Hideous GTK themes in KDE4 sessions.

For some time, GTK apps running inside my KDE4 session would not pick up their theme properly, making them look hideous in their default theme. I'm using a small wrapper script (/usr/local/bin/startkde4) to get my KDE4 desktop up and running. Since I've put the "unset GTK2*" line into the script, GTK apps pick their theme again:

#!/bin/sh

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/kdedev/kde/lib
export KDEDIR=/home/kdedev/kde
export PATH=$KDEDIR/bin/:$PATH
export KDEHOME=~/.kde4

unset GTK2_RC_FILES

. /home/kdedev/kde/bin/startkde

Hope this tip keeps someone from tearing out hair. :)

[ Thu, 08 May 2008 12:58:09 +0200 ] permanent link

Non-linear animations in KWin.

Some time ago I've done a proof-of-concept how one can make KWin's compositing effects use non-linear timelines. Before that, a KWin animation would feel a bit static. Think of minimising a window. It would abruptly start moving at a constant speed and stop at some point in the same, abrupt way. Now we have a wonderful class in Qt, called QTimeLine that provides some additional curveshapes, making it easier to show accelerated or slowing down movements. After some discussions on the KWin mailinglist, I've implemented a smallish wrapper class around QTimeLine that is tailored towards the needs of KWin's effects.
After review by Mr KWin, Lubos, I've committed it to KDE's SVN last Friday, and along with it 'port' of the minization, the desktop grid and the coverswitch effect. Making those effects use the new KWin::TimeLine class wasn't hard at all (well, modulo on where I needed some help ;-)). In fact, the coverswitch effect was done in 5 minutes during the last beer of the Tokamak Plasma sprint. Now at least those three effects feel more natural, less static. More effects will be ported later on, if you want to get your hands dirty, feel free to have a look at it.

During the last week, we've done some more polishing to KWin effects. Aaron has made the coverswitch effect more beautiful, and made the mousemark one (the one that shows stars revolving around your mousepointer) a bit less jumpy -- it now 'feels' like it's always revolving, but not always shown -- and not 'start at position 0 whenever shown'. Last night I've excluded some window types from the brand-spanking-new Wobbly Windows effect in KWin. Previously, menu would wobble as they pop up, making for a hectic user experience when opening various menus in short order. It seems that not all Windows know what they are, but at least having it working for menus is quite an improvement already.
I've also made windows become translucent as they are being minimised, making it look a bit fancier.

Hacking on KWin is actually a lot of fun. You can do a lot with very little, the code in most of the effects is (at least partly) easy to understand and modify, and the results are very visible, which I think is a good motivator.

[ Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:03:42 +0200 ] permanent link

We broke Plasma.

After Alexis has torn Plasma into pieces yesterday, some brave individuals svn up'ed, rebuild kdebase and started putting the pieces backtogether. There are huge amounts of fallout right now, but we're getting closer to having some basic applets back. Currently digiclock, battery, kickoff kind of work (modulo some layout problems in the panel), taskbar at least compiles after some frenzy porting over the last hour. All this feels like a fast-track through the last year-and-a-half through Plasma development. I can remember very well when we first saw a panel and rudimentary clock appearing, the same happened today with much "ooooh" and "aaah" ... :-)

But Why? you might ask yourself, it started to look polished and now it's broken again. Well, Plasma in KDE 4.0 was based on Qt 4.3. Qt 4.3 lacked the widgets-on-canvas support Qt 4.4 has. That means that layout managers and widgets had to be written from scratch for 4.0. Now KDE's trunk/ requires Qt 4.4, including the widgets-on-canvas (WoC) support, we're able to use QWidgets, and maybe more important Qt's layoutmanagers in Plasma applets and containments such as the panel. So we were able to remove large parts of code in favour of using Qt's functionality -- less maintainence burden, less bugs, less memory consumption and all that included.

And while that fixing of the WoC fallout happens, the next round of breakage is on the horizon: Kevin, Richard and Aaron and The WhiteBoard have gone through all the classes in libplasma in order to polish that, remove braindeadness and a couple WTF's in the code. The plasma API should become much more intuitive, easy to use and future-proof. The downside being another round of breakage and fixing all over the codebase. We expect the results of the API review to hit trunk/ later this week -- including the breakage it introduces. After that, we hope that libplasma is stable enough to have it move over to kdelibs, currently that's planned for the 4.2 timeframe. I've put the results of the API review online. As to the "Which face does this SVN account belong to?", that'll come later. Besides a working desktop, one needs something to look forward to. :P

So if you've compiled trunk/ after yesterday and wondered what happened and why someone visually bombed it back into the stone-age (last year ;-)), now you know why :-) If you want to help fixing up things, update trunk/, join #plasma on freenode like others do and fix obvious breakage. It's not necessarily hard, but there's quite some code crunching involved. Do tell others on IRC what you're fixing so duplicate work is prevented. Looking at the current flurry of patches gives you a good idea what to replace with what.

[ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:08:34 +0200 ] permanent link

fkefer is out of laptop.

So after we worked on priorities thanks to our awesome Celeste, Franz Keferböck showed us his version of priorities. He visited us down here in Milano at the Tokamak Plasma Sprint, bringing Stevie, his girlfriend, a case of fine Austrian beer, but unfortunately he forgot his laptop at home. Now that's what I call priorities. :-)

[ Sun, 13 Apr 2008 03:37:14 +0200 ] permanent link

Lies, damn lies, ... .

... and statistics. Last week, I took a python script that I had written some time ago for CodeYard, modified it a bit and analysed some recent KDE subversion logs. I've taken a look at the number of commits in the KDE 4.0 branch, and a bit in trunk/. I've also compared number of authors and commits to the KDE and GNOME Subversion repositories since 2004. I'm discussing my findings below. Of course, being Free Software, research and all, I've put up the script and data so you can run with it and create your own reality.

This graph shows number of commits and authors in trunk since KDE 4.0.0 has been tagged. We see the this number is quite a bit higher than even the sum of bugfix and translation commits that has gone into the 4.0 branch. That, I think does reflect well that main development is taking place in trunk (no surprise there), and that trunk is probably quite a bit ahead (in terms of instability? :)) compared to 4.0-branch.

I do not quite understand the high number of commits in the 4.0-branch. I've fed the log starting with rev 757456 until HEAD to the script. I would've expected the number to be roughly the sum of 4.0.1, 4.0.2 and 4.0.3 logs. I wouldn't be surprised if there a bug in my datacollection script. Email me if you know what's going on there.

KDE and GNOME Compared

This graph gives a long-term impression of the number of commits and distinct authors per month in both, KDE and GNOME subversion repositories. Some observations:

• KDE and GNOME are pretty similar in size
• Only recently (roughly since the beginning of 2007, there's a real difference in the number of commits
• Since the beginning 2007, the number of KDE commits has grown by ~20%
• Lately, there seems to be more difference in the monthly numbers for GNOME
• Because the numbers have been so close to each other, it's looks like we're not competing, but that what's good for one is good for the other. So having GNOME doing well suggests that the climate for KDE is also friendlier. This has been less evident lately, however.
• The number of rises close to their six-monthly releases
• As of lately, the number of KDE commits is higher than the number of GNOME commits, GNOME has slightly more distinct authors monthly
• There is certainly no exponential growth in the number of Free Desktop developers. If we believe these number which obviously(*1) do not include third party authors (*1) not as long as I define "third party authors" as "those not developing their software in KDE's and GNOME's SVN repos" anyway :-)

KDE 4.0 Branch

Here we see the number of commits to the KDE 4.0 branch in Subversion. Two things are striking:

• The 4.0 branch is calming down. Reasons are probably that the more obvious bugs are fixed, and that more developers have switched to using trunk/ that is going to become 4.1 this summer. I would have expected such a trend.
• KHTML and KWin people are doing really well (and "Plasma-Ruphy" in 4.0.2), this is also reflected in recent changelogs. It doesn't say a lot about development progress, since the 4.0 branch is focusing bugfixes and performance improvements.

[ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:33:09 +0200 ] permanent link



A KDE Office.

KDE e.V. the foundation backing KDE legally, financially and in many different ways has traditionally been a very 'lean' organisation. In its first ten years, the KDE e.V. has been run by volunteers from the KDE community. This has lead to interesting situations in the past. Developers doing accounting is my favorite stupid thing (not because they're bad at it, they've done an awesome job) because we badly need those developers to work on KDE -- and it's probably not their favourite thing to do (not *my* favourite thing to do anyway).
So during the last years, we've worked towards stabilising KDE e.V.'s financial situation so it allows for a commitment, the commitment you need when someone becomes financially dependant on you. We've managed -- also thanks to our Patrons and Supporting Members -- to be confident about our situation, both organisationally and financially.

We had been in contact with Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. for some time already. It had been brought up earlier that our organisations are pretty similar in what we do (supporting a volunteer project in the Free Culture domain). It was also proposed to to share resources, such as an office. But we've been struggling for some time moving forward in this process. Those among the readers that went through their own start-up phase can probably tell you that getting the first employee is a pretty big step. We've mastered that now, and that's something we're very happy with.

The building in Frankfurt where Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is located had some spare rooms, most notably one adjacent to the Wikimedia office when a policy window opened. Wikimedia wanted to hire an administrative assistant, and that's also something we were looking for. In December, we've moved forward. Klaas and I travelled to Frankfurt (which is incidentally pretty much in the middle between Nürnberg and Nijmegen) to meet Claudia Rauch, a proposed candidate for the position of KDE Office Dudette. The vibes were good, her background consolidated that first feeling so we decided to go ahead. The situation now is the following: The official address of KDE e.V. has moved from Eva's private address to Frankfurt, Rödelheimer Bahnweg where our office is located. The office is run by Claudia who is hired part-time to support the KDE e.V. in mainly administrative things. The scope of her work can of course not be completely sure at this point. KDE e.V. is a quickly evolving organisation, and you never know tomorrow's challenges. Short- to mid-term, having an office and someone to run it will alleviate us of some of the more urgent administrative tasks. The "performance" of the KDE e.V. will improve through that. Now you ask yourself what this performance is, and rightfully so. It expresses in turnaround time for travel cost reimbursements and other administrative requests the KDE e.V. Board gets. It also means that we can offer some support to organisers of Akademy and other conferences and sprints. The office in Frankfurt will also be the new home of the KDE Boothbox, a rugged aluminium case with equipment one typically needs at events, such as demo systems, signage, cables, and so on. The boothbox has already found its way to Frankfurt. You can request to have it shipped to the event your planning to represent KDE at. This process has not always been as smooth as we would have wanted it to, but we hope for quick improvment now.

Next Thursday, I'll be travelling to Milano to take part in the first Plasma sprint ever, meeting some of the people I tend to be hacking with on the same projects. After that sprint Aaron, Peyton and me will be going to Frankfurt for a two-day Board meeting. That will be the first Board meeting hosted by ourselves. :-)

[ Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:37:48 +0100 ] permanent link



All ur ChangeLog r belong to us.

We (marketing / promo hat on) are right now trying to write the announcement for KDE 4.0.3, which will be released on April 2nd, a bit more than a week from now. Let's have a look at how this actually works, and zoom in on the bugfix / translation updates that 4.0.x releases are. The announcement is usually written by a subset of the Marketing Team, coordination takes place on the kde-promo mailinglist. On this list, people that are willing and able to write about KDE hang out. Those people are collecting information about those releases. For a big thing such as KDE 4.0, this is relatively easy, there's more than enough to talk about. For an update release (such as next week's) we're mostly relying on the changelog as raw material. We try to form an impression of what's happened in branch in that period, and munge that into something which is readable for human beings and provides a high-level summary for those that won't dive into details. Then, the original announcement version is written and ASAP (though usually too late) sent to the translation teams so we have a multi-language announcement ready on release day. The trade-off here is: Writing the announcement earlier, the changelog will be incomplete, but the translation teams get more time, so we end up having more and better translations on release day. Writing the announcement later, there's more in the changelog (although unfortunately not much more :/) but the translation teams have too little time, so we lack translations. Having a more complete changelog available earlier is the solution to this problem. So we need help from developers. Kudos at this point go out to the KHTML and Okular teams, who, from the top of my head, usually have done their changelog homework well.

For the lazy ones among us (most, assumably), here's what you do (assuming you use svn+ssh, https users will what to change):

svn co svn+ssh://svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/www/sites/www/announcements/changelogs
kwrite changelogs/changelog_branch_4_0.xml

Scroll down to a line that looks like , scroll down a bit more, to the part containing the module and product your changes went in, and add them. You can use the tags bugfix , improvement , feature or whatever is documented in the DOCS. In practise, it'll be a bit of copy/pasting. Commit your changes and have a smile on your face when you read about your improvements in the announcement a few days later. If you want to see what you've done, run the following on the changelog and see your changes put into the webpages:

xsltproc --stringparam outputversion "4.0.3" -o changelog4_0_2to4_0_3.php
changelog.xsl changelog_branch_4_0.xml


I think this ignoring of the changelog is a display of a culture that we see quite often within KDE. A culture that is very humble and fully concentrates on getting work done. Only in this case, it causes problems for others that also want to get their work (informing about KDE) done. So if you changed something in the KDE 4.0 branch between 27th of February and 26th March (this coming Wednesday) please support the Marketing Team's work by adding your change to the changelog. Remember, if a change is worth backporting, it's worth putting in the changelog. The more entries there are in the changelog, the more choice the Marketing Team has to streamline the message. Of course, also the 'raw' changelog will be available to the users, usually linked from the announcement on www.kde.org and multiple other sites reporting about KDE 4.0.3. Users will look for their pet issue being addressed. The Marketing Team does an awesome job in communicating what's happening (who doesn't love reading the Commit-Digest for example?), but they can't do that on their own. Please spend those 5 minutes and help your fellow gearhead.

[ Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:02:11 +0100 ] permanent link



A pink desktop.

During the release event in Mountain View, there was also a distro BoF where upstream told some KDE people about things they'd like to see in KDE. One of those things is that the desktop should be easy to brand. It should be easy to create a product out of KDE (which is really a raw product). Themability makes it easier to brand KDE in a way that reflects the Corporate or Community Identity of distributors.
In the screenshot you can see how far we've come along that way. Since the Fluffy Bunny theme has developed into some kind of running gag, I decided to make my desktop something that would make Mira say "I want KDE!". The result can be seen in the above screenshot. I've been using this setup for some days now, and I must say that, even while I'm not a huge fan of pink, it looks very slick and calm. It's definitely something I can work with.

So what can be seen in the screenshot? There's the Aya plasma theme which changes its look based on the system colors. We can hint SVG files used in the Plasma widgets and tell them something about the colorscheme in use. You see, the panel is also nicely pink, it just picks up the colorscheme that's setup in System Settings. Also, the first Plasma themes start to turn up so you already have some choice in creating the looks you want. Jeremy has just very recently added Get Hot New Stuff support to the "Configure Desktop" dialogue, so installing new themes is now very easy. The grumpy guy can see on the bottom left of the screenshot is Chuck Norris. While I'm also not particularly into Chuck Norris, it's actually very cool that Mr Norris made his way onto my desktop. It's not a Plasma applet, it's an OSX Dashboard widget. Yes, we can already load dashboard widgets onto our desktop, thanks to Zack and Aaron spending a couple of days (nights?) together hacking.
Then, not exactly Plasma, but still very cool is the hovering selection that's new in Dolphin (or more technical in KFileItemDelegate). On the screenshot you see that a few directories are selected. That would need to be done either by dragging a rubberband around them selecting, or by holding CTRL pressed and then clicking. "Desktop" is hovered when the screenshot has been taken. You see a small green + in the top left corner, click on that + and the directory is not opened, but selected. Click anywhere else on it, and it's opened. That makes it really easy to make and edit a selection.
A couple of days ago, a folder plasmoid has been started in KDE's playground in SVN. Fredrik Höglund is working on that. This plasmoid will probably make it possible to have multiple folders on the desktop. Plasma people don't like the idea of having the desktop only represent one directory on your system when you can have multiple of them.

And all that (and much, much more) has happened in just 2.5 months. In April, there will be a Plasma sprint in Milano where more coolness will be planned and implemented. Plasma is quickly catching up with the functionality people have been used to in KDE 3.5 and has surely exceeded that in some areas already. Even for those strange individuals that don't like pink, or Chuck Norris, or combinations of those two, this just has to be impressive. :-)


[ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:52:10 +0100 ] permanent link



Plasma's panel is now resizable, interviewed.

Yesterday, Sebastian Sauer commited some changes to the Plasma panel that make it possible to resize it. This has been a much-wanted feature. Earlier already, Olivier Goffart has made it possible to have two rows of tasks in the taskbar, and also to only show windows from the current virtual desktop in the taskbar. Result is a much better configurable panel now. You guys rock. :-)

I sat down and started fixing some applets that didn't behave quite well at small sizes. One victim was the digital clock. The battery now tries a bit harder to squeeze itself in the space it gets, and the panel now actually respects the taskbar font setting from kcontrol. I've also added some animations to the battery, so now if you unplug your AC adapter, you can actually see the AC adapter flash disappear, so the battery applet gives the user a bit more feedback. Also, the label showing the charge percentage on top of the battery now fades in and out nicely. Plasma::Phase goodness all over. :-)

On other news, during the last days, I also gave an email interview to Richard Hughes for Linux Tech Daily.



[ Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:15:48 +0100 ] permanent link



Newsflash: Plasma hackers assaulted by dangerous croc.

Sunnyvale, CA. Earlier today, two Plasma hackers have been assaulted by a crocodile while taking a short break from their quest for world domination. The crocodile has later been hunted down by a KRunner and lost its life in a Plasma crash. Original photos from the crime scene show one of the Plasma hackers, Riccardo Iaconelli proudly presenting his prey.

The incident happened the day after the developers had celebrated the release of KDE 4.0, an innovative piece of software, written by a bunch of hippies and commies.

Sources on the ground in Sunnyvale reported that the victims are doing fine. They are both recovering from the shock as we speak. Iaconelli, one of the victims states in an exclusive interview with yours truly: "You know, we're doing a dangerous job out here. KDE development is not always as peachy as we'd like it to be, but someone has to do the dirty work."

[ Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:59:08 +0100 ] permanent link



Release Schedule bits and Planned Features for KDE 4.1.

Earlier today, the KDE Release Team came up with a rough release schedule. This schedule is actually two-fold. Bugfix releases will come out every month, at least for the next half year. The next real feature release will be KDE 4.1 in July 2008. Furthermore, KDE will be releasing a new feature version every 6 months, so KDE 4.2 will be there in January 2009, 4.3 in July 2009, and so on. We hope that this way, we make it easier for both KDE people and distributors / OSVs to plan.

Plasma might see an intermittent release in the meantime, which is made quite easy with our improved infrastructure, so early adopting users won't need to wait until July for some sorely missing features (resizing, moving panel, anyone?!).

So what's in the pipeline for KDE 4.1? Let's see:

• Mac Port
• Windows Port
• OpenSolaris Port
• Plasma with widgets on canvas, makes things like layouting much easier, and generally integrating widgets into plasmoids
• Webkit in plasma
• Apple dashboard widgets support in Plasma
• Decibel VOIP and real-time communication framework
• Dragon Player multimedia player
• More polished kopete
• KDevelop and KDevplatform
• KDE-PIM, based on Akonadi
• GetHotNewStuff2 / DXS
• Plasmagik plasma packages and add-on creator
• Lots of smaller features
Impressive huh? Actually, a lot of those things is close to being done already, and of course, we'll be seeing the 'usual', but nonetheless important things like performance improvements, UI polish, artwork updates, translation and localisation improvements, bugfixes, newly ported applications, new 'smaller' features in applications, new plasmoids, more data on GetHotNewStuff, new KWin compositing effects, and so on ...

As KDE 4.1 will be based on Qt 4.4, we'll get some things for free: new backends for Phonon (gstreamer, DirectShow, QuickTime), performance improvements in SVG rendering, alien widgets for smoother resizing, webkit (there's a KPart being written by Trolltech peeps, and more freedom with GPLv3. (And the stuff I forgot :-)).

Around the same time, KOffice 2 should be available, which is another really big thing. Amarok2 also looks quite promising already, but I don't have exact data right now (could walk over and wake up Jeff Mitchell, but not sure if he'd like that ;-))

Disclaimer: Please note that this is not an official list, nobody guarantees that all or any of the above will end up in KDE 4.1. Right now, it looks like all this stuff will make it into 4.1, lots of it is even close to being finished already. In any event, don't complain if not everythings makes it into 4.1. Also, this list is not exclusive, so there will surely be more new things.

[ Sat, 19 Jan 2008 09:58:26 +0100 ] permanent link



KDE and the Linux Kernel.

Just returned from a break-out session with some kernel developers who are here at Google where we discussed a couple of things that can be improved in the current Linux kernel for a better user experience. We, that is a group of KDE people from different areas, among which aseigo, Dirk, Thiago, Will, Zack -- in randomly alphabetical order. Kernel people in this session include Natalie Protasevich, Andrew Morton, Daniel Phillips and Gary Greene.

Issues that have been discussed are limitations in inotify where we'd like to be able to watch more files at once for changes, the most notable use case being desktop search and indexing. Another interesting issue we're facing is bad guessing when trying to keep interesting things (such as a maildir with lots and lots of small files in cache) when dealing with large I/O. This is actually something we can improve ourselves by using fadvise to tell the kernel what makes sense -- the kernel cannot reasonably be expected to know the purpose and usage of data, so we need to tell it somehow.

Of course, my pet-peeve and the ever-interesting issue of suspend is another big issue with the Linux kernel we currently have. While it is on the radar of the kernel devs, we made sure that they know how important that is to us. In my opinion, the solution to this is two-fold. As it's mostly drivers that are responsible for the rather bad user experience currently, drivers need to be improved. Open drivers can obviously be fixed much easier for the kernel developers, but it also helps if large companies can kick each other when they're screwing up suspend and hibernate.

Most important outcome of this meeting has probably been the opening of communication channels. Andrew told us that the best way to get our issues addressed is filing bugs (as emails), voting for them to justify resources put into them. Andrew also told us that sending such a bugreport from a @kde.org email address will prioritise it, which is I think important to know for us. Kernel people really want to help us, getting them the information they need will make it easier to fix problems we face when using the Linux kernel. Such a bugreport ideally includes a testcase (code!) which shows the problem.

Needless to say that I'm very happy we got the chance to exchange. Thanks everybody involved! Also, I should probably pass on Daniel's "Thank you for creating KDE!" to you all.

[ Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:54:46 +0100 ] permanent link



Be free.






KDE 4.0 is released.




[ Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:14:18 +0100 ] permanent link



Looking back.

More than 2 and a half years ago a historical meeting took place in Berlin - APPEAL. From the Dot story: "The scope was broad and incuded artwork, human interface guidelines, Tenor (a contextual linkage engine), alterntives to traditional file managers and groupware applications." Reading back, there is a striking similarity with core concepts of KDE4. Most of those items are reality in KDE 4.0. Others are close to done and will surface wthin the next releases.

In Malaga (my first aKademy, still being a student), this atmosphere of doing something big became more evident. There, I worked with Jan and Ellen (Relevantive & OpenUsability) on a usability review of Guidance. To me, this showed the great potential and how to merge the processes around software development ad usability engineering and get something really nice out of it.

I also remember a presentation given by three artists, the Oxygen team. Ken, Nuno and David presented their first bits of work to the community. They discussed concepts behind the Oxygen icon set (it was still merely an icon set, back then) and even showed a first, very early pre-alpha version of some icons.

At the same aKademy, we started setting up the Marketing Working Group, with its primary mission coherent messaging around KDE, based on Guerilla Marketing and scientific strategical analyses.

For me, this was the start of the KDE 4 vision. Tomorrow we will flip the switch to make this vision reality. And next week we'll present it to the world.

[ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:53:00 +0100 ] permanent link



First-hand KDE news.

As some of you know, the KDE Marketing Team has a so-called press channel for some time now. We feel that it's a good idea to make this more well-known to the media, so here's a call for more participants. The press channel is a low-traffic mailinglist we subscribe interested journalists to. The press channel offers first-hand information, and often even scoops to news before we officially publish it. Sometimes, we even put additional material, such as screenshots into the channel for free reuse in your (the journalists') stories. The format of the messages in the press channel is kept very brief. One should be able to judge from the content in less than 20 seconds if it's interesting material. Additional information is provided through links, so it's easy to start doing research for a story.

Why am I telling this? There are actually two reasons. One is to make the work of the Marketing Team, that is often going on behind the curtains more transparant. Another reason is to invite more journalists to the party, so we increase coverage on KDE in the media and the community reads more actual and better researched news. We want to make it easy for journalists to cover KDE in the media.

So if you're an interested journalists, please get in contact with me via my email (sebas@kde.org) and tell me that you'd like to join the press channel. As motivation, your affiliation is handy information for us. If you know journalists who could take advantage of this, please let them know, or point them at this blog entry.



[ Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:37:31 +0100 ] permanent link



You are press.

My previous blogentry caught quite some attention. Within 36 hours, I burnt 90GB of traffic (thanks jorik for bearing with me!), and at first apache choked on the number of incoming request. But that was only a configuration problem, apache needed its maximum number of concurrent connections increased. I blame the web-2.0 buzzword for this.

So most of the users were eager to see screenshots of what's going to become KDE 4.0, Aaron's changed to parts of the plasma user interface (panel and krunner theming were updated shortly before) probably helped a bit. Right before my blogentry, we released KDE 4.0 rc1, which didn't have those new looks, and we didn't really bother posting screenshots along with the announcement. So why that? It has everything to do with our current release process. Dirk usually tags the next release on wednesday, then it gets roughly a week of testing, making compile and fixing obviously stupid things you inevitably get when snapshotting an source code repository that's heavily worked on. So it takes about a week to prepare the release and distribute it to the packagers of various distributions to give them some time to build the code. The announcement is usually done the week thereafter on Tuesdays. And in this case, those running KDE trunk have the more recent code when the release that has been tagged one week before is announced. This will probably change once we branch 4.0 and trunk/ becomes KDE 4.1-in-progress. This, however, will also still take some time. It has been shortly discussed in the release team, and most people think that we should not distract ourselves by branching off 4.1 too quickly.

So you are press. A lot of KDE's PR comes from people within the community. It's quite natural, given the interesting blogposts on PlanetKDE. We can make it even more popular by reaching out and being more verbose about the cool desktop, apps and libraries we create. I gather that KDE is also read by quite some people who might not be following the traffic on various mailinglists, and it's always beneficial for us if we know better what's going on in other parts of the project. Let's feel encouraged by the amount of people eagerly waiting for information to pop up. Create screenshots of cool things in KDE, explain them shortly and blog it. We can probably also amaze ourselves quite a bit by all those tricks that can be done with our new KDE -- such blogs also make nice additions to the documentation and might also enlighten those people longing for this handy feature to dump their proprietary platform and switch to KDE.

My favourite feature this week was the "undo close tab" which konqueror now has. When logging into my KDE 4 desktop, konqueror friendly asked when starting up if it should also restore the previously opened tabs. Sure, do it. Works like a charm! :-)

Last week, my favourite feature certainly was Kate's sessions. It's not a new thing, but I never bothered looking at it and considering it. Now, my kate has a couple of sessions that save me the tedious work of opening 5 documents (that often are located in different directories). Now it's two clicks away and I can get to work right away.

[ Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:53:02 +0100 ] permanent link



KDE 4 snapshot screenshots.

Without ado, here's a bunch of screenshots of how KDE 4.0 currently looks like. Please note that this is very recent, and not all of it is part of the just-released KDE 4.0 RC1. It's that fresh.
Click here to get to all the screenshots.
This is the desktop, showing some plasmoids, the panel (which really is a container for plasmoids, konsole, nothing really fancy ;-)).



KSysguard and systemsettings, configure and monitor what's going on. Systemsettings replaces kcontrol, ksysguard has seen a huge overhaul, using vectorgraphics now. Mix that with some usability improvements and you get this.



Dolphin is very stable already, and looking good. Have a peak at its configuration dialogue.



Pressing Alt+F2 opens the KRunner interface. It gives you access to starting applications, but it's also a pocket calculator (type in =42*42), a converter for various units and can be used to start a search via strigi, KDE4's desktop indexer.



Gwenview, KDE's image viewer has seen major improvements in the user interface, making it quicker and easier to use.



Okular is the new document reader, it supports multiple formats. The focus lies on ease of use.



KWrite is the simple text editor shipped with KDE 4.0. It shares the text editing component with Kate, the advanced text editor.



KWin has new compositing features. The handy expose effect can be accessed by putting the mouse cursor in the upper left corner. The just click on the window you want to select.



... while typing text, kwin will filter and show only those windows that match. If you're down to one match, press enter and get your window of choice in front of your nose.



Since virtual desktops are there to stay, KWin also has their handling improved. Press Control+F8 and see the Desktopgrid effect. Klik on one of those desktop to choose it, or drag applications from one virtual desktop to the other.



That's it for now. Remember, this can change by the day. Not all artwork is final, there are some glitches left, but it's really shaping up well. Thanks everybody for getting this far!



[ Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:05:23 +0100 ] permanent link



Oxygen battery.

The artwork for the battery was initially taken from powermanager, the small application we developed for Kubuntu. KDE4's batteryapplet would need an Oxygen battery. There is one shipped with the icon set, so I sat down, wrestled with inkscape and beat it into shape so it can be used as a theme for the batteryapplet in KDE4's plasma.

Yesterday, Aaron landed a series of larger changes in plasma, making it possible to drag applets onto the panel. I noticed that the battery got stretched out far too much, so I added some hinting taking the aspectratio of the SVG file into account. The result is an Oxygen battery on the panel and on the desktop. For those that prefer the more classic artwork, I've left that in as an option.

The KDE 4 desktop has come to a point where it's well usable, if you can live with some minor kinks. With the arrival of new artwork for krunner and properly themed panel background, the various pieces of plasma are falling into place now. I'm starting to experience the first bits of the real KDE 4 user experience, and I love it. This is going to be a great desktop.


[ Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:45:30 +0100 ] permanent link



clockwork.

I've been giving the digital clock in plasma some love. For one, I added a 'plain mode' that just draws text on it. The clock is now also a bit more configurable. I've made some improvements to the clock's layout and size handling. It now behaves a bit better in the panel and on the desktop.

Today I've also booked tickets and hotel for a hacking week in Athens in early december. We'll be working on the implementation of the SQO-OSS platform. Tomorrow, ade and I have our weekly meeting at a local coffee roaster's cafe. The perfect place to wrestle with java obviously.

Coming Friday, some friends come over, we're planning do a port-wine tasting. On Saturday, CodeYard's monthly Community Day is held at the university here in Nijmegen. If you're a dutch or flemish student, interested in free software stuff or programming, email us and come by. The day will be spent with talks about various computer-related issues, and there's a room full of computers to show each other cool stuff and hack a bit.



[ Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:25:10 +0100 ] permanent link



Greenwheels.

Jeff Bailey writes about carsharing, and it being critical to solving the problem of mass-transit. First, and foremost, I do agree with that.

In the Netherlands, while public transport is quite good (if not cheap) and fairly reliable (compared to say, India :-)), the "if it costs me ten minutes more to get there, I'd rather go by car" is quite apparent. That's not to say that people don't go by train, they do. Usually though, trains during rush hours are pretty packed. Getting a 1st class ticket solves that in most cases, it makes the difference between getting a place to sit, and often enables you to do some work on the train. Or take a nap which is hardly possible in an overcrowded train.

So there's Greenwheels, a car sharing company that manages to get quite some coverage over the whole country. Taking part in this programme costs between 12.50 EUR and 25 EUR so it is quite cheap not to use the car. Those cars (small Peugeots) are usually near to a train station, making combined journeys easy. In most cities, you also find one within a short footwalk. There's three cars here within 10 minutes walk, one of them just around the corner. I've been using this for more than a year now, and my impressions are really good. If you need a car quickly, it's usually available, but it makes you think twice wether to actually go by car and not by bike. I don't really like driving (worked as a courier for some time after school, so I've seen enough of it) but those shopping visits some time make it useful. I get to use the car once a month, roughly.

It doesn't work very well for those cases with lots of idle time, you pay per hour (at least in the evenings and weekends), and longer journeys (couple of hundred km) can become quite expensive. But then, get a train and only do the last mile by car -- that's what trains are bad at.

I'm sure it's not an option for everyone, but still good to consider this before you add yet another car to those traffic jams. And having lots of cars in the streets in front of your house doesn't improve the quality of living as well. So for the Dutchies, there's Greenwheels. Now go looking for something similar in your country.



[ Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:20:33 +0100 ] permanent link


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© Sebastian Kügler