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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in dotkde's Blurty:

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    Friday, August 29th, 2008
    10:01 am
    KDE Commit-Digest for 17th August 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1220010429/

    In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: New "Browser History", "Konqueror Sessions", "Konsole Sessions", and "Kate Sessions" KRunners in Plasma. Proof-of-concept of simple uploading in Plasmagik. A MythTV data engine for retrieving data about a MythTV installation (upcoming recordings, etc), and the start of a RSIBreak engine. An applet for displaying new message information from KMail, Kopete, etc for use with the Plasmoids-on-Screensaver project. Support for panel form factors, and a configuration dialog in the Lancelot alternative menu. Various improvements in the "Desktop Grid" KWin-Composite effect. More bugfixes for Kicker in KDE 3.5. A backtrace browser plugin for Kate. Code completion for PHP in KDevelop. More levels added in the Stepgame project. Lots of improvements in KGo, support for themes in Kapman. Window title tagged images in KSnapshot to assist indexing by Strigi. Support for reading form actions and removing annotations in Okular. Animated image support (eg. GIF) in Gwenview. First steps towards a Mailody Kontact part. More work for Amarok 2.0, especially regarding playlist handling. Start of a PDF import filter (for KOffice 2.1, using Poppler) in Karbon. Initial Kross integration in the Shaman package manager. More user interface work in KColorEdit. New device notifier moved into kdebase, new KsCD moved into kdemultimedia. Removal of viewer functionality in KPilot to become a syncing application only. Import of Kaffeine video player into extragear. Tagging of Amarok 1.4.10, a security fix release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
    Thursday, August 28th, 2008
    10:31 pm
    KOffice Releases 10th Alpha of KOffice 2.0
    http://dot.kde.org/1219966353/

    The KOffice team, developers, students, packagers and bug reporters have prepared the final Alpha release of KOffice 2.0: KOffice 2.0 Alpha 10. KOffice will enter feature freeze in two weeks, so the next release will be the first Beta. And we are committed to releasing as many Beta's as is necessary before declaring Release Candidate status for KOffice 2.0. Read on for more details.


    This Alpha release contains all the work done by the Google Summer of Code students. Remember, these are: a bristle-based brush engine for Krita, a calligraphy tool for Karbon (which is available in all applications), a quantum leap in KWord ODF support, especially for styles, lists, page styles, a .doc to .odt conversion filter, a .kpr to .odp conversion filter, the presentation view for KPresenter, and the Kexi web forms feature...



    Other highlights of this release are:




    • Presentation view for KPresenter now working

    • A new style docker in KWord for page and paragraph styles

    • A new shape style docker that handles the colors, patterns and gradients of shapes in a uniform way.

    • Many bug fixes in Krita (note: Krita's filter handling got inadvertently broken just before tagging. It's repaired by now, but the fix is not in Alpha 10)



    As well as many bug fixes, stability improvements and ODF compliance, there are improvements all over KOffice.



    Please go to the announcement for more information, the Changelog for a list of all the changes the developers could remember, the Visual Changelog for screenshots and the Release Notes for download information.



    And in the meantime, enjoy this screenshot of artwork done in Krita by the French artist Enkhitan:



    Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
    12:01 pm
    KDE 3.5.10 Updates Kicker and KPDF
    http://dot.kde.org/1219751598/

    The KDE community has finalised another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release, 3.5.10 brings numerous bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5. The fixes are thinly spread across KPDF with a number of crash fixes, KGPG and probably most interesting various fixes in Kicker, KDE 3's panel.




    • Improved visibility on transparent backgrounds

    • Themed arrow buttons in applets that were missing them

    • Layout and antialiasing fixes in various applets




    Note, as with every release, the changelog is not complete as our developers often forget to document their work. For users of KDE 3.5.9 it should be low-risk to upgrade to KDE 3.5.10 since the rules of what is to enter the KDE 3.5 branch are pretty strict at that point, it is in maintenance only mode.

    10:01 am
    KDE 3.5.10 Updates Kicker and KPDF
    http://dot.kde.org/1219751598/

    The KDE community has finalised another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release, 3.5.10 brings numerous bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5. The fixes are thinly spread across KPDF with a number of crash fixes, KGPG, and probably most interesting, various fixes in Kicker, the KDE 3 panel. Read on for more details.

    Kicker fixes include:




    • Improved visibility on transparent backgrounds

    • Themed arrow buttons in applets that were missing them

    • Layout and antialiasing fixes in various applets




    Note, as with every release, the changelog is not complete as our developers often forget to document their work. For users of KDE 3.5.9 it should be low-risk to upgrade to KDE 3.5.10 since the rules of what can enter the KDE 3.5 branch are pretty strict at this point: it is in maintenance only mode.

    Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
    10:01 am
    FSFE Welcomes KDE's Adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement
    http://dot.kde.org/1219405212/

    Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the KDE project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. Read on for more details.

    "We see the adoption of the FLA by KDE as a positive and important milestone in the maturity of the Free Software community," says Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe. "The FLA was designed to help projects increase the legal maintainability of their software to ensure long-term protection and reliability. KDE is among the most important Free Software initiatives and it is playing a central role in bringing freedom to the desktop. This decision of the KDE project underlines its dedication to think about how to make that freedom last."



    Adriaan de Groot, Vice President of KDE e.V., the organisation behind the KDE project, said "KDE e.V. has endorsed the use of a particular FLA based directly on the FSFE's sample FLA as the preferred way to assign copyright to the association. We recognise that assignment is an option that individuals may wish to exercise; it is in no way pushed upon KDE contributors. There are also other avenues of copyright assignment available besides the FLA, but we believe this is the easiest way to get it done, with little fuss. Enthusiasm for the FLA was immediate - people were asking for printed versions of the form at Akademy before the week was out so that they could fill one in."



    "The FLA is a versatile document designed to work across different countries with different perceptions of copyright and authorship," says Shane Coughlan, Freedom Task Force coordinator. "As a truly international project, KDE provides a great example of how the FLA can provide legal coherency in the mid-to-long term. It's been a pleasure to help with the adoption process and FSFE's Freedom Task Force is ready to continuing supporting KDE in the future."

    KDE's adoption of the FLA is the result of cooperation between KDE e.V. and FSFE's Freedom Task Force over the last year and a half, part of the deepening collaboration between the two associate organisations.



    The full press release can be found on KDE e.V.'s website.

    Friday, August 22nd, 2008
    10:31 am
    Beta 1 of Amarok 2 "Nerrivik" Released
    http://dot.kde.org/1219404793/

    The Amarok team is proud to announce the first beta version of Amarok 2, codenamed Nerrivik. It contains a considerable amount of improvements over the previous alpha versions, bringing Amarok one step closer to the 2.0 release. The highlights of this first beta version are the scripting interface, file tracking (so you keep your statistics if you move your files around), gorgeous new artwork as well as lots of bugfixes. Read more about it in the release announcement.



    Thursday, August 21st, 2008
    2:01 pm
    KDE Commit-Digest for 10th August 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1219319527/

    In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma support for Google Gadgets moves into kdebase. "Places" engine gets service support, and a new "Leave Message" Plasmoid for use with the Plasmoids-on-Screensaver project. More work on the "Weather" Plasmoid and "grouping taskbar", and an initial version of a menu applet for small form-factors, and a new applet to visualise the size of an IceCream compilation cluster. Work on the URL and breadcrumb navigator, and the "capacity bar" in Dolphin. A new "Sphere" effect in kwin-composite. More work on biased playlists, AFT, and a toolbox menu as a replacement for the applet browser in Amarok 2.0. A "fully working" Twitter plugin in Marble. Synonym and antonym modes working in Parley. More work on handling RAW images in Digikam. Various developments in KPilot, and keyboard shortcuts, colour scheme, and "export to HTML" work in the MessageListView project in KMail. Beginnings of master pages support in KWord. Initial import of KDisplay and kio_bookmarks. Kreative3d renamed to SolidKreator. Konversation 1.1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
    10:01 am
    KDE Commit-Digest for 10th August 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1219319527/

    In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Google Gadgets for Plasma support moves into kdebase. "Places" engine gets service support, and a new "Leave Message" Plasmoid for use with the Plasmoids-on-Screensaver project. More work on the "Weather" Plasmoid and "grouping taskbar", and an initial version of a menu applet for small form-factors, and a new applet to visualise the size of an IceCream compilation cluster. Work on the URL and breadcrumb navigator, and the "capacity bar" in Dolphin. A new "Sphere" effect in kwin-composite. More work on biased playlists, AFT, and a toolbox menu as a replacement for the applet browser in Amarok 2.0. A "fully working" Twitter plugin in Marble. Synonym and antonym modes working in Parley. More work on handling RAW images in Digikam. Various developments in KPilot, and keyboard shortcuts, colour scheme, and "export to HTML" work in the MessageListView project in KMail. Beginnings of master pages support in KWord. Initial import of KDisplay and kio_bookmarks. Kreative3d renamed to SolidKreator. Konversation 1.1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
    Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
    10:01 am
    Mobile and Embedded Day at Akademy
    http://dot.kde.org/1218802017/

    This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks.

















    Open Citymap on Qtopia


    The day opened with Kate Alhola from Nokia showing off the Nokia N810. As already reported, the talk was followed by handing out the devices to the audience. Her blog says she hopes to see lots of Qt and KDE applications in Maemo Garage soon.



    Koen Deforche from EmWeb showed off Wt, a Qt like toolkit for webpages. It is intended for use in embedded devices without their own display but which can run a small web server to provide their user interface. Wt itself is a C++ library which closely follows the Qt API and compiles into a programme featuring a built in web server. Wt is GPL and uses a similar dual licence to Qt for proprietary uses. If you like Qt but you need to write an embeded UI with web technologies, Wt seems like a perfect fit.






    Taking apart an OpenMoko phone.


    Ole Tange said he had a dream. He wanted a mobile device which was open to hacking, used free software and worked as a phone and PDA. He found his dream with the OpenMoko, a mobile phone made by FIC, a Taiwanese company who were fed up of making hardware which was then rebranded by US companies. OpenMoko has recently changed to using Qtopia, the mobile platform from Trolltech. As a free device we are able to work on ideas that do not interest companies making closed platforms, one suggestion was to programme the phone so when a salesperson calls you can have it say "press 1 if you are selling something". Another suggestion was to use the motion sensor to test if you are cycling, in which case you do not want a call. One more was to turn off the phone when in a cinema but turn it back on automatically after the film. After the talk he took out his screwdriver and showed how to take apart the device.



    Bling was on show next with Leonardo Sobral Cunha and Artur Duque de Souza from OpenBOSSA showing off QEdje, a port of the Enlightenment Edje library to Qt. They make applications for Nokia N810 and other devices and showed off the slick user interfaces they have made.



    Making KDE technology available to embedded devices was the theme of Eva Brucherseifer's talk. She used Decibel as an example of a KDE library that would be interesting on mobile devices. She hopes there will be more code shared between KDE and mobile platforms in future.



    Student projects were the topic of the next two talks. Firstly Mickey Leroy showed off his university project which he did at the De Nayer Institute, home of Akademy (Akademy organiser Bart Cerneels from the EmSys research group was the mentor for the OpenCityMap project). Open Citymap is an application to show and edit Open Street Map from within a Qtopia device. It made maximum use of the small screen space available on a mobile device to create a usable interface. It also uses QtScript to allow plugins with custom functionality.



    Knut Yrvin from Trolltech spoke about his
    experience of mentoring student projects in Norwegian University. Many
    students tended towards choosing simple projects over ambitious ones
    which would have results in the real world. It also takes up his time
    of course and as a frequent traveller he is not always able to respond
    quickly. Given the good results from OpenCityMap though we can hope he
    and Bart will continue mentoring student projects. It was also pointed
    out the good results we have been getting from Google Summer of Code.

    Panel Discussion






    The Panel


    The day closed with a panel discussion on the topic of Driving innovation with Open Desktop Technologies. Shane Martin Coughlin a lawyer with FSFE opened by saying he wants to make more technology available to more people and that needs free software and genuinely open standards. Aaron Seigo said free software opens doors that can span between different companies and their devices and we will see lots of crossover between different devices. Knut from Nokia said free software lets you get on without just debugging and fixing existing software.



    It was asked what is it about free software that allows crossover. Aaron emphasised the social aspect. Innovation does not happen in a vacuum, with free software people can experiment more and work together. He is a desktop guy but today he is on a mobile panel, that sort of crossover does not happen outside of free software. Shane said free software gives a grant that lets people take changes and do what they want with it. The biggest challenge going with open desktop is it is more complex than any one person or company can go with. There will be technical and cultural problems crossing borders, problem is how we move forward with global developer and user base where there are different cultures. We will have to innovate with licencing and platforms.



    Knut pointed out that in Africa people have mobile phones as their first computer. Only a small fraction of the world use PCs, increasingly the rest use phones first. He told us that the Trolltech CEO said the challenge to the mobile industry is it needs to change its business model from proprietary software since software is becoming commoditised, it can be installed at no cost and that will change business models in the same way as happened with the internet. The next step is letting applications flood into devices.



    Aaron said that the majority of software is written on high powered computers. Not many people rushed to write apps for XO, while plenty did for the iPhone because it is a more interesting device. You can not try and bring the people writing free software now to do mobile stuff if it's not interesting and sexy for them. Instead we need to make user interfaces span from one side to the other.



    Sven, a programmer from Nokia said they introduced standard libraries as a lowest common denominator. It will take time for people to learn how to do everything on small and limited devices, but we will get there. If you are able to do it you will then get much more performance from desktop devices as a result. Cross platform is important too, people using second hand machines do not have a choice about platform so it is important to be able to work on as many devices as possible.



    It was asked if the desktop is still relevant. Aaron said it is massively important, we are deploying 50 million desktops in Brazil, MS and Apple have plenty more of course. It used to be desktop was the only game and embedded was maybe done by some people over there. Now desktop is on a continuum which includes embedded. As desktop developers we can question ourselves in how we build our user interfaces so they are more componentised and work on a range of devices. He challenges everyone in the audience to write software which is more aware of its environment.

    1:01 am
    KDE Commit-Digest for 3rd August 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1219149384/

    In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The Plasma "extenders" project is merged into kdebase, with initial integration into the kuiserver applet. Continued work on the systray-refactor, and more work on the "Weather" Plasmoid. A whole load of bugfixes for Kicker 3.5.10. A new "Magic Lamp" minimize effect, and a rework of the "Grid" effect in kwin-composite. Support for extracting artwork from iPod's, tag editing and removing files from MTP devices, and scriptable services (including a "web control" script), and lots of other developments in Amarok 2.0. An automatic image fetching script/plugin added to Parley. Basic XLIFF support in Lokalize. Support for regular expressions in KSysGuard graphing. Improved support for password protected archives in Ark. Support for saving file fonts embedded into a PDF file in Okular. A new, enhanced Strigi service (using KDE technologies) for interfacing with NEPOMUK. KJots and KTimeTracker can now be deactivated (while KMail, KOrganizer and KAddressbook cannot) in Kontact. Beginnings of "master pages" support in KWord. Rocs, a graph algorithm tool, added to playground/edu. "Google Gadgets for Plasma" moved to kdereview, "Timer" Plasmoid moved to kdeplasma-addons. Read the rest of the Digest here.
    1:01 am
    KDE 4.1 in Slackware Testing
    http://dot.kde.org/1219142531/

    Official Slackware packages of KDE 4.1 (and dependencies) are now in the "Testing" directory of Slackware-current. See the changelog for more information, and read on for a quote from Slackware founder, Patrick Volkerding!

    Slackware creator/maintainter Patrick Volkerding writes this in the Slackware changelog:




    "Added KDE version 4.1 to testing! :-)
    Thanks to Robby Workman and Heinz Wiesinger for all the packaging and testing help, and of course to the whole KDE community for helping to bring the Linux desktop to a whole new level of appearance and ease of use. I've installed this on my main email/browsing/general machine and as far as I'm concerned there's just no looking back. It's really a big step forward."


    Patrick has included scripts to help upgrade from KDE 3.5.x. Take advantage of the README's and documentation he's included (and notice that this information is for Slackware "current", not Slackware 12.1)



    Kudos to Rob Workman for making KDE 4.x available for Slackware for the last few months.

    Sunday, August 17th, 2008
    4:01 pm
    People Behind KDE: Michael Pyne
    http://dot.kde.org/1218997445/

    In the next People Behind KDE interview, we stay in the United States of America (but leave in an underwater craft!) to meet a KDE developer who could be a JuKebox in another life, someone who helps you build development versions of KDE (staying on the bleeding edge without the pain!) - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Michael Pyne.
    Saturday, August 16th, 2008
    2:01 pm
    KDE 4.1 in the Press
    http://dot.kde.org/1218901449/

    Our latest release, KDE 4.1, has had a great reception in the media so far. The KDE Promotion team has been collecting articles and blog entries, and put them together. Very interesting reviews have been published, and we thought you might want to read some. There are reviews in English, German, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese. If we missed one, feel free to add them to the comments below.
    Friday, August 15th, 2008
    10:01 pm
    Video Comes to KDE://Radio from the Akademy Boat Trip
    http://dot.kde.org/1218846507/

    After a hard week's discussion and hacking the Akademy attendees took a relaxing trip along the river Dijle towards Antwerp. The KDE discussion continued of course but most of the KDE contributors took the chance to rest from hacking and enjoy the countryside of Flanders. KDE://Radio has been updated with some short video interviews which will introduce you to your friendly KDE contributors.




    Besides drinks, we had great food too. A couple of the more sensitive types got sunburned, others so overly happy we had a large group hug when we got back to the shore. All in all it was great to be together without laptops for a while, although the KDE Games group did a BOF anyway.



    After the group hug the KDE developers spread over Mechelen, looking for fun and entertainment. Some went back to the hostel, where they could get back to writing code.



    10:01 am
    Mobile and Embedded Day at Akademy
    http://dot.kde.org/1218802017/

    This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks.
















    Open Citymap on Qtopia


    The day opened with Kate Alhola from Nokia showing off the Nokia N810. As already reported, the talk was followed by handing out the devices to the audience. Her blog says she hopes to see lots of Qt and KDE applications in Maemo Garage soon.



    Koen Deforche from EmWeb showed off Wt, a Qt like toolkit for webpages. It is intended for use in embedded devices without their own display but which can run a small web server to provide their user interface. Wt itself is a C++ library which closely follows the Qt API and compiles into a programme featuring a built in web server. Wt is GPL and uses a similar dual licence to Qt for proprietary uses. If you like Qt but you need to write an embeded UI with web technologies, Wt seems like a perfect fit.






    Taking apart an OpenMoko phone.


    Ole Tange said he had a dream. He wanted a mobile device which was open to hacking, used free software and worked as a phone and PDA. He found his dream with the OpenMoko, a mobile phone made by FIC, a Taiwanese company who were fed up of making hardware which was then rebranded by US companies. OpenMoko has recently changed to using Qtopia, the mobile platform from Trolltech. As a free device we are able to work on ideas that do not interest companies making closed platforms, one suggestion was to programme the phone so when a salesperson calls you can have it say "press 1 if you are selling something". Another suggestion was to use the motion sensor to test if you are cycling, in which case you do not want a call. One more was to turn off the phone when in a cinema but turn it back on automatically after the film. After the talk he took out his screwdriver and showed how to take apart the device.



    Bling was on show next with Leonardo Sobral Cunha and Artur Duque de Souza from OpenBOSSA showing off QEdje, a port of the Enlightenment Edje library to Qt. They make applications for Nokia N810 and other devices and showed off the slick user interfaces they have made.



    Making KDE technology available to embedded devices was the theme of Eva Brucherseifer's talk. She used Decibel as an example of a KDE library that would be interesting on mobile devices. She hopes there will be more code shared between KDE and mobile platforms in future.



    Student projects were the topic of the next two talks. Firstly Mickey Leroy showed off his university project which he did at the De Nayer Institute, home of Akademy. Open Citymap is an application to show and edit Open Street Map from within a Qtopia device. It made maximum use of the small screen space available on a mobile device to create a usable interface. It also uses QtScript to allow plugins with custom functionality.



    Knut Yrvin from Trolltech was the mentor for the Open Citymap project. He spoke about his experience of mentoring student projects. Many students tended towards chosing simple projects over ambitious ones which would have results in the real world. It also takes up his time of course and as a frequent traveller he is not always able to respond quickly. Given the good results from Open Citymap though we can hope he continues with student projects. It was also pointed out the good results we have been getting from Google Summer of Code.



    Panel Discussion






    The Panel


    The day closed with a panel discussion on the topic of Driving innovation with Open Desktop Technologies. Shane Martin Coughlin a lawyer with FSFE opened by saying he wants to make more technology available to more people and that needs free software and genuinely open standards. Aaron Seigo said free software opens doors that can span between different companies and their devices and we will see lots of crossover between different devices. Knut from Nokia said free software lets you get on without just debugging and fixing existing software.



    It was asked what is it about free software that allows crossover. Aaron emphasised the social aspect. Innovation does not happen in a vacuum, with free software people can experiment more and work together. He is a desktop guy but today he is on a mobile panel, that sort of crossover does not happen outside of free software. Shane said free software gives a grant that lets people take changes and do what they want with it. The biggest challenge going with open desktop is it is more complex than any one person or company can go with. There will be technical and cultural problems crossing borders, problem is how we move forward with global developer and user base where there are different cultures. We will have to innovate with licencing and platforms.



    Knut pointed out that in Africa people have mobile phones as their first computer. Only a small fraction of the world use PCs, increasingly the rest use phones first. He told us that the Trolltech CEO said the challenge to the mobile industry is it needs to change its business model from proprietary software since software is becoming commoditised, it can be installed at no cost and that will change business models in the same way as happened with the internet. The next step is letting applications flood into devices.



    Aaron said that the majority of software is written on high powered computers. Not many people rushed to write apps for XO, while plenty did for the iPhone because it is a more interesting device. You can not try and bring the people writing free software now to do mobile stuff if it's not interesting and sexy for them. Instead we need to make user interfaces span from one side to the other.



    Sven, a programmer from Nokia said they introduced standard libraries as a lowest common denominator. It will take time for people to learn how to do everything on small and limited devices, but we will get there. If you are able to do it you will then get much more performance from desktop devices as a result. Cross platform is important too, people using second hand machines do not have a choice about platform so it is important to be able to work on as many devices as possible.



    It was asked if the desktop is still relevant. Aaron said it is massively important, we are deploying 50 million desktops in Brazil, MS and Apple have plenty more of course. It used to be desktop was the only game and embedded was maybe done by some people over there. Now desktop is on a continuum which includes embedded. As desktop developers we can question ourselves in how we build our user interfaces so they are more componentised and work on a range of devices. He challenges everyone in the audience to write software which is more aware of its environment.

    Thursday, August 14th, 2008
    8:01 pm
    KDE 4.1 Included in FreeBSD Ports Tree
    http://dot.kde.org/1218753052/

    KDE 4 is now also available for FreeBSD starting with the marvelous KDE 4.1. The original commit from the FreeBSD/KDE team says 'The KDE FreeBSD team is proud to announce the release of KDE 4.1.0 for FreeBSD'. KDE 4 will be installed into a custom prefix ${LOCALBASE}/kde4 so KDE 4 and KDE 3 can co-exist. For sound to work, it is necessary to have dbus and hal enabled
    in your system. Please see the respective documentation on how
    to enable these. For more Information see the HEADS UP at ports@ and kde-freebsd@ or our wiki page. See the Commit message and
    port info. Have fun!
    4:01 pm
    Integration at Akademy
    http://dot.kde.org/1218645101/

    An important topic at Akademy 2008 is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk, but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many developers here. Read on for more of what is discussed here.





    Integration: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.


    One of the talks on Saturday morning was about integration. As it was given by Inge Wallin it quickly started to resemble a Marble talk - fans of that application must be having a blast, as there's also a 'real' talk about Marble by Patrick Spendrin. Marble was used by Inge to show one of the long-time strengths of KDE - integration. We have always had technologies like KIO which allows network transparent file access, and the KParts framework which makes it incredibly easy to embed applications in other applications - think about what Konqueror does, showing pictures using Gwenview, for example. In KDE 4, many new technologies were introduced, some, like the ones just mentioned, low-level like Solid (hardware information) and Phonon (audio & video) but also more complex. Marble is a shining example here - it is a full-blown virtual earth application. But you can integrate it on several levels in many other applications and customise it with powerful additional visualisations. Take KOffice - yes, Marble can integrate in KOffice. You can have a document, be it a spreadsheet, presentation or text document, and have a real, interactive map in there. This clearly shows the power of integration - map applications aren't new, neither are office suites. But as far as we know nobody has combined these to the same level before outside of KDE.



    Important here is how you can enable integration in several ways. In KDE 3, we mostly saw two kinds of integration - either low-level in the form of libraries used to enhance the functionality in your application, or in the form of a KPart, embedding the application pretty much as-is into another one. Marble shows that more can be done. It not only offers some low-level libraries and a KPart, but it is also specifically designed to act as a plugin in other applications. For example in KAddressBook, where it could be used to link a person to a location.



    So for a developer, there are many options now: you can use Marble's low-level infrastructure to achieve a very high level of integration, you can integrate the Marble interface as a KPart - which ensures there are no dependencies and the integration is easier. Or you can achieve less tight (but much easier) integration by using it as a plugin. If you are new to KDE development, writing a plugin for an application is one of the easiest ways to get involved.



    Thomas Zander from KWord fame and now employed by Nokia told us he is seeing a growing trend in this area. Noting how hard it can be to figure out what people are interested in when you want to give a talk at Akademy, he is happy there is a clear vision within the KDE community. We have always focused on integration and modularisation, but this vision has crystalised in KDE 4. Almost every sub-project seems to target architectural modularisation and making re-use of code easier, according to Thomas. Look at KOffice with its "Flake" shape technology, Marble, Plasma, and even Qt with the work going into the ODF writer (allowing every Qt app to easily create ODF files). Fabrizio Montesi also wrote about this trend in his blog. The JOLIE framework he is working on could bring some great new capabilities in this area, merging the architectural advantages of KDE with the powerful service-oriented technology of JOLIE. Look for an interview about this topic online soon!






    Digikam integrated with Marble


    This flexibility is something more KDE applications are and should be aspiring to. A funny coincidence was noted by Wade in his blog, where he wrote how Gilles Caulier of Digikam, a strong early adopter of many of the new technologies in KDE, was talking about integration of Marble in the Digikam talk at the exact same time Inge mentioned it in his integration talk... we are clearly very synchronised in our thinking about this topic.



    During the NEPOMUK talk by Laura Josan, more integration ideas came up. Very interesting was the description of how Marble could work with Amarok and its Last.fm integration to show a globe with artists and their locations. You could search for a location and see bands from that area, or search for other bands close to certain artists. These kind of things would be rather easy to develop thanks to the infrastructure being built by Marble. More ideas like these are floating around, and many more could come up in the future.



    Easy integration, using either the plugin method or KParts technology allow a developer to quickly assess the value of integrating a particular technology, and the tight integration possible with libraries and widgets they provide gives us the potential for entirely new use cases. If you think about integration, and allow your applications to be integrated into others, or to make use of other applications, you or someone else in KDE may stumble upon something incredibly powerful and innovative. And as our current strategy is focusing on doing new, original, innovative things, more integration offers a very compelling avenue for acheiving those targets.



    The "Akonadi Rumble" offered even more examples, talking about integrating Akonadi and Decibel in Kopete. Decibel has to store its contacts and the instant messages in Akonadi, which then uses NEPOMUK and Strigi to search through them. This way, you can connect every bit of information related to one person and show it anywhere. As Akonadi is ignorant of the types of data, you can, for example, view chat logs threaded within your email application. The framework, being generalised, thus brings together information from many sources and makes it much easier to work with it in several ways depending on what you are doing. You can keep a much better overview and thus more easily manage your personal information.



    As you can see, Akademy is more about integration and cooperation than ever, and KDE is consolidating its lead in this area in the computing world.

    6:01 am
    Integration at Akademy
    http://dot.kde.org/1218645101/

    An important topic at Akademy 2008 is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk, but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many developers here. Read on for more of what is discussed here.




    Integration: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.


    One of the talks on Saturday morning was about integration. As it was given by Inge Wallin it quickly started to resemble a Marble talk - fans of that application must be having a blast, as there's also a 'real' talk about Marble by Patrick Spendrin. Marble was used by Inge to show one of the long-time strengths of KDE - integration. We have always had technologies like KIO which allows network transparent file access, and the KParts framework which makes it incredibly easy to embed applications in other applications - think about what Konqueror does, showing pictures using Gwenview, for example. In KDE 4, many new technologies were introduced, some, like the ones just mentioned, low-level like Solid (hardware information) and Phonon (audio & video) but also more complex. Marble is a shining example here - it is a full-blown virtual earth application. But you can integrate it on several levels in many other applications and customise it with powerful additional visualisations. Take KOffice - yes, Marble can integrate in KOffice. You can have a document, be it a spreadsheet, presentation or text document, and have a real, interactive map in there. This clearly shows the power of integration - map applications aren't new, neither are office suites. But as far as we know nobody has combined these to the same level before outside of KDE.



    Important here is how you can enable integration in several ways. In KDE 3, we mostly saw two kinds of integration - either low-level in the form of libraries used to enhance the functionality in your application, or in the form of a KPart, embedding the application pretty much as-is into another one. Marble shows that more can be done. It not only offers some low-level libraries and a KPart, but it is also specifically designed to act as a plugin in other applications. For example in KAddressBook, where it could be used to link a person to a location.



    So for a developer, there are many options now: you can use Marble's low-level infrastructure to achieve a very high level of integration, you can integrate the Marble interface as a KPart - which ensures there are no dependencies and the integration is easier. Or you can acheive less tight (but much easier) integration by using it as a plugin. If you are new to KDE development, writing a plugin for an application is one of the easiest ways to get involved.



    Thomas Zander from KWord fame and now employed by Nokia told us he is seeing a growing trend in this area. Noting how hard it can be to figure out what people are interested in when you want to give a talk at Akademy, he is happy there is a clear vision within the KDE community. We have always focused on integration and modularisation, but this vision has crystalised in KDE 4. Almost every sub-project seems to target architectural modularisation and making re-use of code easier, according to Thomas. Look at KOffice with its "Flake" shape technology, Marble, Plasma, and even Qt with the work going into the ODF writer (allowing every Qt app to easily create ODF files). Fabrizio Montesi also wrote about this trend in his blog. The JOLIE framework he is working on could bring some great new capabilities in this area, merging the architectural advantages of KDE with the powerful service-oriented technology of JOLIE. Look for an interview about this topic online soon!






    Digikam integrated with Marble


    This flexibility is something more KDE applications are and should be aspiring to. A funny coincidence was noted by Wade in his blog, where he wrote how Gilles Caulier of Digikam, a strong early adopter of many of the new technologies in KDE, was talking about integration of Marble in the Digikam talk at the exact same time Inge mentioned it in his integration talk... we are clearly very synchronised in our thinking about this topic.



    During the NEPOMUK talk by Laura Josan, more integration ideas came up. Very interesting was the description of how Marble could work with Amarok and its Last.fm integration to show a globe with artists and their locations. You could search for a location and see bands from that area, or search for other bands close to certain artists. These kind of things would be rather easy to develop thanks to the infrastructure being built by Marble. More ideas like these are floating around, and many more could come up in the future.



    Easy integration, using either the plugin method or KParts technology allow a developer to quickly assess the value of integrating a particular technology, and the tight integration possible with libraries and widgets they provide gives us the potential for entirely new use cases. If you think about integration, and allow your applications to be integrated into others, or to make use of other applications, you or someone else in KDE may stumble upon something incredibly powerful and innovative. And as our current strategy is focusing on doing new, original, innovative things, more integration offers a very compelling avenue for acheiving those targets.



    The "Akonadi Rumble" offered even more examples, talking about integrating Akonadi and Decibel in Kopete. Decibel has to store its contacts and the instant messages in Akonadi, which then uses NEPOMUK and Strigi to search through them. This way, you can connect every bit of information related to one person and show it anywhere. As Akonadi is ignorant of the types of data, you can, for example, view chat logs threaded within your email application. The framework, being generalised, thus brings together information from many sources and makes it much easier to work with it in several ways depending on what you are doing. You can keep a much better overview and thus more easily manage your personal information.



    As you can see, Akademy is more about integration and cooperation than ever, and KDE is consolidating its lead in this area in the computing world.

    Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
    2:01 pm
    Integration at Akademy
    http://dot.kde.org/1218645101/

    An important topic at Akademy is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many hackers here. Read on to see some of what is being said about it.








    Integration: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.


    One of the talks on Saturday morning was about integration. As it was given by Inge Wallin it quickly started to resemble a Marble talk - fans of that application must be having a blast, as there's also a 'real' talk about Marble by Patrick Spendrin. Marble was used by Inge to show one of the longtime strengths of KDE - integration. We have always had technologies like KIO which allows network transparent file access and the KParts framework which makes it incredibly easy to embed applications in other applications - think about what Konqueror does, showing pictures using Gwenview. In KDE 4 many new technologies were introduced, some, like the ones just mentioned, low-level like Solid (hardware information) and Phonon (audio & video) but also more complex. Marble is a shining example here - it is a full blown virtual earth application. But you can integrate it on several levels in any other application you want and customise it with powerful additional visualisations. Take KOffice - yes, Marble can integrate in KOffice. You can have a document, be it a spreadsheet, presentation or text document, and have a real, interactive map in there. This clearly shows the power of integration - map applications aren't new, neither are Office suites. But as far as we know nobody has combined these before outside of KDE.



    Important here is how you can enable integration in several ways. In KDE 3 we mostly saw two kinds of integration - either low-level in the form of libraries you could use to enhance the functionality in your application, or in the form of a KPart, embedding the application pretty much as-it-is into another one. Marble shows that more can be done. It not only offers some low-level libraries and a KPart but it is also specifically designed to act as a plugin in other applications. For example in KAddressBook where it could be used to link a person to a location.



    So for a developer, there are many options now: you can use Marble's low-level infrastructure to achieve a very high level of integration, you can integrate the Marble interface as a KPart - which ensures you do not depend on it and it is much easier to do. Or you can archive even less tight but much easier integration using it as a plugin. If you are new to KDE development, writing a plugin for an application is one of the easiest way to get involved.



    Thomas Zander from KWord fame and now employed by Trolltech Nokia told us he is seeing a growing trend in this area. Noting how hard it can be to figure out what people are interested in when you want to give a talk at Akademy, he is happy there is a clear vision within the KDE community. We have always focused on integration and modularisation, but this vision has crystalised in KDE 4. Almost every subproject seems to target architectural modularisation and making re-use of code easier, according to Thomas. Look at KOffice with its shape technology, Marble, Plasma, and even Qt with the work going on on the ODF writer (allowing every Qt app to easily write ODF files) in there. Fabrizio Montesi also wrote about this trend in his blog. The framework he is working on could bring some great new capabilities in this area, merging the architectural advantages of KDE with the powerful service-oriented technology of Jolie. Look for an interview about this topic on the dot soon!






    Digikam integrated with Marble


    This flexibility is something more KDE applications are and should be aspiring to. A funny coincidence was noted by Wade in his blog, where he wrote how Gilles Caullier of Digikam, a strong early adaptor of many of the new technologies in KDE, was talking about integration of Marble in the Digikam talk at the exact same time Inge mentioned it in his integration talk... we are clearly very synchronised in our thinking about this topic.



    During the Nepomuk talk by Laura Josan, more integration ideas came up. Very interesting was the description of how Marble could work with Amarok and its Last.FM integration to show a globe with artists and their locations. You could search for a location and see bands from that area, or search for other bands close to a certain artists. These kind of things would be rather easy to develop thanks to the infrastructure being build by Marble. More ideas like these are floating around, and many more could come up in the future.



    Easy integration like the 'plugin-way' or with the KPart technology allows a developer to quickly asses the value of integrating a particular technology, and the tight integration possible with libraries and widgets they provide gives us the potential for entirely new use cases. If you think about integration, and allow your applications to be integrated in others or to make use of other applications, you or someone else in KDE may stumble upon something incredibly powerful and innovative. And as our current strategy is focusing on doing new, original, innovative things, more integration offers a very compelling avenue for archiving those targets.



    The Akonadi rumble offered even more examples of this, talking about integrating Akonadi and Decibel in Kopete. Decibel has to store its contacts and the instant messages in Akonadi, which then uses Nepomuk and Strigi to search through them. This way you can connect absolutely every bit of information related to one person and show it anywhere. As Akonadi is ignorant of the types of data, you can for example view your chat logs threaded within your email application. The framework, being generalised, thus brings together information from many sources and makes it much easier to work with it in several ways depending on what you are doing. You can keep a much better overview and thus more easily manage your personal information.



    As you can see, Akademy is more about integration and cooperation than ever, and KDE is consolidating its lead in this area in the computing world.

    6:01 am
    KDE Commit-Digest for 27th July 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1218618757/

    In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for hiding/showing system icons in Plasma, support for using the native Windows start menu where appropriate, with more work in the "Previewer" applet and "TabBar". Better filtering support in the "FolderView" applet. Various work toward Amarok 2, including visual changes, work on playlists, and initial support for MTP devices. Work on a welcome screen in Parley. Initial commit of a "Sky Calendar" tool in KStars. A Twitter plugin in Marble. Trials with network games in KTank. Keyboard actions for switching tabs in Konsole. OpenSoundSystem (version 4) support in KMix. Quick extract and batch extract interfaces in Ark. "Automatic computer shutdown after downloading" functionality in KGet. Experimental mouse pressure and rotation for sumi-e painting in Krita. Text support for the WMF import filter in KOffice. KGo is added to playground/games. KDE 4.1.0 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
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