Saturday, January 31, 2009

Anyone want any hot new stuff?

Hi all,

In talking with Roger (DaSkreech) lately, we've been wondering what apps in KDE haven't been using KNewStuff to distribute data for their applications. KNewStuff is very well used in kde-edu apps, and in many of the kdegames for distributing game themes, levels, etc. It's also very well used in the desktop to distribute wallpapers, colorschemes, plasma themes, etc. I'd like to see it used more in apps like KRecipe, to get more recipe's, in any app that has support for scripting to distribute scripts, and so forth.

I am aware there are some missing features in KNewStuff, and woild like to know what developers have found when they've tried to use it. Any missing features that hindered it's use, or just lack of know-how of how to use it and set it up?

Some things I've been considering lately have been setting up a ghns provider at home to provide access to family pictures in wallpaper size, and making a windows port of khotnewstuff4 those family members stuck on windows could use to fetch the images. A bit over the top, but definitely possible. Many more ideas for ghns, and ODC (Open Desktop Collaboration) can be found in Frank's Keynote from last years akademy, a great presentation full of ideas for bringing our technology further along.

Anyway, if you have any ideas for how ghns could be used in more apps, or improvements for it, don't hesitate to leave comments here, or e-mail us on the ghns list ghns@lists.freedesktop.org or come join #ghns in irc.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

I must be doing something wrong =)

Hey all, I've been hanging out in irc and such lately, and am excited to get working on stuff again (poke me if you see me not working on stuff, I really need to get some things working better). Anyway, just wanted to throw something out there real fast and see if anyone else has hit it. For about the past year when I build qt-copy I've proceeded to move or delete the qt-copy/include/phonon folder in order for kdebase to not find those headers and find the installed ones from kdesupport/phonon. This last week I've been trying to not do that and build things straight as they come, but haven't had much luck, sort of. The other day I copied the .bashrc directly from techbase, and used it to build qt-copy, kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, and kdebase without a hitch. Only problem was that it installed to $HOME/kde instead of /usr/local where I like it. So after that finished I tweaked the .bashrc to install to /usr/local and wouldn't you know it, kdebase/runtime/phonon/kcm didn't build again, same issue... That was a long story, but I'm just wondering if anyone out there that builds qt-copy and installs kde to /usr/local has it building somehow =)

In other news, there are a few things I need to work on (bugs in ghns mostly) and a few things I could work on and wanted to get some feedback about what people think would be most worthwhile. Just an informal leave a comment if you like one/a few of these ideas and let me know what you'd like to see.

1. KHotNewStuff updateable category - show all installed items that have updates, possibly with an update all button/action of some kind.

2. KHotNewStuff installed category - show all installed items so user can remove ones not wanted anymore, this makes the most sence for wallpapers, etc. that move off of the "Latest" list pretty quickly as new wallpapers come available.

3. KHotNewStuff upload - often asked for, some spamming issues to work out to make it work right, but should be doable, and would simplify distribution of data a great deal. (Think sharing guitar hero songs with your friends, only sharing with the world and not guitar hero songs, but kgoldrunner levels, etc. =)

4. KHotNewStuff ui tweaks - I'd like to add a hover for the preview that shows a larger image of the preview, fix up a lot of other things I left hanging when I left last summer, etc.

I'll probably be trying to work in all of the above, but just wonder what people would like to see first/most and if anyone has any ideas/feedback I'll welcome it all =)