Author: apol (Page 7 of 14)

KAlgebra on Android

24 April 2012 / apol / 10 Comments

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.

Next KDE Workspace Iteration

7 March 2012 / apol / 4 Comments

As it has already been said in the Plasma mailing list, we’re planning the next iteration of the KDE Workspaces.

For this project, we’d like to start with gathering a group of people to figure out a vision for this next iteration. If you know you have good ideas and you want to be part of this group, please send me an e-mail to aleixpol@kde.org and we will condider your application.

Anyhow, if vision is not what you want to work on and you still want to help, also there’s plenty you can do, just read through the e-mail and you should already start to get some ideas.

Kamoso Sprint

12 February 2012 / apol / 4 Comments

Kamoso sprints are special. There’s no travelling involved, there’s no big deal other than managing to find the correct day to meet with Alex Fiestas and spend some KDE time.

I think that Alex will agree with me that it was quite a productive time, we got quite a lot working and the rest more or less sorted out. I wanted to make a lengthy blog post about how did we spend the night.

Since it’s already late, I’ll leave you with this video and some pictures. I hope you’ll grasp how awesome it is to work on KDE. Again. 🙂

Cheers!! \o/
(say cheeseeee!!! 🙂 )

Road to KDevelop 4.3, Beta Available

16 January 2012 / apol / 4 Comments

Hi!
It’s been probably too much time since we announced a KDevelop version for the last time, but hey! Here we are, as alive as ever! 🙂

Actually it hasn’t been a quiet year, there’s been quite a lot of development going on, specially with regard to stabilization, improved integration facilities and, of course, Milian’s c++11 work, which is not ready yet, but much closer than it used to.

Long story short, here we can find the packages to compile it here, together with some verbose changelogs in case you’re interested.

Also you can wait for your-favorite-distro to package it, but more on that in the future! 🙂

New year, new life (or KDE and GTK integration)

2 January 2012 / apol / 16 Comments

Or as they say in Spanish: año nuevo, vida nueva. Well, or not. My new year started the 1st December actually, when I got my engineering degree, but I’ll talk about the project some other day.

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 :).

Akademy-fr FTW!

25 November 2011 / apol / 7 Comments

Hi!
It’s been a good day today!

First of all I arrived to Toulouse where Akademy-fr is going to happen. I’m really happy of being part of this first (I hope of many) Akademy-fr edition. 🙂

Secondly, KAlgebra has been accepted to the OVI store. As far as I know, it’s the first (I hope of many, again :)) application bundling kde libs in it. So all N9* users can install it without ugly tricks! \o/

Proof: KAlgebra at OVI store.

Salutations dès Toulouse!!

Pairs and ugly applications

9 November 2011 / apol / 3 Comments

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 :D) 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:

Check the video, when your eyes hurt just stop it.
Think of what you think the GUI should look like.
Here I’d love to say that you should be able to provide a QML file, if you can’t then just a mockup.
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
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 😉

So KDE is getting older…

5 October 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

And from KDE Spain we don’t want to let the next 14th October to pass by without a proper birthday party.

That’s why we have put together 4 mini-events/birthday parties around the country to celebrate in A Coruña, Barcelona, Castelló and Málaga. We’ll have some talks and probably some dinner if people feels like going out a little :).

If you’re interested in coming to the event, check the schedule here: http://kde-espana.es/news.php#itemKDEcumple15aoshabrquecelebrarlo

If you’re interested in helping, don’t hesitate to ask me or anyone in KDE Spain! There’s plenty you can do, including organizing another in your city, we will provide some materials for you, we want you to be part of it as well!

And for the rest, whoever you are, don’t forget to spread the word! KDE is going to be 15 and needs your enthusiasm too, for the next joyful 15 years!

\o/

KAlgebra Mobile and QtQuick

3 October 2011 / apol / 6 Comments

Some years ago I’ve been talking, whining maybe, about how KAlgebra is more flexible than it looks, the proof is this post from 2009. A lot of time has passed since then, not as much work on KAlgebra as I’d have wanted, but we are much further. Having an N900 gived me the confidence to work on a KAlgebraMobile that probably nobody tried but most of you have installed on your system, yay! It was quite a disaster, bad timing (end of N900 era) and kdecore didn’t make it to the main repositories for some reason I can’t understand, so I that version will stay in our hearts and vcs logs but not much further.

I have this little flaw, whenever I find a new cool technology I fantasize about porting KAlgebra to it. Same happened with QtQuick (QML back then), it made sense: I always wanted to have KAlgebra working on a handheld device and there we had some good opportunity. The big problem was that I didn’t want to make KAlgebra Mobile a Harmattan application, or a Fremantle, or build the GUI from scratch, since most of you will know I’m no designer. The whole QtQuick application development process looked fuzzy to me (and still does, but less).

The whole thing changed when I was asked to try QtDesktop Components, mostly because I had to try it on something and I finally could invoke something like “Button {}”. Once I had it working, I created separate implementations for harmattan and desktop, so right now it’s quite easy to extend to different sets of components quite easily as long as they are a little API-equivalent.

In short, right now we have a KAlgebraMobile applications that can be tested and used on desktop and also used on Harmattan. It’s far more interesting the second case, mostly because on the desktop we’ve had a version of KAlgebra since many years and I didn’t have to blog about it. Anyway, as always, it’s on kde’s KAlgebra master branch, feel free to test it. If you don’t feel like, enjoy some pretty pictures!

And last but not least, big thanks to Laszlo Papp for working for KDE in Harmattan, without his work this wouldn’t have been possible. Also big thanks to Jens Bache-Wiig who is caring about desktop even if he can do mobile UI’s :). This kind of people make this community alive and prosper!!

KDE Spain is translatable

16 September 2011 / apol / 3 Comments

Hi!
As some of you might know in Spain many different languages are spoken and among the major goals of the KDE Spain association, we’re trying to push those to be properly available and usable in KDE.

Until some time ago, it was just possible to browse our website in Spanish, which wasn’t very coherent, that’s why we adapted the website for localization.

For the moment, besides Spanish, we just have Catalan and English which is a good start. 🙂

I hope you like it, cheers to anyone who helped! 🙂

PS: Of course it’s not like we speak that much English in Spain, it’s just in case you want to take a look…