Category: Software Libre (Page 6 of 9)

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 point of views, the Commit Digest

15 October 2012 / apol / 1 Comment

I’ve usually contributed to KDE by developing software itself, I’ve done other things from KDE Spain as well, as many presentations but that’s not really my focus.

What I’d like to discuss today is my experience with the commit digest. Since before I even had a KDE svn account, I started following commit digest. For those who don’t know about it, the commit digest is a service that with the help of some editors, it gathers what KDE commits have been interesting during a week and posts them together in a nice web page.

I’ve always liked it. Enthusiasts have few ways of following the KDE development: the Planet KDE, KDE News, some mailing lists. But all those refer mostly refer to things that are quite close to be usable or just discussions but little actual work. Those are great, but some of us like to see how those come together, like in a crystal ball. Here’s where the commit digest helps a lot, because it puts some interesting specific modifications and fixed bugs that have happened in our code base for the reader to see what has been going on. I think it’s fantastic!

In any case, a couple of weeks ago I saw some of the editors asking for help and I decided to contribute to it. Getting started is easy, you just go to the enzyme web and apply for the role you’d like to do and then you’ll receive an e-mail with the mailing list and a wiki page discussing the guidelines.

From there you can start contributing from a nice interface such as this:
enzyme review screenshot

There you just press the cross or the tick if the commit should proceed or not. I recently found out that the keyboard can be used for that as well; you can do so by pressing the Right Arrow key for jumping to the next entry and space whenever you find a commit relevant, this will mark the current commit as good, so that it can be classified afterwards.

All in all, I think that the Commit Digest is a very nice way to contribute to KDE. It’s easy to get started with it and I think it pays off. Also you get to see how most people work inside KDE.

Hope you find this interesting like I did!

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 😉

KDevelop 4.4 rc1

10 September 2012 / apol / 2 Comments

As we announced recently, we’ve kept working on the stable version of KDevelop to bring you the polished software you’re looking for.

Many bugs have been fixed during the last weeks, I think we can safely say that it has improved since the last beta and of course, KDevelop 4.3.

If you want to try it now that it’s still hot, you will be able to find the tarballs for you to compile here.

Additionally you can use the packages from some of the more popular distro’s. Feel free to follow the instructions of the packagers. For now, I’ve been told it’s already available for Fedora 18, OpenSuse KDE:Distro:Factory and ArchLinux [testing]. If you want to know about your distribution, please contact them! 🙂

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. ^^

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. 🙂