TheBlindCow

It’s been a long way, it’s made us struggle with ugliness at some point, but now we have Pairs in place to be released with the next KDE 4.9 Beta.

Also it will come with a great new UI drawn by Abhash Bikram Thapa featuring some lovely colorful people, yay!

If anybody is interested in the project, please get in touch with us or with the kde-edu mailing list! There’s plenty to be done: new games (sets of images and concepts), the game editor, improving the adaption in touch systems, and anything you’d like.

Thanks to everyone who has been involved in the making, especially Marco Calignano for helping and pushing me to do the work when needed, and Anne Marie for caring about the project. ^^

Since I started blogging I’ve talked many times about KAlgebra. Usually it’s not to display it’s awesome features but to discuss its portability. I’ve always considered that it’s important for KDE not to lock down its applications to a platform. That’s why I’ve put my efforts into ensuring KAlgebra will work properly on different platforms so far, like the N9 and Plasma Active.

– TL;DR: you can jump to the video –

I think we’ve done a great job so far. It hasn’t been easy and we are not there yet, but I think that being able to do things like this is an awesome opportunity for projects like KDE Edu where we want to target the widest audience possible.

Android offers this, a widespread audience where we will be able to put our things. That’s why I put my interest in it, anyway.

Regarding the actual implementation, it’s far from perfect. It’s using KAlgebra Mobile, which has different backends. I created a new one that doesn’t require any components present. QtQuick components are lacking for Android at the moment, so I came up with this UI that besides not being properly integrated it works good enough and keeps me from frustration. Things are looking good on that regard, apparently I’m not the only one needing those, so I hope we’ll get some proper UX eventually.

A lot is left to be done still: Integration with the system, integration in the Market, etc. Ideas welcome.

Oh, and last but not least, big thank you for Marijn Kruisselbrink who put up with my questions and opened the path by adapting kdelibs.

And now, the video.

Almost forgot, if anybody wants to try it, you can download the installer here. Remember, it eats easter bunnies.

Hi!
Some time ago I blogged about a new game for KDE Edu, a memory-enhancing cards game. It was getting dusty in my scratch repository until Marco Calignano had the strength to push some features that it desperately needed and at the same time pushed me into gaining interest in the project again.

A lot has happened since: the name changed to Pairs (can be found in kde:pairs now) and it’s quite awesome already, I’d say. It lets us download themes from the Internet, supports different game types like image->image, image->word and some others, etc.

A couple of weeks ago we discussed about moving it to KDE Edu finally, although we decided not to and port it to QtQuick so that we can make it work in touch screens and we can get to have fancy GUI. In few days we managed to port it to QtQuick (somehow, there are some hacks ) but now it’s a little ugly. WTH, not a little ugly, very ugly. It makes your eyes hurt and it’s on purpose.

Why would someone make such an ugly beast? Well, because we’re looking forward to find someone who can make it look nice. Now, those of you who have some pride in your artistic skills, please consider it: Could you please dedicate some time in your life to a community of hardcore developers without this sparkle for beauty? We don’t have much to offer other than considering your idea and hopefully it will get to be used by children from all around the world (now that I think of it, maybe it is something!).

What we need is quite simple:

1. Check the video, when your eyes hurt just stop it.
2. Think of what you think the GUI should look like.
3. Here I’d love to say that you should be able to provide a QML file, if you can’t then just a mockup.
4. Optionally (and preferably) you can check what it looks like by modifying the qml GUI and compiling the program. Here there are some instructions: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE_Applications
5. Send it to me at aleixpol@kde.org. You can also send me any questions you have, as well as posting them as comments below, so that we can discuss it all together.

Cheers, for beauty!

PS: And elegance

I’m quite happy to see that we finally made it for the new KDE Edu design. From my point of view it’s quite hard to make all these changes from our community perspective. KDE has been built fundamentally around software developers and it’s not easy to get contributions other than that, I guess that’s mainly because I can write the type checker for KAlgebra but I really can’t work on a website design. It’s usually quite hard to get people from the community willing to put their love in projects like the KDE Edu website.

They say that there are always solutions, this time it came from Agustín Benito, who used his white wizard powers to get us in contact with a couple of designers coming from ASOLIF companies that wanted to contribute to free software somehow, and this was the way.

The experience went really well, I won’t say it was easy for me but I’d say it’s because it was my first time working like that and I didn’t know very much what to expect, but the thing is that people who worked with us are very good professionals (something that doesn’t happen always in our world as well, for good and bad) and I don’t think anyone can doubt of the quality of our result, like it or not. \o/ yay us!

I won’t say everything was perfect, probably the whole process took too much time and communication could have been better probably, but I think it’s a great start and I’m really looking forward in seeing this collaboration paradigm gaining adoption inside KDE, and why not, taking part in these projects.

And last but not least, thanks to the KDE-www guys who were really helpful, specially Ingo Malchow and Matthias Meßmer who were really supportive with the project and helped us make the best out of it. Also thanks to Alex Fiestas who joined us in the KDE Edu sprint and broke some of his own KDE collaboration rules to give us a hand doing some development on the website.

Long life to KDE Edu and flowers! \o/

I’ve probably been talking lately too much about where I was going to spread my KDE love and talking too little about what I’ve been doing and what’s happening:

Akademy-es: Yes! we’re having the Akademy-es in Barcelona this year and I know you won’t miss it. Yay! Awesome. Well it takes some preparation, so it takes some time. I feel I’m quite lucky I could find a rather big team of local KDE enthusiasts, that way I don’t have to do it all by myself but truth is it’s time consuming and love consuming. By the way, if anybody wants to help, just poke me and remember to register if you want to come!

KDE Edu: We had our yearly meeting. In my opinion most of our group work was about getting the best out of GSoC and the rebranding. The GSoC results where out last week, I hope the best luck for all the GSoC student, as an ex-student I can remember the excitement of being accepted, so congrat’s to all of them . About the rebranding, news will be coming soon . On the KAlgebra side, the language has improved tons since 1 year ago, it’s quite hard to show that to the KAlgebra user I guess, but we’ll get there, for the moment rocs looks like it will be the next victim.

KDevelop: As some of you already know, I’m working on my final engineering project around KDevelop, doing some static analysis using our infrastructure. It’s still going forward but it’s keeping me to commit new features to KDevelop lately, I hope I’ll fix that soon, though… >:) I’ve got some crazy ideas to be put in place, since I don’t like to talk about something that’s not implemented, you’d better wait and see . If anyone is interested in static analysis (on c++ for the moment) you can find me in irc/e-mail and we can talk about life and spring oh and static analysis.

In the end, a lot of things are moving, I don’t have as much coding time as I’d like since there’s always something that sounds that if I don’t do it nobody will, probably I shouldn’t think like that… but oh well, I hope everyone will enjoy my KDE areas the way we all enjoy KDE.

Hugs for everyone! \o/

Hi!
Some intensive days are coming let’s talk about it a little .

Next week I’ll be going to San Francisco because I’ll be attending to Camp KDE. It’s specially interesting to go there because it’s a very nice opportunity to get in touch with a KDE community that is not usually around in the events I’ve been going (it’s going to be my first KDE meeting outside of Europe). There I will be talking about KDevelop and KDE Edu (no wonder), two beautiful projects from a beautiful community like KDE, can’t be more proud of it .

The day after I come back I’ll be going to Bilbao where we’re celebrating this year’s KDE Edu sprint. I feel like it’s an important step for KDE Edu because it will be the first time where we are celebrating it in an education context and because we will be gathering some important people from this country who is interested in education. Hopefully we will be able to take our project to the next level, so yay us! (again ).

And last but not least, I’ll be going to Vigo the week after that, where I will give the KDE talks in the Free Software master by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Igalia. I’m happy to see these initiatives happening here and proud to help to take it to the next level. (yay us! bis bis).

And last but not least, thanks to all the sponsors the KDE eV board and, in the end, all the people who makes this kind of things possible . See you soon!

In barely 5 hours I’ll be taking my plane to Bruxelles, on my way to FOSDEM, where I’m going to meet a bunch of people interested on a lot of things like I do, mainly Free Software (and chocolate , but that’s off topic I guess). Also there I’ll be talking about KDE in Education at the Cross Desktop devroom. I’d like to tell anyone interested on education to come and share with us their opinion and thoughts regarding Free and Open Education.

I’d also like to remind you all that we’ll be celebrating the KDE 4.6 dinner in Barcelona (well, this time Badalona, but it’s still close the next 19th february, if you want to come, please just follow these instructions: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.6#Barcelona

Last but not least, it would be good that anyone interested in coming to this year’s KDE Edu sprint says so on KDE Edu mailing list so that we have a correct appreciation about how much people is interested in coming. There will be hacking, talks to the local community and lots of fun with the local folks in Bilbao .

See you soon!

Hi!
As some of you know already, last week I was in Dublin trying to understand what MeeGo means (I got some conclusions, maybe some day I’ll share them). More importantly though, I also met a bunch of KDE hackers and we decided to start to work on some project together. I wanted to work on a KDE Memory game for a while and there I found some time to work on it, here there’s a demonstration about what we can do.

video source: http://proli.net/meu/los_otros/kmemory-presentation.ogv

If you’re interested on it and want to help get it in shape for the next KDE (now 4.7) release, here’s a list of what you can do:
- Think of a good name (yes, kmemory sounds fishy)
- Create a theme
- Create an icon
- Give ideas on how can we improve the theme specification (see kde.theme example in the git repository)
- Give ideas on what UI do we want (not how can it be improved, but what we want, it’s a little different).
- Just try it and enjoy yourself (no, that doesn’t mean an X theme ¬¬)

You can find the project here: http://gitweb.kde.org/scratch/apol/kmemory.git

Cheers!

Next Thursday afternoon I’ll be attending the Drumbeat Festival discussing about Education software.

If you are interested on the subject don’t hesitate to come!

This saturday we will be celebrating the Software Freedom Day in Barcelona. I’ll be attending and I’ll talk about KDE and Education.

If you’re close and interested on the subject feel free to come and we will discuss anything you like!

See you there!