KDE Blogs 

KOffice has the potential to be a widely used office suite. One of the requirements for user adoption is good support for popular file formats and most presentations are available as Powerpoint presentations. KOffice uses ODF as native format. There is an import filter for PowerPoint presentations in KOffice which is currently incomplete. At KO, we are working to improve this situation. Read More

I've been improving the .doc import of KWord over the last couple of months (besides working on tables) I must say it has been quite a dramatic improvement. From having each paragraph being loaded onto each own page with the formatting all wrong, no tables, page size wrong, and many other bugs all over, I'm pleased to say that I'll this weekend give the .doc import a real world test, as I'll be conducting a 2,5 hour lecture using KWord to go through a 40 page document with tables, images inside tables, pagebreaks and lots of formatting. Read More

I'm just back in from the first day the openSUSE conference. The day started badly when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming that OpenOffice ate my presentation (again), but it was still there when I resumed my laptop and so I biked the 5km into the Berufsförderungswerk Nuernberg, the technical college where the conference is a guest. A good number of people were in for Lenz Grimmer's keynote on virtual development teamwork, which was a relief, then I sat in for a bit of the openSUSE Weekly News talk by Sascha Manns. Running a news magazine is an important and demanding part of a project's internal and external communications and I'm grateful that Sascha and team put in the effort, and hope they get more contributors. Then I earwigged at the back of the GNOME team meeting, while Andy Wafaa demoed me the SUSE Goblin image. It's impressively polished and will give the Plasma netbook interface a tough act to follow. Read More

So, after far too long, TagLib 1.6 is out. I finally asked Lukáš Lalinský, who's been the largest TagLib contributor other than myself and veteran of the MusicBrainz project, to step in and take over maintainership as I've been off doing the whole interwebs startup thing for the last year and change and time is exceedingly scarce of late. Read More

While sipping from a Vignes de Nicole and nibbiling on some Heukäse, I am thinking about Wine. Not the liquid version, but the software project. As a reader of Linux Weekly News, I noticed that the Wine project makes very frequent releases. I looked up its release history and saw that Wine has made a developer release every fortnight for the last four years. The 11 years before that the releases were approximately monthly. Each of these development releases comes with an announcement with a long list of the changes that happened in these two weeks. This dedication is due to Alexandre Julliard who has made all of those releases. Read More

This weekend I have been bitten by some singletons. They have annoyed me so much that I am writing this blog about them. I will expose the singleton as a dangerous construct. Tempting, but dangerous. Read More

Ubuntu Developer Week is under way with a whole week of IRC sessions on a range of development topics. Me and Aurelien are running a Write-Your-First-Plasmoid session at 20:00UTC today. See you in #ubuntu-classroom

KDE 4.3 is out, I'm vacationed, and now is a good time to explain share same of the things I would like to get done in PyKDE for KDE 4.4. Read More

To be honest I'm not all that happy with the current situation. Riverbank Computing, basically Phil Thompson, has done an excellent job developing SIP and PyQt over the last 10 years and providing a Free Software (GPL) version which PyKDE is built on. Phil has also done an excellent job of providing answers to my queries, basically as a free service to KDE and the FOSS community. Having two competing Python bindings for Qt is a waste of resources and is generally disruptive to the community at large. Seeing the future of Riverbank and the good working relationship between it and KDE jeopardised is not something that appeals to me. I am disappointed that no kind of cooperative agreement could be reached between Nokia and Riverbank Computing. Read More

Recently, let's say in the past year, I saw a growing number of email messages on the KDE lists with the following content only: +1 This is getting annoying for me. I get a nice notification from KMail about the messages arrived, and if I saw that it came to some folder that I'm interested in, I look at the message. And many times it contains nothing, but a +1. I can understand the urge to express support for an idea, a person, but please, think about it twice before doing so. These days it is not about abusing my / the worlds bandwidth, as we use more to share "stuff", it is about abusing the time of the readers. Read More