Utah Open Source Conference 2009 day one

Today was the first day. Setup went fairly smoothly. I set up wired network with the switch and two boxes Ian Geiser sent me to use, but the wired network was not working (I later connected their wired network just into one machine and it worked fine, so dunno). Luckily they had wireless in those little boxen, so that got them online to demo kde 4.3 kubuntu. I realized how important web access is to kde during that time though, the microblogging, comic, weather, etc. applets all need web access obviously. But so did ghns to get providers of comics for the plasmoid, etc. etc. I think I take web access for granted most of the time.

There was some good feedback at the conference. I heard lots of people saying they used to love kde but haven't used it since 4.0 came out. I left all those people with hope in 4.3 that they hadn't tried besides there on the demo boxen. I met a few kde fans which was pretty cool. Showed amarok, kde-edu apps (kstars, kig, kgeography, klettres to some guys that mentioned they had kids), kmahjongg, and plasma of course. I also showed kwin present windows and it's ability to filter by typing, so many people don't know about that useful feature! I can definitely see where promotion can get us many many more users testing, using, playing with and enjoying the wonderful stuff we contribute our efforts to. Tomorrow should be fun, will give more report tomorrow probably.

I think the only downer about the day was that there was a huge window right behind our row of tables, which gave so much glare the screens were barely visible. That and irc was blocked, hehe.

ghns meeting

Yesterday morning we had another meeting in #ghns on freenode. It went very well, there was a much better turn out than last week, and since we had been hacking on things this week a lot more thought was brought into it I think. The plan on techbase got some ui features added to it based on feedback from users, and some developers. Josef was at the meeting and will be adding some things to HotStuff (the implementation of dxs running on newstuff.kde.org) to support paging which will be good. Especially since Eugene and some others thought of a way to do paging that's transparent to the user. We'll load two pages of data, show it in the list, and when the user scrolls to the second page of data, we'll load the third page and so on. Hope that will turn out feeling natural and cool =) We've also decided to leave the filter box in for local filtering (but rename it to Filter) and make server-side search available via a search button. Some complaints about the current method of "sorting" were raised also, since it doesn't really sort anything, just grabs 3 different feeds from the server (highest rated, latest, and most downloads). I'm thinking of making those tabs, but that's not optimal either. If anyone has a good idea how to represent that with the ui we have, that would be cool. Anyway, all in all it was a great meeting, and though there's lots more to do, we are all optimistic.

Hopefully in the next couple days I'll have some real stuff to show, so stay tuned.

KNewStuff3

In the past couple days I've been playing with the code, and have reached a couple conclusions. First, KNS::Engine isn't an engine, it's an interface the apps use to interact with the engine. Apps don't need to know anything about the engine though (and currently don't/can't anyway). Also this interface class has no signaling mechanism, so it would be good to derive it from QObject so it can send out signals and apps can connect to them. In other words some binary incompatible changes will be necessary and I'm on the way to make them happen by creating knewstuff3. Because of this decision we have the chance to make some binary incompatible changes in the library itself which I believe will help keep the design cleaner and make it easier to maintain as a whole.

I had a discussion on irc today about what to name the interface class, and after a few suggestions settled on the name KNS::Client. I'll be getting that going this week, and hope to have something basic working by next week. We'll see.

This coming saturday we'll have another meeting on #ghns on freenode if anyone else wants to come along and share their 2c with the rest of us. As I blogged last time, last weekends meeting was productive. We've got a plan and are on the road to better things.

KNewStuff2 Future

Time again to think about the future. This morning in #ghns on freenode we had a meeting about KNewStuff2 and ghns (Get Hot New Stuff) in general. There are a lot of cool things coming our way with Open Desktop (opendesktop.org) and it's use in Plasma (OCS Widget) and KNewStuff2. Before the meeting I wrote down a plan for making KNewStuff2 better prepared for these coming changes and documented it here: KNewStuff2Plan and will be working to achieve that end for KDE 4.4. Frederik will be working on the RESTProvider which will provide better access to the functionality on kde-look.org etc. sites. I'll be revamping a bunch of the KNewStuff2 library to make this easier and better also. Plus documenting my promise to do so here gives me more motivation/pressure to actually get it done =)

Want a taste of what's to come? How about the ability to rate/comment on a wallpaper from the KNewStuff2 dialog itself (something I promised back at the 4.0 release event but never got in ;) . How about the ability to see multiple pages of "latest uploaded" and "highest rated"? How about the ability to see all color schemes uploaded by that master color schemer Joe Colormakerman? I'm hoping we can get there and much further in the not so distant future. Anyone with me? =)

Utah Open Source Conference

Hey everyone,

Time has come again for the third annual Utah Open Source Conference http://www.utosc.com (I missed the first two, but will be going to this one). I'll be bringing stuff to demo KDE to people and set up a booth there, so if anyone wants to come by and say hi, or see the coolness that is KDE, well, you know where I'll be anyway.

This is also a call for help. If anyone is going to be in the area and would like to help me represent KDE and man the booth that would be awesome. I've never actually run a booth like this before, so will be my first time, but should be fun I think.

Anyway, hope to see ya there, and let me know if you'd like to help with the booth either on irc (jpwhiting) or via e-mail (jpwhiting@kde.org).

The Future of Kttsd

As you may or may not know, Kttsd is in the middle of some changes. Before Gary Cramblitt (aka phantomsdad) left the project, he made (and documented very well) a design to make kttsd basically just wrap speech-dispatcher. This design has many advantages, it simplifies kttsd code quite a bit, adds new functuonality, and makes kttsd better able to focus on what it does well, which I see as being the voice for KDE applications/desktop/platform. Kttsd has always been very good at filtering things like notifications (I use it to listen to irc and have for ages), and at providing an interface to an otherwise obscure sub-system (speech). However I also think there is definitely room for improvement =) And here's where you come in dear blog reader.

I'm considering changing up the ui a bit, to try to bring it into this century. The job list/control tab is somewhat dated, and it has always seemed a bit cumbersome to me. I'm considering making the job list more of a log of what has come in from what apps, with an easy to see view of what the filters did to the text for easy tweaking of filters (I seem to spend a bit of time each week trying to tweak the filters in one way or another). Other requests that have come on bugs.kde.org have been the ability to dynamically switch the current voice being used. So I'm thinking what if we make the jobs tab be more of a log and add a new tab for real-time speech control (change the current voice to male/female, language, pitch, speed, etc. all in realtime. Opinions anyone?

If we do the above we could also easily have a menu in kttsmgr's system tray icon to choose the voice, adjust speed/pitch, etc. on the fly also. So from you I'd like some feedback about which features you currently use in kttsd (talker chooser filter?, string replacer filter? easy (or not) access to festival/espeak/other speech system?) and what you'd like to see kttsd allow you to do in the future.

Thanks for reading and I hope next time to have some pretty pictures of a nice interface =)

KTTSD using speech-dispatcher

Hey all, lately I've been working a bit on porting kttsd to use speech-dispatcher as per Gary Cramblitt (previous kttsd maintainer)'s design from back in 2005. Anyway, I thought I'd give a bit of a progress report on the effort here.

First a quick summary of Gary's design though. The idea is that speech-dispatcher will do most of the work previously done by kttsd (job management, synthesizer communication, etc.) which is simplifying kttsd's codebase quite a bit. The reason to switch to using speech-dispatcher is that it's a system app, so console apps can use it to synthesize text, kde apps (directly or via kttsd) can use it also, and it will do all job management, so apps wont be trying to talk at the same time, etc. Also gnome is switching to use speech-dispatcher exclusively for 3.0 release.

So status, I've got two machines both running speech-dispatcher 0.6.7 (configured with festival and espeak) and kttsd notifications are going there directly and working fine. There's still some work to do to get the job manager in kttsd to show all jobs from speech-dispatcher, and figure out how to represent all the voices speech-dispatcher has configured in the kttsd talker tab, but it is functional. I've got all the plugins for synthesizers removed from my branch, and took out the sentence boundary detector plugin also, as all that is done by speech-dispatcher. I'll be working closely soon with speech-dispatcher itself, adding some missing functionality to fill in the gaps of what kttsd used to be able to do and speech-dispatcher currently can't do yet (basic stuff like which job is currently being spoken, repeating jobs, etc.).

I've also removed the output methods (alsa and phonon) from the branch, as speech-dispatcher sends the output to the speakers itself. This avoids a bug we've had since 4.0 where when using phonon and the xine backend, speech got cut off quite often.

I hope to have kttsd using speech-dispatcher exclusively by 4.4 and have it provide a gui to set up speech-dispatcher also (besides prioritizing the available talkers that speech-dispatcher provides). My end goal is to have a setup where I can set apps like kopete and konversation to send new message notifications to kttsd, have it filter the notifications, and speak them. Obviously much more will be possible, but that's my itch anyway =)

P.S. if you want to try the branch, it's at https://svn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/work/kdeaccessibility-kttsd-using-speechd/kttsd