Today I’d like to talk about my new job at Netrunner, where I started some days after my graduation.

There I have been working on a KCM module to configure your GTK2/3. To do so, I took Chakra’s kcm and reworked it a little to behave like I wanted to. Now that we’re here, big thanks to the Chakra crowd, specially Manuel Tortosa and José Antonio Sánchez, who let me fiddle with their project.

After the cleanup part, I ported the project to our git.kde.org infrastructure, so now it’s a KDE project. It’s in playground for the moment, we’ll see where it will go from now on.

The KCM itself is quite stable at the moment. Feature-wise, it lets you select the GTK styles, the font and the icon themes to be used. Furthermore, it lets you tweak some more specific settings like the icon placing on the menu and so. Also there’s the possibility to download GTK and icon themes for fun and profit. I hope you’ll enjoy it .

For Netrunner/debian/*ubuntu users, you can install the package using this package. (Please, use this package for testing purposes only).
On other distro’s, please ask your packagers to package it .

Today I would like to talk a little about some work I’ve been doing recently in KDevelop in order to assure we have a good path for the new KDevelop user and KDE or free software Developer.

I think that KDevelop has been quite good at being adopted by people who know their way in the development process: in few words, people who already know the language they’re using and usually they can fill any lacking feature KDevelop might have, by doing some old-style terminal hacking . No problem with that, but apparently not everyone is born with some wizard skills, so I’d like to improve this situation.

There are many aspects that can be improved and some have been lately. One of the most annoying things that we found (mostly in Randa, in the KDevelop team and some random spontaneous meeting) to be more annoying, was our “New Project” wizard, specially when it comes to start new technology based in KDE.

This is what it looked like before starting working on it:

There are some things I don’t like here: The tree view looks clumsy and doesn’t lead the user anywhere, so whenever I have considered to create a new project from this dialog, I’ve felt violated somehow. What I’m going to show here has to be taken as a first step towards where I want future KDE Developers experience to start (if they are starting a new project).

The idea here is that the user will select, first of all, what kind of application is going to be created, roughly: KDE Application, just a standard application, a web service or whatever it’s needed. Using KDE as an example, we’ll select if we want to create a console application, GUI application, Plasmoid, etc. Finally, we’ll select the language we want to use be C++, Python or whatever it’s available.

That last step change is important, because we’re adding more importance at what we are doing (a Plasmoid for example) than if we are going to do it in C++ or Python.

From this point there’s many things to be done:

• Make it possible to create new applications from the KDE Examples
• Add some category information, categories are not translatable right now and they can’t have an icon. I’d like to see this improved.
• KNewStuff support to download new templates?
• Make sure the KDE GUI application templates are equivalent for C++ or Python.
• Improve the template’s description. Add links to techbase!
• Think about the templates you always wanted as a kid and contribute them!
• … many other things in your imagination

If someone is interested in helping, just ping me in IRC at #kdevelop in freenode, comment here or send me an e-mail, your call!

Oh! And last but not least, Big thanks to Àlex Fiestas for helping me sorting the templates and discussing the ideas, and Aurélien Gâteau for giving me a hand at making the GUI more usable.
After all this lonely KDE hacking, it feels great to sit down with someone else and try to take the best out of you on what you’re doing!

I always like to go to free software events, regardless it’s a KDE event or not. It’s a good way to step back at what I’ve been doing for the last years and to process a little if it makes sense, if it’s worth it and to consider other’s positions to check why are they working in different stuff and if I should change my views (all in all, not everyone is working in KDE Edu and KDevelop,… surprisingly ).

There were a lot of conversations and different opinions, I still do hear people claiming that we have to outcome the big proprietary projects. There’s been an important change here, now the best/biggest projects are those who use better Free Software (or Open Source like some people call it) wisely, I don’t think there’s that much of a battle with free software or not from the development perspective. We’re there, now we need to make KDE one of those communities that we want people to work with and to work on. That said, let’s get all this awesomeness to the end users, who usually aren’t aware of that.

Also it was nice to see more faces than in the usual meetings, it’s always good to see that there’s people who trust in what you do even if they’re not actively contributing. There’s a lot of profiles to fulfill in the free software world and we still need a lot of passionate people.

And, last but not least, thanks to the organization to put together some really nice conferences, to even bring some international speakers (hey Aaron! ), to try to make us think a little about what what’s being done and to give us the opportunity to talk about our passion.

See you soon! \o/

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/

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

See you there!

If you want to come just add yourself!

For more information see: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.5#Barcelona

See you there!

For starters, I spent last week with the KDE Edu and KDE Multimedia teams in Randa where we gathered to get our projects some steps forward. Personally it was a great experience, I was actually looking forward to discuss some issues with the KDE Edu people mostly and I think we did great, we’ll see how it turns out in the future but I’m quite optimistic about it . Also I could meet Percy, our new KAlgebra contributor in person, so we could discuss about some technical issues we found and about how are we going to rule the world in the future.
On the other hand, with my Kamoso developer hat on, it was a nice experience also to get to talk to some VLC developer to sort our problems out which is going to mean a new version soon. \o/ Great, and kudos to Alex who is doing some really tough work (VLC has bugs too! we had a hard time to realize that). And last but not least it was great to be able to show KDevelop to some KDE developers who had not realized its awesomeness yet, I even think I convinced some of them so, yay us!

Other than that, I keep working on my GSoC, I’ll have some flash visit home tomorrow and much more to come .

1. I like computers but computers don’t like me.
2. I study computer science.
3. I prefer to be awake during the night instead of the day as humans usually do.
4. I like to argue with everyone, even if I agree them.
5. I like to spend nights discussing about anything I can think of, or programming.
6. I like to sleep.
7. I hate people who is happy early in the morning
8. My bedside table books are written by people called Tanenbaum, Stallings or JA Marina
9. I don’t like novels
10. I like to think that I value freedom, intelligence and humor

Given you managed to read until there, you are tagged too.

Take care!