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GSoC proposals, from both sides

26 February 2013 / apol / 3 Comments

So Google Summer of Code 2013 has been presented already and there’s many people asking about it. From my perspective, GSoC has changed quite a bit over the years, so I have. When it started I was starting university, since then I’ve been a student in 3 occasions and a mentor in 3 other occasions. I figured that given I’ve been at both sides, I could give some advises to incoming people that can be useful.

The student side

The first year I applied for GSoC in KDE I wasn’t accepted. I guess that this fact alone made me respect GSoC a little more (sometimes I feel like people see it like an easy way to get money during summer). The first time I applied for something, I proposed for something that I figured that I missed from KHTML that I missed while developing KAlgebra (MathML support). I didn’t love the project but I wanted the outcome. I didn’t talk to anyone from the community about it, not before, not after. I guess this was my biggest problem, this and that I was (and still am) clueless about KHTML internals. That couldn’t be well received by the mentors.

The next year I took a different approach. This time I went for KDevelop, it was a project that I used in a daily basis back then already and I already had sent a couple of patches to fix some usability problems there. I thought about what could I do there to improve it. I was following KDE development closely, and cmake was starting to be adopted by then so I guessed KDevelop could use some support for it. Before doing so, I remember talking about it with apaku and adymo, who gave me some suggestions for my proposal, telling me that there even was some work started on that area. Being accepted there was huge for me, not only I would be doing something that I wanted during a whole summer, but also something that I needed and I would join a team that I respected a lot.

The next two times got easier, and I don’t think it was mentors preferring me over other students, but I got to understand KDevelop as a project, our user base and their complaints. That gave me a good advantage when writing proposals.

The mentor side

GSoC is great for KDE. We get yearly handwork for working on our projects. Nevertheless, I think that almost any mentor can tell about bad stories. It’s one of those cases where we’d really like to focus on the positive, but it gets really hard.

Before the students are selected, mentors have 2 major challenges in my opinion: they need to select both a good project and a good person behind it.

To get good project one of the things we usually do is to create an idea page with things to be done on our projects. We try these ideas to be something that has enough charge for someone to spend 3 months working full-time, we put features that are not really pushing since there’s probably someone else doing them and something that can be appealing enough to a student to pick. The ideas page is the channel that ends up attracting more students in the end, but it has a number of problems for us, the first being that this list is where someone not caring that much would go. Try to stay away from this profile, please care.
To get good people, the first thing I do is to take into account how the proposal was written.
Does it take into account all features? Does it explain how the project will change the bigger picture? Why is he doing the project? Does he believe in the project? Is there any possibility he’d stay after the GSoC? Does he even know how to write properly?
And who is this person?

I know it’s not very scientific, but keep in mind GSoC is not about getting a new feature for us, but about getting a good contribution so we are thorough. In the end, we’re going to spend many hours mentoring this person and project, we don’t want that work to be for nothing.

My suggestions

Read the mailing list, show up on IRC, figure out what’s the project interest and if you’d fit with those people.
Don’t compromise about the project idea, make sure you pick an awesome idea that you like. If you don’t find one, make it up.
Make sure that you know what you’re doing and why.
The proposal is not about choosing a project within the ideas page. It’s about saying how you’ll make it a reality.
Sending a patch beforehand helps a lot. Much more than saying how you rock. Also if you’ve contributed to other projects, make sure the proposal points to it. The important thing for us is to know that you can code and work with a community
Follow the Planet KDE

And please, note that’s my very own opinion. Not KDE, not KDevelop or KDE Edu, although I’m sure that other people will agree with (some of) my points.

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. ^^

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!