Saturday, February 28, 2015

node.js experience wanted

Hello all,

If there's anyone in the community, or even just reading this blog, that has experience with node.js and a bit of time I would like to recruit you for a special task. The task is to get bodega-server (and maybe the webapp or admin client too if you're so inclined) to actually work again. It worked at some point in the past year from what I hear, but currently it just spews 404 error pages for any api call it gets. I gather that this is because the nodes that it uses have changed their api since it was written. My time is limited and I've poked it enough to not give warnings at runtime anymore, but someone that really knows the ins and outs of node.js could probably fix it much faster than I so I am asking for such a brave soul to come forward and get the next generation software/data/"stuff" distribution system to do so. I know you're out there and you're considering, stop considering, hop on #kde-devel or #kde-www or anywhere on freenode and find me or others trying to get this going. Or just look at the code itself here and throw me some pointers.

I can't promise much except fame, thanks, admiration of your peers, etc. but hopefully that's enough.

P.S. this couldn't happen soon enough, ocs/attica, knewstuff, and opendesktop/kde-look, etc. are really showing their age. Having bodega working would make a lot of awesome things possible again.

Friday, February 13, 2015

QtSpeech progress

This week some changes in knotifications/knotifyconfig/kanagram/okular are in the works. The kanagram changes are already on master, the others are in review. Those changes are bringing back the use of text to speech features via the new QtSpeech module. Some have asked what the status of QtSpeech is, so I thought I'd share a bit about it here.

Frederik Gladhorn created the QtTextToSpeech module a while ago as a test to see how feasible it would be to wrap all the platforms Qt is supported on's TTS APIs in one easy to use Qt API. This turned out to be a great idea in my opinion. The predecessor to QtSpeech in KDE applications was Jovie, formerly known as kttsd. While it worked for the most part it required a daemon to be running which spoke with different synthesizers (originally) then was modified to use speech-dispatcher directly instead (when it was renamed to Jovie). QtSpeech on the other hand is a library. If you want to use it, you link to it in your application, create a QTextToSpeech object, and pass any text to speak to it's "say" method. No D-Bus connection required, no daemon required, just a small, light library that wraps the native platform TTS API directly.

As for the status of QtSpeech, I'm afraid it's not quite ready for prime time. It wont likely get added to Qt 5.5 which has feature freeze next Monday. It is however ready to be tested, improved, etc. on each platform. Most of it's API is implemented completely on linux, The basic API (saying text) is implemented on Android, Windows and Mac OS X. Patches are on gerrit to implement the rest of the API (getting available voices, locales, setting the voice) on OS X and will be written soon for Windows also. I plan to spend a bit of time on it each week so it will be ready for release with Qt 5.6 and I hope anyone else interested will join us.

More information about QtSpeech can be found here http://qt-project.org/wiki/QtSpeech. I hope this update has been helpful.

P.S. Here's a work in progress screenshot of the example widget Frederik created which is inside the QtSpeech git repository as it appears on OS X.


Edit: The wiki has been moved apparently. It's now found here: https://wiki.qt.io/index.php?title=QtSpeech