KDE Blogs 

I'm back from the awesome Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. It feels good to be back in Berlin and with my family, but I'm very scared of the backlog that now awaits me. Before I tackle it (and potentially blog more about the event) I need to get something off my chest, lest it is forgotten. I'd like to publicly thank Klaas Freitag, who's term as a member of the KDE e.V. board of directors just ended with our general assembly a few days ago, for his contribution to our project. He stepped up to help out with the more mundane and every-day tasks that are required of the board, thus freeing up people like our beloved bouncing ball and poster boy Aaron (who's term also ended, but who'll get plenty credit anyway ;) to do what they do best. I really admire the effective, quiet and ego-less way in which Klaas has carried himself and represented us. He's done a lot of work behind the scenes that benefits KDE greatly and helped get e.V. and its operational side up to a sustainable level. So thank you very much, Klaas, and enjoy the extra time you can hopefully now spend with your family again. :) Read More

The main talks are over for Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and Akademy. Glyn Moody wins the prize for best keynote, I always did admire him as the only writer worth reading in Computer Weekly and he proved himself to be an inspirational but thoroughly grounded speaker. I spent much of the time running between rooms manning three of the video camers, and at times acting as session chair too. Nobody from Gnome volunteered to help out so their videos will be badly cut in places, eventually Robert Knight was good enough to help. Running around gave me a good feel for a lot of the talks which were varied and interesting. Turns out there is more to Gnome 3 than cleaning up some APIs (infact GTK 3 may not happen in time for Gnome 3 although nobody seemed to be sure). Marble had the most bling demo and now features other planets too. The Plasma Netbook talk was interesting, the developers have done a lot of research into the user interface possibilities, they critised the Ubuntu Netbook setup for only using the desktop as a simple launcher and not anything else it could be used for (of course this is changing, it'll be integrating Plasma soon). The track on money in free software gave various thoughts: Till had the problem of KDAB hiring all the PIM maintainers so there is the danger that nobody is left to maintain the bits they are not so interested in, the Amarok guys seem unsure how to get started making money although they seem to have plenty of ideas on it, and Frank Karlichek announced the openDesktop.org App Store which will be an interesting experiment in making money by selling binaries. Read More

I noticed yesterday that at the kde-apps.org page for WMIface, a tool that allowed scripting the window manager used by KDE3 from command line, a comment appeared asking about a version for KDE4. It felt like a good idea to do something as simple as this in the evening as a relaxation, so, after quite some time playing with C++ templates and so on (since I'm a lazy developer and therefore I went with doing some extra work that would save me from doing work), I have to disappoint you. There is no version specifically for KDE4. In order to reduce the dependencies I made it depend on just QtCore and X11 libs, with those few important classes from kdeui copied into the project. No KDE dependency whatsoever. This provides the CLI tool with startup time decent enough for direct usage, and makes it usable on every system, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, whatever. Read More

Hello everybody, I should introduce myself first: I am Ramón Zarazúa, I am a GSOC student working on C++ refacoring support for KDevelop. I am very pleased to be contributing to KDE and the community, and want to make us the best we can be! Read More

Indeed, I've got good, no, very good news from Real Life ! :-) About one month ago me and Antje married, so she is now Mrs. Neundorf :-) The weather that day was slightly rainy and misty in the morning, but became better as soon as we were married, and we had a great party in the evening with our relatives and friends :-) Read More

The Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria is very enjoyable. The conference center is very luxurious. It comes with uniformed assistants in every presentation room helping by changing the name signs and refreshing the water. The main conference hall has a wonderful view on the ocean. There are people from KDE, GNOME and many other projects here, so there are many interesting people that I have not met before. The conference is located near the ocean, so attendees can go swimming for lunch. The talks are all recorded with the slides as insets, so if you are not here or cannot attend two talks at the same time, you can view the talks later. Read More

What Hot Tub Magazine, the magazine for the discerning Kubuntu contributor. The things you find in airport lounges...

One question I've seen come up several times on #qt and qt-interest is how to add custom (application specific) APIs to those available by default in QtWebKit. This is actually pretty easy (once you know how) as I'll show below. This post will show a simple example of how to make an object available from javascript, including calling methods on the object and returning values from C++. Read More

KDE's conference opened today after the Canonical sponsored party last night. The location is superb, the auditorium is massive and right next to the beach. The people as always are the highlight with more than twice as many as usual. The hotel is nice too with our rooftop penthouse suite. Read More

If you're a developer interested in RSS in KDE (and maybe you are at GCDS right now), please scroll to the end. Akregator development was slowed down for quite some time: The development team was basically reduced to one person, me, and I had not much time for it. That's why Akregator only slowly recovered from porting regressions introduced during the KDE4 port. Also, the article storage layer showed its limitations (see startup time and memory consumption) and the metakit backend implementation lacks robustness, thus it became clear that something must happen to make both the user experience pleasant and hacking Akregator fun again. Another long outstanding wish of mine was to decouple feed list handling and item storage from the core Application to a central desktop service, to make both accessible to other applications without the need to run Akregator. Read More