Author: apol (Page 7 of 15)

Discovering your OS and beyond

9 August 2012 / apol / 16 Comments

Some time ago, I already talked about the project I started along with Blue Systems called Muon Discover. For those who didn’t follow, it’s some software to get to know the resources your OS is providing like applications.

Muon Discover has had quite a good welcome, somebody even recorded some pretty awesome review, but as you will understand we couldn’t stop there.

The first Muon Discover iteration was centered into building a new GUI to figure out your system’s available applications. The second iteration though, was meant to be an engine overhaul. The GUI wouldn’t change much but technically it changed a lot. Muon’s internal library was repurposed into a backend-based system where APT is only a backend, which means basically two things:

Now we can have multiple backends
Now we don’t depend on QApt

With all these changes, I chose to add another backend too (a backend-based system with 1 backend is sad), so I created some KNS+OCS backend that works well enough. At the moment, it is providing Plasmoids to be added to your KDE Desktop and Comics for your Comics Plasmoid. Here you can see a video of Muon Discover running on my ArchLinux system. 🙂

Muon Discover, KNS Backend from Aleix Pol on Vimeo.

Now the call for collaboration:
Do you want your OS resources to be available through Muon? Create a backend!
Do you want to support other resources than we’re displaying? Create a backend, or expose those through OCS.

Possibilities are wide and it’s a great moment to explore them. What do we want to offer? Only applications? Maybe also multimedia resources? Books? We have to figure all this out, and now it’s the moment to do so by joining the project :).

If there’s any way I can help, I’ll be glad to, so don’t hesitate to ask if there’s any question!

See you!

Pairs is finally in KDE Edu

25 May 2012 / apol / 5 Comments

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. ^^

Explore applications with Muon Discover

27 April 2012 / apol / 15 Comments

As some of you know, I’m working for Blue Systems, during the recent months it’s been on improving some bits of muon and developing a new front-end that we’ve called Muon Discover.

The idea is simple. Haven’t you ever found a tool that was perfect for your need but you only found it after some time stumbling upon it on the net? When considering to install an application, don’t you wonder sometimes if it’s really worth it? Or if it’s actually what you’re looking for.

We are trying to address these areas in this new front-end we called Muon Discover. There you’ll be able to search applications, to navigate through categories and top5 lists and figure out what they are meant for by seeing the screenshots and reviews.

Furthermore, Muon Discover will let you manage the different sources of software you have and manage the applications you’ve already installed in the past but you don’t want anymore.

Here you can see a video that shows a bit what it does.

If anybody is interested, you can try it from our cyber-stuff PPA.

And last but not least, thanks to Jonathan Thomas, Muon maintainer who was really open to new ideas in all this process!

As always, I’m welcome to feedback. Please give us feedback, we need to know what it feels like to use it with your hands! 🙂

You’re welcome to KDevelop!

27 April 2012 / apol / 15 Comments

Sometimes it’s hard to get started using a tool, some people call it white page syndrome, in KDevelop we had the gray page syndrome:

I guess you see what I mean.

To solve this problem we discussed many times about creating some way to Kickstart a KDevelop session properly, this is what I came up with. It’s nothing very different from what others do, but it’s ours, so that makes it immensely awesome. I guess you’ll understand about it easy by putting a video, looking forward to your feedback!

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!!