I'm here

It's been over a year since I posted anything. That's way too long. So what's going on in the projects I care about lately?
Speech-dispatcher will soon have a 0.8.5 release. There's a set of patches in the works on a branch on github that moves the audio to the server so we will be able to do useful things like label each pulse audio output with the client application name rather than a generic sd_espeak, sd_pico name for each output module. This way you'll see stuff like "Konsole speech", "Konversation speech" etc. volume controls for the speech volume control of the application's speech output. In order for this to work some other refactoring needs to be done in the espeak and other modules so stopping audio playback will be immediate etc.
QtSpeech has had some work done. The android and windows versions have been seeing some love lately. I'm optimistic that it can be included in an upcoming Qt release. Though I'm not sure why it hasn't been included yet.
KMouth has been waiting a QtSpeech release in order for it's kf5/qt5 branch to be merged to master.
KNewStuff could use some work. There was talk at a recent conference about adding the properties and such necessary for it to be used from QML. I'll follow up on that and see what has become of it.
All in all I feel like I haven't been around as much in the above projects as I'd like to have been. Life is busy and work is busy and such. I plan to spend a bit more time on these though. Even if it means I get slightly less sleep. Looking forward to a good rest of the year.

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? =)