KDE 

At the desktop summit, many contributors got a ExoPC from Intel, but the software on it was quite a disappointment. Meanwhile, there is an official release of Plasma Active that fills the gap. So I sat down and installed it on the ExoPC. It really works quite nice and smooth. Applications like Amarok and a browser make it usable to hear music and do some quick internet surfing. I documented the steps in order to get everything up and running. Read More

Finally some sustainable announcements about the future of Qt and its open governance project: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/ http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/ I hope this will be well received and we will see yet another increase in contributions to our Qt/KDE ecosystem ;) Thanks for all the effort to all people who made this possible!

Some days ago, Dominik implemented a line modification system in the KatePart. For all who don’t know what that means at all (like me before the DS 2011), here some screenshots. First, starting with a fresh loaded file: Now, lets write some lines: Read More

Once in a while, there are really interesting blogs, presentations and reports about how to do things right as software developer. This is a quick list of links about API design and coding style: Designing Qt-Style C++ APIs (Qt4), by Matthias Ettrich, 2005 API Design Principles, extended version of (1), Qt Developer Network (Nokia) The Little Manual of API Design, an in-depth summary of (1) and (2), Jasmin Blanchette, 2008 (Nokia) Developing Quality Libraries, presentation of (1)-(3) on the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria, Oliver Goffart, 2009 How to Design a Good API and Why It Matters, Joshua Bloch, 2007 (Google) Qt Coding Style, good coding style not limited to Qt, Qt Developer Network (Nokia) Guidelines for KDE Development, similar to e.g. (6), KDE Techbase Hall of API Shame: Boolean Trap, Ariya Hidayat, 2011 Thanks to all the authors for sharing & happy reading! Read More

Soon the GSoC projects of this year are over again. I would like to thank our two students Adrian Lungu and Svyatoslav Kuzmich for their work! They both did a nice job and improved both the code folding and the vi mode a lot. Thanks to them and I hope they stick around in our project, more help is always welcome ;) And thanks to Google for sponsoring their efforts. Read More

After adding the new design to the Kate homepage, I got some feedback about broken fonts and other stuff. Most should be fixed now, e.g. the “The Team” page now looks kind of okay again. In addition, we now have some nice feed display with the latest commits and overall a bit cleanup page. For mobile devices, like my Android phone, we now have WPtouch installed, which provides some rather nice layout for small screens (but allows easy switch back to normal layout, too). Read More

2021 Update: Kate's current mascot is Kate the Cyber Woodpecker. Kate’s icon is quiet nice, but for our website and other stuff, it would be really cool to have some eye catcher and something to know: yeah, that is Kate :) As Kate is obviously a woman, at least in most languages, it would be quiet nice if some artist could come up with a painted or rendered one to put on our page. Read More

Kate has since more than one year a new WordPress powered site. During last years Akademy, Dominik and I installed it and filled it with first life. It replaced the old Drupal powered site, that Anders did set up years ago. Thanks again to Anders here, for the work he did on the old page. But since the day Anders didn’t have that much time any more for Kate development, it somehow lost its drive (as Dominik an I are not at all capable to work with Drupal, whereas Anders really was an well practiced Drupal admininstrator). The current WordPress site is much more usable for us, as we know WordPress much better than Drupal. The initial import of the content of the old Drupal page was kind of painful, but most stuff was moved over even during Akademy, just some outdated howtos and faqs got purged. Read More

Kate (App + Part + KWrite) is down to 200 bugs, thanks a lot to all people helping with this effort, e.g. Dominik, Erlend, Adrian, … Perhaps others want to join, we have still a lot bugs and many are quiet some work (and stuff like BiDi errors are not that nice to fix, if you have actually no clue about the used languages :/)

It’s been a nice week here in Berlin at the Desktop summit. I have even got some coding done. A command I often missed from Vim was the gq command that re-formats text based on your text width setting. For example, if you want to stick to a sixty-columns layout, you often have to re-format the text when adding or removing something, like in this screenshot where some text has been surrounded by HTML tags: Read More