wow, KMail

Ivan already blogged about it, but I have to join in the festivities, KMail's new interface (using Qt4's model/view framework) totally rocks, it's so awesome and useful, and much faster than before (I use imap, so maybe that's part of it?) It's stuff like this that makes me want to get out there and code, code, code, and make kde totally rock as it already does, but even more so =) Good job guys.

Back, with lots of help and thanks

Hello Planet,

I'm back, sort of. I've gotten a few good bug reports, and some thorough testing lately of KNewStuff which has helped poke me and get me back involved looking at code and trying to keep up with all that's going on. Thanks to the hard work of Petri Damstén of plasma comic fame, knewstuff will have less bugs for the 4.2 release.

I've also been taking a good look at ktts while I've been away from development, and it's in a decent but getting stale state. It's got a nice roadmap that Gary Cramblitt wrote before he had to leave the project is here: http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/roadmap.html including the plan for moving to speech-dispatcher and working better with other desktop software. A lot has been done by him also, but there's still a lot to do, and a handful of bugs as well. Any devs with any spare time (spare time? what's that?) come join the mostly empty #kde-accessibility irc channel, and lend a bit of time =), even if just long enough to test kttsd with your app and some notifications and give bug reports =).

Holy crap, Akademy is going to totally Rock!

Hi all,

Just took a look at the akademy schedule of presentations, and have to say, I'm floored. It's incredible how the community can get together, hold hands, and move forward like that. There are some incredible presentations I'll definitely be watching as soon as they are available. I can't believe the stuff talked about in Frank's Keynote description, absolutely incredible, can't wait until all that is available. As usual Inge is right when he will be presenting about how integration is our greatest asset. I hope Olaf's talk on accessibility opens some eyes to issues that are faced there too, should be great I think. Those are only a couple that jump out at me at first glance, the rest look very good also. Anyway, it's a great feeling to know we will be accomplishing these goals as we all press forward. A big thank you to the organizers, and all involved in this event, it's gonna totally rock!

Changes...

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let everyone know why I've been missing lately I guess. My life is changing, hopefully for the better, but it's going to be an adjustment at first for sure. Stephanie has decided that she does not love me anymore, and has fallen for someone she met on irc but not in person yet, who lives in India (yeah, it shocks everyone). We filed for divorce wednesday, I'm keeping custody of both our daughters, and stuff. I plan to keep contributing to KDE, but it will definitely be a lot less than before unfortunately because of time issues. I've lots of family and friends supporting us and we will be ok, I just need to take on both father and mother roles. I'll still be on irc lurking and stuff, but will probably be afk a lot more and stuff.

KNewStuff with Goya

KHotNewstuff2 is going to be using Goya (once it moves out of kdereview and into kdeui on the 19th). So I thought publicly thank Raphael(ereslibre) and Kevin(ervin) for the great work on such a nice framework. I also wanted to let everyone see the new ui a bit and get some feedback.



This is 'khotnewstuff4 plasma-themes.knsrc' Currently the name, one line of description, author, and downloads are visible. I'll try to get rating shown, and a way to see more information about an entry. Also, notice the tooltip shows the complete description for each entry, it can be a bit big at times, not sure what the best way to show that would be, suggestions anyone?

Preparing for 4.1

April flew by. I was able to speak with Josef on irc for a while a couple weeks ago, and got some direction for fixing some DXS (Desktop eXchange Service) issues. The engine for DXS is almost fully functional, but will take some more love these last couple weeks before freeze. Frank added id tags to the kde-look.org type sites so if all goes well we should be able to rate and do other collaboration-type things with stuff hosted there (There's an API, I just need to hook up to it now that entries have an id to send).

On the UI end, Ervin tells me he has one more api refactoring to do before Goya is ready for kdereview. I hope it's in time to be released for 4.1. It really is a nice thing to use, and has simplified much of knewstuff2's ui code.

Sharing some hindsight

Right after thiago announced qt-copy had upgraded to rc1, I updated. Learn from my mistakes. Don't update without reverting everything (./apply-patches changes stuff, duh!). Also don't try to just make from your build folder, clean out your build folder first, and rerun configure.

Not sure why I was so braindead thismorning, but thought I'd share the wisdom of hindsight so you don't follow and make the same mistakes I did ;)