough, missing the presentation of my GSoC student and not getting to meet Brad Hards sucks. Read More

Since it seems it will turn up quite often, I would like to answer the question 'Will openSUSE 11.2 include KDE 4.3.2?'. The short answer is no and yes :). The 4.3.2 release of KDE came too late to be included in openSUSE 11.2. As the distribution release gets closer, there is a certain point after which only reviewed changes should be allowed in, in order to reduce the possibility of these changes causing unexpected breakages that might go unnoticed within the relatively short time until the release. This can happen and it wouldn't be very good to fix something small and break something bigger for the release because of some unnoticed mistake. So openSUSE 11.2 will not officially include KDE 4.3.2. Read More

So some already heard the news, but just today i felt that is time to push my own message. After 10 and a half years, i'm leaving Conectiva and of course Mandriva. Among all this years i shared all the up and downs, saw literally hundreds of colleagues leave company in all sort of situations, saw company evolution from a linux box distro to a major world linux developer, survived position changes, office changes, even building changes. As everyone that lived all the past and current histories knows that are all to stay for life. I arrived at Conectiva to do one of amazing hard work, which is convert an migrate the first ATM machines in the world from DOS to Linux in a stupid very short time ( bank is well know as Banrisul and you can see many pictures allover the web ). Guess what, still works, and you can see application running as today, with all post revisions. And i joined later the corporate development team at Conectiva. But was my post assignment that created my real meaning in FLOSS, when i joined the distribution team ( the distro !! ). I will not deny that much of what i learn until now came from the guys there, some of then today found in companies that already are or starting to grow and learn FLOSS. And was there that i get my real love for code, and in special some desktop interface called KDE. Same thing that bring me to know the world, and many friends. From there to now, i've been doing so many things is FLOSS that i really loose track. But this is a not ended history :-) At Conectiva, would be unfare to say thanks for a specific person, since was not a workplace, was a family, as disfunctional with good and bad days family. But survivors. And to Mandriva french friends, i have special thanks for Anne ( extended to her husband Erwan ) that welcome us in a moment that lot of people at .br are having doubts if merge would work and mostly to received me at their home as close friends, even with a surprise invitation to their wedding. And to Blino too, since he was a party buddy and good support at .fr side. ( yes,PLF people, i will not forget you, so no hunting me please :-). And i can say that KDE will be in very good hands at Mandriva starting November... Read More

Nokia has been kind enough for lending me an awesome N900. This will allow me to test KOffice on the phone. Document loading, parsing and scrolling speed could do with improvements. Read More

I was most surprised when the PySide Python bindings project was announced a few weeks ago. Simon Edwards wrote that "To be honest I'm not all that happy with the current situation." Meanwhile, I wasn't too happy that they had worked for eight months in secret without talking to the KDE bindings community either. I think that the PyQt/PyKDE bindings are very high quality and really well maintained, but if someone insists there really must be an LPGL'd Python binding, I personally would much prefer that it was based on 'Smoke'. Read More

Now you can't say anymore you didn't noticed the download was already completed :) We show this only if the KGet window is not active. This is the only small "feature" I recently added. In fact most of my work has been related to making kget more usable and more stable. Ah, BTW, can't make it crash anymore... Please please make it crash otherwise we'll think it's already stable! :). Enjoy!

Yesterday nokia gave away 300 pre-production n900 devices to all attendants of this years Maemo summit in Amsterdam (in the form of a six months loan, after that they'll have to go back to Nokia). I'm also attending, so I also got one. Deciding what the first thing to port to a new device is is always hard, but in the end I figured that something with plasma might be nice. As maemo5 makes it possible for home-screen widgets to be part of separate processes, I figured it might be possible to adapt plasmoidviewer to act as a simple program to put any type of plasma applet on the normal maemo desktop (actually, I think it was somebody else that suggested this, I just don't remember who it was). So after several hours of hacking (and a lot more hours of compiling Qt and various parts of kde (btw, the just released Qt 4.6 maemo5 technology preview is missing some essential bits like for example qdbuscpp2xml), I managed to figure out just exactly how to get the window to appear on the normal desktop as a widget. At first this didn't look to pretty as you can see in this screenshot: Read More

Since today is the big day when KDE trunk starts to depend on Qt 4.6, Raymond Wooninck (tittiatcoke), community packaging hero, has worked to provide packages of the unreleased Qt 4.6 in the openSUSE Build Service. Read More