Accessibility is alive (QtSpeech progress, Jovie's deprecation)

For some time I've been considering what to do about Jovie which was previously known as ktts (KDE Text To Speech). Since before the first KDE Frameworks release actually, since kdelibs used to host a dbus interface definition for the KSpeech dbus interface that ktts and then Jovie implemented. I have a qt5 frameworks branch of Jovie, but it didn't make much sense to port it, since a lot of it is or could become part of the upcoming QtSpeech module. So Jovie has no official qt5 port and wont be getting one either.

What will Okular, KNotify, and other applications that want to speak to users do instead? The answer is QtSpeech. QtSpeech is a project started by Frederik Gladhorn to bring speech api's to all the platforms that Qt supports. It is still in its infancy, but is quickly improving. A few weeks ago when I built my kf5 stack with kdesrc-build I noticed that kdepim(libs?) was depending on it and it hasn't been released yet, so I got motivated to send some improvements to qt-project. Frederik and Laurent Montel have been pushing fixes and improving it also. It is as easy if not easier to use than the KSpeech dbus api (and doesn't require dbus either) and can be used to speak text on linux/unix, osx, windows, and android platforms so far. If you are an expert on any of these platforms please send patches to implement api on these platforms in their backends, the more eyes on this project the faster we can get it solidified and released.

You may be asking but what about feature X in Jovie that I will miss desperately. Yes there are a few things that QtSpeech will not do that Jovie did. These will either need to be done in individual applications or we can create a small framework to add these features (or possibly add them to QtSpeech itself if they make sense there). The features I'm thinking of are:

1. Filtering - Changing ": Hey QtSpeech is really coming along now" to "jpwhiting says 'Hey QtSpeech is really coming along now'" for KNotifications and the like. This could likely be implemented easily in knotify itself and exposed in the notifications configuration dialog.
2. Voice switching - Changing which voice to use based on the text, or the application it is coming from or anything else. This might make sense in QtSpeech itself, but time will tell if it's a wanted/needed feature.
3. User configuration - Jovie had a decent (not ideal, but it was functional) ui to set some voice preferences, such as which voice you wanted to use, which pitch, volume, speed, gender, etc. This will become the only part of Jovie that will get ported, which is a KDE Control Module for speech-dispatcher settings. This may also change over time, as speech-dispatcher itself possibly grows a ui for it's settings.

All in all, progress is being made. I expect QtSpeech to be ready for release with Qt 5.5, but we'll see what happens.

Upcoming KDE Applications 14.12 release prep

Hello,

In preparing for the upcoming releases of KDE Applications 14.12 (2014 Month 12) I realized the other day that we have an interesting situation.  For Qt4 based applications there's libkdeedu which contains the kvtml parsing and manipulating code and also a handful of .kvtml files that KAnagram and KHangMan use to get their word lists. KAnagram has been ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks for some time now, and will have it's first Qt 5 based release at the end of this year. It uses libkeduvocdocument which was ported to Qt 5 also at about the same time this year. libkeduvocdocument uses Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, and also ships the same handful of kvtml files that libkdeedu ships. (libkdeedu has been split for the Qt 5 based releases) KHangMan hasn't yet been ported to frameworks and Qt5 or at least the port isn't stable yet, so it will depend on libkdeedu still, as will KWordQuiz and Parley from what I understand. So we have two libraries that ship the same files, makes them not coinstallable. So we'll be moving the kvtml files out of the libraries and into kdeedu-data soonish to solve this problem. The moral of this story is to look around, see what will be released using Qt5 in the upcoming release, and what will be using Qt4 still. https://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Application-release-status-December-2014 may help also. If you maintain an application and haven't put your application on that page under the Qt4 or Qt5 tables yet, please do, the more we coordinate, the better this release will be.

Thanks, and keep up the good work all.

Simple Elegance

I just noticed a couple of features today and yesterday in plasma next and kwin that I appreciate and wanted to thank whoever thought of adding them. Both are simple but very handy to have. I'm talking about the little X buttons on both the wallpaper configuration dialog and the kwin present windows effect. I don't use either of these features very often, but yesterday when I was testing knewstuff with the wallpaper config it was very handy to be able to delete the installed wallpaper from the wallpaper selection dialog. Then just now it was very handy to be able to close extra windows I had open that I no longer need when I was in the present windows effect looking at what I need to be doing next. Makes it very simple to clean up a workspace.

Just throwing this out there, thanks whoever added these simple nice features.

Plasma Next Improvements and KApplication -> QApplication gotchas

tldr, if you port from KApplication to QApplication, remove the %i from the Exec lines of your .desktop files.

Hey all, so I've been running plasma-next on my main development machine for a month or two now and have definitely enjoyed the speed at which improvements come. Just in time for plasma 5.1 release timezone support was added to the digital clock, so you can choose which timezones you want to see, use your mouse scrollwheel to change which one is visible, and so on. Also because our translators are awesome we got a last minute change in after the string freeze with their permission to show all the configured timezones in the clock's tooltip (similar but not identical to how it worked in kdelibs4 based plasma times). I enjoy the new Breeze theme and icons, and the alternatives system for switching between different k-menus, different task managers (I'm currently enjoying the icons only one) etc. is so handy.

In other news something that has been bothering me for a while is that okular just didn't want to get launched from any visual launcher. Clicking on a pdf in dolphin acted like it was launching, but no Okular ui would appear. Clicking view book on pdf books in Calibre would do likewise. So I spent a couple of days adding debug messages to kinit and klauncher trying to figure out what was going on. Kate launches just fine, so I tried copying the kate.desktop to okularApplication_pdf.desktop and replaced kate with okular etc. and that worked fine also.

So today I asked Albert if he had any ideas and got thinking it had to be something in the .desktop files themselves. So I uncommented another qDebug line in klauncher that said exactly what it was asking kinit to start and found it using "/usr/local/bin/okular blah.pdf --icon okular. So I tried the same from a terminal and found that okular's binary failed to launch because it doesn't understand the --icon parameter. A bit of digging found that KApplication handled that argument, while QApplication doesn't and the frameworks port of okular like a good example ported from KApplication to QApplication already.
Klauncher puts --icon blah in when you have %i in the Exec line of the .desktop file. So if you port from KApplication to QApplication, be sure to remove the %i from the .desktop files of your application also.