Category: bluesystems (Page 3 of 3)

Smoothing the transition to Qt5/KF5

10 January 2014 / apol / 4 Comments

Hi,
If you’ve been following development in KDE recently, you might have the feeling that either it’s not changing much or we’re doing things that are not having an immediate impact on our daily life.

This is changing soon, the KDE developers have definitely been busy. We’ve been preparing the technical layer where we will base our future technologies. That’s Qt 5 and the KDE Frameworks 5, which has been discussed and documented largely.

Anyway, I didn’t want to discuss about the past today, but instead point you out that everything is in place for you to start porting the project of your liking and start taking advantage of Qt5 and KF5.

So if you’re interested, just take a peek at the projects that are already ported (Kate, KDE Workspace, KAlgebra, KGeography and probably others I’m not aware of, you can check if the repository has a frameworks branch) and give it a try.

If you have questions, remember you can use #kde-devel in irc.freenode.org, kde-frameworks-devel mailing list.

Interesting times coming, do you want to be part of it?

KDE 4.12, KDE Frameworks 5 and Barcelona

6 September 2013 / apol / 2 Comments

Summer is almost over, so it’s time to get our things together. A new release is always a good opportunity to get together and getting some things done.

Last Friday we gathered, some had some good food, we had some beer, and we even got to discuss about the future of KDE, free software and, of course, some politics.

Dinner picture

We didn’t have enough with having food, we wanted some hacker fun, so the next morning (well, alright, it was more noon than morning) we met again. This time to work together on KF5, in our Blue Systems’ office.

KF5 mini-sprint

Thanks everybody who came, and for those who didn’t we’re waiting for you next time, or if you can’t come to Barcelona consider organizing one!

\o/

Muon Discover, new version, new features, new look

19 February 2013 / apol / 13 Comments

A new Muon release is approaching and I wanted to use this occasion for sum up a little what happened in the Muon area, in view of the forthcoming 2.0 version.

The first thing you’ll notice is the version bump from 1.5 to 2.0. This is because the whole suite had 2 big changes. Firstly, Jonathan reworked libqapt which will be seeing a 2.0 version as well, and I refactored Muon’s internals so that we could have different back-ends in it.

I’m excited about this last change; not only for the features it’s already providing, like the KNS and Bodega backends, but for where I’d like it to go in the near future. We’ll know more about it soon though. 🙂

Another important change, was that we moved some of the Discover UI from QML to better integrate with the rest of KDE applications, specially by using a native scroll bar and prefer the main window’s toolbar to our custom buttons. I’m not much of a graphical person, but I’m quite happy about the result. I hope you are as well.

Here there’s a small video I made for you to see what’s going on in Muon Discover 2.0. I hope you like it and I hope you want it. 🙂

Cheers! \o/

My first year at BlueSystems

13 December 2012 / apol / 2 Comments

About one year ago, the 1st December 2012 I graduated, and by the same dates I started working for BlueSystems. Since we usually consider year periods like achievements, I thought it was a good occasion for a flashback, so there we go!

The KDE GTK Config KCM was my first assignment. It was something new for me but still interesting otherwise. I was more used to work into making applications, there I worked right into helping integrate an important part of the software we have available to KDE. I think it was successful in the sense that many people are starting to take advantage of it and hopefully enjoying the possibility to fully customize the look of all applications, haven’t you tried it already?
The second project I worked on was Muon Discover. There I spent most of my time this year, by bringing to KDE a new way to see what you have available for enjoying on your system. I think it’s a very interesting project and I’d like to keep working on it regularly since I think there’s much we can offer there. Of course my work on Muon hasn’t been limited to creating Discover, but I’ve also pushed many different internal changes in order to get different backends. Backends for OCS/KNS and Bodega, will be available from the next Muon version.
Furthermore, I’ve tried most of all to help KDE wherever I could. We organized the Pineda sprint, I’ve worked on bringing life to Plasma wallpapers, I’ve committed many fixes in the lower stack of KDE and Plasma Components to make sure everything worked and I put my grain of sand to push the People Framework.

All in all, I’m happy of what we’ve been doing from BlueSystems. I think it’s just starting, we’re doing great work, so keep tuned!

**sigh** When you have fun, time flies!

Cheers, and have happy holidays if you’re having them!

PS: … and this was only what I worked on while sponsored, it’s been a great year indeed. 🙂

Changing wallpapers

25 September 2012 / apol

The fresh air of the Swiss Alps is good for many things. I came here to work on KDE Edu mostly but I’ll be reporting first about some contribution to Plasma. During the last weeks I’ve been working, during my BlueSystems time, on a new plugin that will let you have a wallpaper written in QtQuick. I think it’s a very interesting step because it will provide a simpler way to draw KDE Plasma Wallpapers that can react to things. For now I created a couple of wallpapers: One that’s really ugly and another one that fetches ASCII animals from the interwebz and makes it move randomly from time to time. The good news is that it just works, that it has not a noticeable performance impact 1, that it’s terribly easy to write one and that it’s incredibly fun to play with them. 🙂

1 if you don’t make expensive stuff in the script, of course PS: if anybody is interested in having such wallpapers working on KDE 4.9, please tell me and we’ll manage it 😉