Friday, April 22, 2011

Kontact with google calendar

Hey all, with the help of some friendly folks in #kontact I was able to get mail/calendar set up and working in kontact today. I previously had some bad settings in akonadi from my last attempt a few months (maybe a year?) back. and clearing .config/akonadi helped alleviate that problem.

Since I've been using an android phone lately much of my calendar and mail stuff is on google services, so naturally I wanted to sync my calendar, contacts, and mail with google. Fortunately this is all possible, unfortunately it's not all that clear how to set it up. So here's a quick walkthrough for future reference.

Lets look at the tricky one, calendars. To add a google calendar to your korganizer you just need the caldav address which you can get from the calendar's settings like this.













Then you'll need the google calendar url to plug your calendar's address into which can be found in the help section, here for convenience:



Then you can open korganizer (or kontact) and right click the calendar manager and choose Add Calendar. It will give you a list of resources like this:




Since google calendars support CalDav choose the Dav groupware resource. Here's where the ui could use some update and/or simplification. The next thing you will see is a list of calendar providers, of which google is not a part like this:

The trick (thanks Leo) here is to click cancel since google is not on the list. Strangely (most cancel buttons close instead of continuing) this continues to a dialog to let you add your calendar by url that looks like this:





You can finally put in your url (combine the google calendar url with your calendar's address) and enter your username (foo@gmail.com) and hit the fetch button. After entering your username again (not sure why it doesn't take the one you already set) and password you are able to choose your calendar and add it to korganizer.

Anyone that votes we simplify this process raise your hand :) o/

Sunday, April 3, 2011

School's out

KDE-Edu is out of subversion and now in git. Take a look. And not a moment too soon. This coming week there will be a KDE Edu sprint in Bilbao Spain. What better place to learn how to use git than a sprint with peers eh?  Anyway this message is brought to you by the hard work of Ian Monroe and Nicolas Alvarez who worked very hard to get the conversion rules set up. (And fixed a few bugs in svn2git in the process).

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Minor tasks

Just a quick note to let you all know what I've been up to this week. Monday I took a look at what will be needed to finally fix Jovie (make it use the voices you add, etc.) The rest of the week I've spent some time setting up a local copy of accessibility.kde.org to play with. Last night I got it working with chihuahua layout which looks nice, but has some accessibility issues. I let the awesome crew in #kde-www know about them and a fix is in the works. I wont switch the site over to the new layout until it's accessible, don't worry. I would like to clean up the content on there though, it's very outdated, and much of it could probably move to techbase and/or community.kde.org.

Oh, I've also signed up to be a SoC mentor. This summer is going to be awesome.

Monday, March 28, 2011

QtZeitgeist 0.7.0 released!

Today we released version 0.7.0 of libqzeitgeist aka QtZeitgeist (the first release with a tarball) It's basically the same as 0.1.0 but with a new version, some minor fixes, and a license file.

libQZeitgeist is a wrapper library around the Zeitgeist DBus API for Qt, and is brought to you by Collabora in cooperation with the Zeitgeist team and KDE.

If you don't know what Zeitgeist is:
Zeitgeist is a service which logs the user's activities and notifications, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations, and makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is also able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

To get started:

* Get the code http://releases.zeitgeist-project.com/qzeitgeist/
* Get the Zeitgeist code from http://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.7/0.7/+download/zeitgeist-0.7.tar.gz
* Join #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net
* Have fun with use developing
* Follow the work on http://gitorious.org/kde-zeitgeist/libqzeitgeist

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

It's alive!

I'm very excited to announce that qt-atspi has seen some major progress lately. Frederik Gladhorn has been kicking some major butt and has gotten it into much better shape than it has been previously. I just tested his "experimental" branch, and I've got to say wow. Since I started testing and playing with qt-atspi my holy grail has been to try to get our qt calculator to work with orca as well as gcalctool does. Today I need to get a new holy grail. Fired up orca, fired up the calculator test app and was delighted to hear every button, every change, selection, activation all spoken to my ears through the chain from QAccessible to qt-atspi to at-spi2 to orca to speech-dispatcher to espeak (Quite the chain, I know). In the next days and weeks we'll likely get qt-atspi packaged for distros to test and I'll definitely put some polish on the how to build it yourself tutorial I put on techbase last year for those that want to play with it sooner :)

Frederik you rock!

P.S. Sorry for no pretty pictures, maybe for my next post I'll learn how to make a videocast of qt-atspi in action :p

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

KDE Sysadmins rock!

Hey all. I just wanted to take a quick moment to tell/remind you all that our (KDE) sysadmins rock! They have been very busy recently getting the move to git going. git.kde.org is running cgit, projects.kde.org is running Redmine, there's a web app setup to collect our ssh public keys for those of us who were using https. I spoke a bit with Eike Hein on irc today and he said "I don't think we've had an idle day this month really :-)" Sounds like the next step is setting up reviewboard. Amarok and Konversation are both migrated from gitorious.org to git.kde.org and will be used to test and setup the rest of the infrastructure we will want and need to do what we do best.

So fellow kde folk, please take a moment to thank these diligent guys and let them know how much you appreciate all they have done and continue to do for us all.

Monday, May 31, 2010

Renaming kttsd

Hey all, I thought I already blogged about this topic, but found I didn't. Anyway, one of the things I wanted to get done while in Randa was to rename KTTSD (Kde Text To Speech Daemon) to something with a meaning that is pronounceable. It's changed a lot since 4.0 (and 3.5, etc.) so a new name fits. A user suggested the name Kitty on a previous blog post, so I used that for about a day until another developer pointed out that Kitty exists (http://www.kesiev.com/kittyguide/home/) though it seems outdated/unmaintained. The next morning in Randa, we had a brainstorm session with other developers and came up with a few choices. We went with Jovie which happens to be a less commonly known and used name (and is also one of my daugther's name). So new in kde 4.5 Jovie will talk to everyone (if you or your distro setup speech-dispatcher correctly, etc. etc.)

Next step? Move the developer page from accessibility.kde.org about kttsd that's outdated to techbase and update it for D-Bus, 4.x documentation.