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.

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.

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 =)

Color Scheme KHotNewStuff support

The color schemes kcm module (under display in system-settings) got connected to KHotNewStuff2 last night (thanks again to Frank of kde-look.org). He also set up a reference of the existing providers so if your app has data on kde-*.org and you want to hook up KHotNewStuff, look for the provider url here.

Plasma themes via KHotNewStuff

hi again, Anyone out there notice the "New Themes..." button in configure desktop dialog got enabled today? It allows easy access to all the many (7) plasma theme's early adopters have added to kde-look.org. I added the functionality (3 lines of code, and a providers url from Frank to add to the knsrc file) then used it to download all the themes.

Here's the mandatory screenshot:



A couple small problems so far. The so-called themes, aren't all really themes. Pink bunnies is really just a widget style, so needs a whole theme to make it work right (shouldn't be hard to do), and for some reason downloaded slim-glow and ozone don't appear in the drop-down, while Akoma, Aya, and TiComb do (maybe we only scan capital letter folders). Also, heron unpacks without a folder for itself, so maybe wait for the author of that one to repack it into a heron folder before trying that one.

Otherwise, enjoy!

P.S. the above screenshot was taken on my work pc which is not using goya, in case anyone was wondering.

Progress part 2

I've mistakenly been waiting for Goya to move into kdereview and then kdelibs/kdeui so I could check in my ui changes to the kns download dialog (mistakenly, because I really could work on it more, rather than sit on my backside) (pokes Raphael). In the meantime I've been looking around for other small projects to fill my time. Unfortunately, Pino keeps finishing them before I even figure out what the problem is ;) (thanks Pino).

Anyway, long story short, I got back to looking at the download dialog more thismorning. I still have lots to do to get it working as well as it did in 4.0 (at least including the same information in the ui, with a bit nicer and faster interface). Also need to get some caching stuff figured out, and probably some categorization figured out also to make Kalzium's dataset not such a pain to view in the dialog. Also need to work on/test dxs client side code to make sure it works for what we'll need it for when plasma starts to use it (Get new widgets from the internet).

So small progress, but a good start, I got the dialog showing downloads (which really helps when you look at Most Downloads feed). And the provider information action working. Next I'd like to get the rating showing (maybe with those nice stars nepomuk uses?) and enable/connect rating items from the dialog itself. Then proceed to enable/connect all the actions in the Install button's menu to view comments, and such from the dialog.

P.S. got an update of Rubber Windows kwin plugin from level1 this morning. Works great, can't wait to hear Stephanie's reaction when she gets on the computer later and sees it. (Will check in as soon as I get word from level1 to do so)

Progress

Well, haven't given any progress reports lately, so here's what I've been up to (in case anyone cares).

KHotNewStuff's download dialog has a major overhaul on my desktop at home using ereslibre's goya library to draw buttons etc. It's much faster, just need to work out some details in the actions coming off the toolbuttons. I think I have an idea for how to handle caching and loading stuff from the internet concurrently (the current model doesn't work, because it falsely assumes reading the disk cache will always finish before loading a provider from the internet.)

In other news, I spent a bit of time playing with kttsd the other night (inserting debug statements, etc.) to try to track down a bug where the output is clipped. Turns out the phonon mediaobject was saying it was done a bit early, so kttsd deletes the job, etc. which causes it to clip. I've installed newer xine libs and will see if that fixes the problem. Until then you can set kttsd to use the alsa audio device and it works fine. I also found out how to get kttsd into the system settings when it's installed, and now speech notifications are persistent because kttsd is run on re-login again :) (time to remove those test notifications on window minimize, etc. before they drive my wife crazy ;-)