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I've been in Berlin since Thursday, where we're having a meeting and hacking session about language bindings and Kross scripting. I like Berlin - it's a bit like Amsterdam - plenty of hippies on bicyles although without the canals, the Dutch or the narrow buildings. Read More

I got some Ruby Plasma bindings working a while ago. They wrapped the complete C++ api and allowed you to write a Plasma KDE plugin entirely in Ruby, which just looked like an ordinary C++ plugin to the Plasma runtime. However, that isn't the preferred way to implement non-C++ language support in Plasma. Read More

The first day of the KDE-Bindings / Kross Meeting in Berlin at the KDAB Office is still going on. After starting slowly this morning, because of staying up very late after having fun at a restaurant here in this area where were waiting for all the people to gather together, we caught up very quickly with doing bugfixing and discussions about how to plug hot technologies together. Which ended up with a commit by Richard Dale who made an impressive demo on how to create a smoke lib and a ruby extension within 20 minutes. The example allows to script Ruby applications using QtScript. In the afternoon and evening we had presentations about the particular projects and languages of the developers, from Lua, Python, Ruby, C# and PHP to the Kross Framework and Kross Plugins as for KDevelop or Krita. So far I can tell this meeting seems to be coming together well, and we are all looking forward to having fun during the next day or two and end up filled with new ideas and solutions.

Like every year, so far, and as befits a patron of KDE, KDAB is covering the travel and lodging expenses of all KDABians who want to attend Akademy. Yeah, for Kalle :). A few of the KDE folks in KDAB have chosen to stay behind, this year, and keep the customers happy, but most of us will be there. The current list includes myself, David Faure, Kevin Ottens, Laurent Montel, Andras Mantia, Volker Krause, Pradeepto Bhattacharya, Thomas Moenicke, Thomas McGuire, Andreas Hartmetz and Marc Mutz. We thought of renting a bus, collecting everyone in Berlin and then driving over, but the logistical aspects of that seemed dauting, for a bunch of geeks. So planes and trains it'll be. The talk schedule looks particularly interesting this year, but the best thing, as always, will be to catch up with old friends, make new ones and generally hang around the nicest, smartest, most enthusiastic and engaging group of people ever. Magically diverse, but filled with a common spirit and love, this community continues to fascinate and inspire me, as it does, I'm sure, all of my colleagues. See you soon, at Sint-Katelijne-Waver.

Our famous Oxygen folks have brought a taste of things to come for the weather plasmoid. This mockup is a work in progress. Credit goes to Pinheiro and Lee Olson from Oxygen for getting things started! Read More

Thank $DEITY for feature freezes. It's only after the bulk of the KDE libraries are frozen that bindings people can come into action and franticly update everything before the RCs and the final release of a shiny new version of KDE. It's not much time and it only takes a last minute update to one of the C++ headers in the KDE break the bindings build. (That is the risk you run when you use almost every part of an API). But I can report that Python support is ready for 4.1. yippie! \o/ Read More

It's been a long time since my last entry here, so I think I'll start by giving an update of my life lately. I've been a bit away from KDE development for too long (but not from the KDE community fortunately). Some of you probably know what it's like: long work weeks that makes the recent EU proposal of a 65 hours work week look as a game (my personal record is around 96 work hours in a week and never below 50 hours), deadlines, more deadlines ... you know how it goes. Read More

As we near the first release ever of KDE-PIM for KDE4, I want to take this opportunity to thank the many folks who helped the kdepim team move to a stable release in a short 6 months. Read More

I took a sneak peek at Kdevelop. I did so before, but after waiting a month or two and reading Andreas' announcement I was curious to see the progress. I've been impressed at how great the definition-use-chain (that David Nolden is working on) is becoming (it seems to know more about my code than I do ;)). Hovering over a variable highlights all occurrences of it, pretty helpful sometimes. It gives you auto-completion, shows all uses of a function and probably does a whole lot more fancy stuff that I haven't discovered yet. [image:3547] Another thing I that is extremely useful is the quick open (file/class/function) dialog which helps jumping around in the code. This is already available in Kdevelop 3 though I never noticed until it was demonstrated to me. Some easy-to-remember key combo like ctrl-alt-m will take you there, just give it a try. The Kate part is very nice, though it's a bit too color full maybe. I've been taught to choose cmake and simply point to the root folder of my project and let Kdevelop do its magic. Adding a build folder will allow compilation too. With the new version it is possible to have more than one project open at the same time. That rocks. There are lots of things that are not done yet. The class view for example opens the declaration instead of definition of a function by default. But I could already use it productively :) I chose the smallest project I could think of - the soc branch containing only Parley and its lib. I decided to be brave and let the entire project be parsed in the background. That option is off by default and already took quite some time on the few files I have, so that might be a wise default. Usually Kdevelop parses files as they are opened and at reasonable speed too and then goes for the includes. Nice! Keep up the good job Kdevelop guys, I'm really happy to see Kdevelop taking shape! Useless proclaimers are fun and useless, so here it goes: Kdevelop is in alpha state, so unless you have strong nerves and a reflex to save every minute, you'll have to step in and get Kdevelop ready (or wait a little longer). Testing the new Kdevelop I finally got around to fix a bug in the Parley summer of code branch. Since I introduced it, I guess it's only fair that I fixed it ;) Read More

As a next step in my SoC project this week I've worked on getting Plasma to run on a maemo based device. Getting KDE compiled for this platform provided some new challenges, mainly caused by the old compiler used by its SDK (gcc 3.4.4), but apart from some compiler issues I didn't have many problems to get it to compile. Overall compiling stuff for maemo seems a lot easier that cross-compiling it for openmoko, as the scratchbox environment maemo uses nicely hides all the complicated cross-compiling issues, so it appears as if you're compiling normally (scratchbox even transparently uses qemu to run any ARM binaries that are build and used in the same build process). Read More