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KAlgebra Everywhere

7 November 2009 / apol

Today when I got home I felt like doing something big, something new and something fast. As many other times, this turned into some KAlgebra coding rush but today it was a bit different, because it involved a new project in KDE: Cantor.

So what happened? Cantor is an interface for mathematical engines (supports Maxima, Sage and R) that works on worksheets instead of just a console as we do in KAlgebra currently, like many other programs that you might know like Maple for instance. What I did was to implement a KAlgebra backend for Cantor.
I have to say it was quite straightforward. Alexander Rieder, the developer, has been helpful and everything worked fine, which is great and surprising for such a young project, so kudos for Cantor! 🙂

This backend already supports code completion, syntax highlighting and some embedded help, it doesn’t support plotting or latex exporting Â¿yet? though, but I hope this will be added at some point. I’d like to remark that it’s good to have such backend because it makes Cantor a project that properly integrates the tools that KDE-Edu provides and doesn’t just rely on (probably better) choices from 3rd parties.

So now we have 4 KAlgebra interfaces: GUI, Console, Plasmoid and Cantor. What’s next?

Here you can see what it looks like:

Enjoy!

KDE talk in Barcelona

6 March 2009 / apol

Hi, I will be giving a talk about KDE next sunday at 11:00 am in the UPC university, on the Campus nord and I am posting this blog entry because if you are in Barcelona and interested in KDE you might want to come.

Here you can find all the information about how to go, schedules and (yes, there are other talks you might want to go too 😉 ): http://www.fiberparty.org/

See you!

KDevelop4’s Documentation Integration

28 February 2009 / apol

I’m back to you today to show something that we have been baking lately for KDevelop. It is its new documentation integration.

With KDevelop 4 we have been focusing on putting together the information that the user will be willing to read every moment. Until now, while browsing the code, we were only showing the information gathered by the C++ support. Since the last week this is no longer true, we can now show the documentation provided by the different documentation plugins. We only have a QtHelp plugin for now, but I hope the architecture will be flexible enough for the new plugins we will have on the future, such as, maybe, a Doxygen’s, cmake’s or anything the reader can imagine.

Here you can see a couple of screenshots that might give you an idea of how does it work so that you can see KDevelop 4, love it and try it.

– The information shown when hovering the DUChain:

– The tool view on the right showing the requested information:

🙂

KDE for students

23 December 2008 / apol

Last week Albert and I made a couple of talks related to KDE on the TÃ©rmens Lan Party event. One of these talks was about KDE-Edu. We reviewed every application one by one, showing some of their strengths.

There was a teacher in the audience (who is concerned about free software, afaik), he said that he was trying to get to use gnu/linux on his school but that he was facing some problems when it comes to use KDE.

One of the issues he mentioned (and that I don’t really know about) is the lack of accessibility tools, the other one is that KDE-Edu applications don’t really fit teachers needs.

It is this second point the one that I would like to focus now. We have quite good applications, but we developers (despite the ones that are both developers and teachers, of course) do what we ponder that’s useful, but not what it is in the actual classroom, so I just wanted to point out that we are open to requests, or at least I am.

In this direction, I wanted to mention that someone contacted me since he wanted to see some features happening on KAlgebra because of some study he is doing. I’m just mentioning that because it was a feature that I was not intending to add in a near future but that can indeed be useful in a real scenario, and it is implemented and hopefully will be in for KDE 4. Here you can see a screenshot of it and you can download and try it here if you wish, even if it is not ready still.

In conclusion, I just wanted to say that if you miss anything, just ask for it. If you don’t know what we have, just check all the (maybe too little) information we’re offering and if you want to contribute but you don’t feel like coding, you can help to improve this communication channel, that is actually failing, so that this education software reaches its goal, students.

Guademy and GSoC

28 April 2008 / apol

Yes, this year you will have to put up with me with another Google Summer of Code project (well, mainly Matt Rogers, who is mentoring me again 😉 ). This year I’ll try to get KDevelop (KDevPlatform) to be able to use plugins written on different languages through Kross. Great! 🙂

On the other side, this weekend I’ve been at ValÃ¨ncia, attending to the Guademy conferences, where we have been discussing about interoperability between free software environments (or should I say KDE and Gnome?) among other things related to free (libre) software. It was quite interesting so far, despite I had to a bit earlier due to some personal issues it’s been great to be there. 🙂

Back to reality, now I’ll have to concentrate a bit more on the university before starting the summer of code hard work… But still I want to put some code that I have been baking lately related to KDevelop’s cmake support… 🙂

C’ ya!

KDevelop hackaton

21 April 2008 / apol

I am back from Munich, I am at the university now actually :(.

It was a great week though, lots of hacking, knowing people and community building. It is always nice to know the people which have been sharing with you bugs and features :). It was kind of sad leaving the place but well, we had to come back to reality.

In the hacking side, I have been working on the cmake support as a language which is quite ready (we still lack of cache support but i’m planning to add it soon anyway 🙂 ). The rest of KDevelop is taking shape really nicely, it still has some crashes and is having some speed issues that I hope that will be addressed during the following months.

I’ll put some feature review when everything is settled down, but I’m very excited about this new IDE that we will enjoy in some months!

Take care!

KDevelop Developer Meeting – Day[0]

12 April 2008 / apol

So today the KDevelop hackaton started. Yesterday I spent all the day just to go to Munich, where the hackaton is happening.

It was an usual trip: Police trying to get you naked when checking if you have no weapons, train delays (yeah in Germany, I thought that this didn’t happen here 🙂 and some misunderstandings with the hostel receptionist.

When I got my room (finally), then I managed to get some food from an anonymous international frachise and had a walk in the area near the hostel. Germany is quite scary when it is dark :s…

Today we went at Trolltech offices, where Harald spoke about Qt (history, news and features) and I spoke for a while about KDE4. Then we had lunch break and Alexander exposed his ideas about what he wanted KDevelop 4 to be and we started to discuss about how should it be and how are we goint to make it rock. 🙂

Now, after some rest, it seems we will have some cultural interaction (which seems to involve beer :P)…

Aditel IParty X

2 April 2008 / apol

I spent the last along with tsdgeos, ana`, ereslibre, pgquiles and nefertum to the Aditel IParty X that happened in CastellÃ³ de la Plana, where we were invited to give some talks about KDE.

I have to say it was a great LAN Party, one of the best I’ve ever gone, sure (and that’s not because I won a Wii 🙂 ). The people, the place, the organization. 🙂 The only problem was the beamer that didn’t want to work (sometimes) with my laptop, but we could workaround that easily (thanks to Emilio :P).

I think the talks will be soon available, in case someone is actually interested (they are in spanish btw)…

PS: If someone sees a video involving IParty X and Qt4 dance, don’t look at it, it is a fake… 😎 yeah really… 😛

Things about me

8 February 2008 / apol

Some days ago, stephanie tagged me in one of her posts and now I am supposed to say 10 things about me. She evil-laughed me until she got me to do this post. Damn! she is good at that. -.-
I don’t really think there are 10 things about me. Even if that existed, I don’t thing anyone is actually interested on it. BTW, now you know what you are going to find if you keep reading that. 🙂
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