KDE Blogs 

This weekend I visited my parents in law, because my wifes paternal grandmother celebrated her 90th birthday. I noticed that the laptop they use was still running Kubuntu Feisty with OpenOffice 2.2. On this machine, reading emails, managing photos, surfing the internet and working on office documents are most important. Digikam is used for photos. Kmail and konqueror from KDE 3.5 are installed and a mix of OpenOffice and Microsoft Office 97 on wine is in use for editing office documents. in short, a horribly outdated setup of more than two years old. IT is still moving fast. Feisty was not a long term release and no updates for it anymore. Read More

One important feature for photo management is missing in the FOSS world:an application for creating photo albums that can be sent away for printing at a printing service. There is however a pretty slick closed source application that works on linux. It can be fiound at for example Pixum (also in.nl and .de). It is based on Qt 4.4 and installs using a perl script which downloads the artwork and the required libraries. The application is customized for different printing companies that have these customized downloads available from their website. Not all of them offer the linux or even the macintosh version. This is a shame and probably done to limit the number of different questions users might have. A standard for these photo album ordering services would be great, but I'm not holding my breath and will recommend Pixum for now. Read More

Kubuntu 9.10 CDs are now available for pre-order on the Kubuntu Shipit site. Can't wait a month for the CD to be delivered? Download the release candidate now for one last round of testing. Thanks to everyone who helped test the RC releases, see you again next week for the real thing! Read More

Amazing Blog This is the amazing idea that came with Amanda from the new local KDE-MG group. Simple, beatifull and the most interesting way to get conference people to enjoy your booth, put his ideas out of the mind and getting everyone close. At this picture, you see Tomaz ( no tap dance included ), and the board, saying ODEIO ( I Hate ) on left and AMO ( I Love ) and everyone can express their feeling about our beloved project where we can improve it or not, writing a note, whatever you want to write. Our small booth is really more interesting:-) Right now, i'm in the talk table to introduce Anne-Marie in her's bugsquad presentation ! Later will talk more about our second Latinoware experience, getting better and better... Ahh, i forgot to say, there's a nice tipical "Minas Gerais" prize waiting for one of the guys writing the note ! Read More

All hands on deck for the release candidate CD (and DVD and USB and upgrades) testing day. See the ISO tracker for what needs tested (duplicates tests always welcome) and join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate.

You may remember two of my recent blogs. One was about a project to parse powerpoint files and another one was about porting hexdump to the browser. So how about a combination of those two topics: parsing powerpoint files in the browser. It is quite a feasible task. The powerpoint file format is largely described in an xml schema now. From this scheme one would need to generate a parser like there is for c++ and java already. The parsers for java and c++ are both less then 700 lines of code. Read More

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