quick bug days wrap up

This is a quick wrap-up entry for Plasma Bug Days which was held over the last two days. First, we accomplished a lot. I mean a lot. The first goal was to drop into third place on the Weekly Bug Report. We accomplished that on the first day and so moved onto another goal suggested by one of the participants: have fewer reports open than we did six months ago. We also accomplished that. Now we have a new goal: break 1000. We're just 120 reports away from that goal right now.

Today has been relatively slow going as it isn't an official Bug Day so just a few showed up to do bug triage today. Quite promisingly, though, some people from the Bug Days showed up today again. I do hope all of them continue to be involved and help with the bug wrangling as their efforts were just fantastic this weekend.

I also set about to fix some of the older and more annoying issues in some of the more commonly used parts of Plasma Desktop. Many commits later, and many already-fixed (along with some won't or can't fixes, too), and the bug report count has dropped yet further. 4.8 is going to be a fantastic release.

Yesterday was really invigorating, as well: even more people showed up for day 2 than for day 1. That's understandable as it was the weekend. Together we mowed through large quantities of bug reports.

We also pulled together some Plasma bug hunting documentation for newcomers. It was very clear that handing out bugzilla account upgrades to those who took the time to show up was really worthwhile as well: it empowered people who may not have otherwise asked to help out, and boy did they ever.

I used to host bug days sem-regularly, but with project growth and life business they fell to the wayside. I'm happy to say, though, that bug days will be a regular part of Plasma life again, with at least one such event hosted every release cycle.

Our long term goal is to get down to a stable 400-500 open defect reports, and I think that is achievable. We have worked through 600 reports in just 2 weeks, over half of them just this weekend. So it is possible.

The results of a clean bug database are that it becomes far, far easier for developers to identify what needs attention. It also helps our involved users know that, yes, we still have a pulse and do care and pay attention, something that sometimes gets missed.

I now have a nice parcel of "junior job" bugs and a handful of "critical issues for 4.8" in hand as a result of Bug Days ... and a really good feeling about things to boot.

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plasma bug day 1

Today was the first of two Plasma Bug Days we're hosting this week in #plasma on irc.freenode.net. It started at noon UTC and people started rolling in. With the help of Ann Marie and Marco, we got the volunteer bug hunters up to speed and working with a high degree of effectivity.

So far (and we're not yet done for the day!) we've closed 62 reports. There were a number of fixes applied for 4.8 (and some for the upcoming 4.7.4 as well) as a result, and duplicates or already fixed bugs were also being caught. A good number of crashers were identified and fixed, and one vastly annoying bug where a panel would mutate and take over the whole screen when the screen count changed was also killed. That's pretty decent for a day's effort.

Big thanks and kudos to all those who participated so far, including asraniel, thijs, BrummbQ, mck182, emilsedgh, mrrub and Adaptee. (Hope I didn't miss anyone, if I did: mea culpa! and let me know :)

We'll be at it again all day tomorrow, so come join us in #plasma and have some fun with us getting Plasma into great shape!

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plasma bug days reminder

Just a quick reminder to all those interested: Plasma Bug Days start today at noon UTC and run until tomorrow night. You are invited to join us test and triage reports (no coding skills required!), participate in live bug wrangling workshops and, for the coders out there, fix bugs that the triage horde identifies.

They center of activity for this is #plasma on irc.freenode.net. As they say: come one, come all! :)

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serbia

I was in Belgrade last week for five days speaking at the B-Link festival. It wasn't just software, in fact it was primarily not software. There were panel discussions on various social, political and artistic topics. I met a musician from Ljubljana, the co-founder of the Dutch Pirate Party, local Wikipedians and several KDE fans .. not to mention members of the Math faculty at the university there.

It was my first foray into this area of Europe, and it was an interesting, educational and thoroughly enjoyable experience. Talking about politics with people there was interesting as conversations deviated from the standard memes, which is understandable given that this was a region with its own cultural history and heritage that was also at war less than 15 years ago. The transitions there in the last few decades have been sweeping and that has certainly shaped the mental landscape as well.

The physical architecture of the place was also interesting: relics of the cold war era sat stolidly next to the brands of today. I've seen pictures, but walking the streets is really the only way to get a proper feel for it. Unfortunately it was very foggy and a bit cold for much of the time I was there, so the weather certainly got in the way of this aspect of my visit.

Ivan Čukić helped arrange all this and he set up a really good program for presenting KDE at the festival. We had four people speaking on various topics with around 20 people in attendance. Most of those who came use Linux, many of them also use KDE software. The next day, Ivan arranged for me to speak at the local University where he also works and I got to meet some delightful people. Some expressed interest in getting involved with KDE as a contributor, so I'm hopeful to see some more commits coming from Serbia in the near future! :)


I'm still ruminating on my experiences there. Despite only being there for five days, there is lots to digest. Most of all, I hope that we managed to inject some KDE awareness and desire to those we spent time with. With that, at least, I believe we succeeded. :)

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plasma bug days

We want to make Plasma Workspaces 4.8 a great release, and one way to reach that goal is to take care of the defects that creep in. To do that, we need your help to groom the bug database. We also realize that to do that, many of you would appreciate some help and teamwork.

It's been a while since we've held Plasma bug days. They worked very well in the past so we're resurrecting them.

On Friday December 2 and Saturday December 3 in #plasma on irc.freenode.net from noon UTC until sometime in the evening (e.g. when the last of us pass out ;)  we will be holding Plasma Bug Master Sessions From Outer Space And Beyond With Mustard Sauce .. ok, that's just a working title, admittedly, but here's what will be happening in #plasma on both days:

• Live, hands-on, interactive tutorials on effective bug triage with an empahsis on the sorts of reports Plasma gets



• Handing out bugs.kde.org account upgrades to people who don't have them but ought to



• Massive, parallel, coordinated bug squashing. People who want to try their hands at simple patches are encouraged to join us, but coding skills are not ultimately what we need: we need to comb through the bug database marking duplicates, verifying fixes and finding big issues that deserve more priority.



• Mustard sauce

We also have some targets. Over the last 3 days we've dropped the number of bug reports for Plasma by over 250 and are down by ~213 over the last week. Many were closed with patches, though many also were cleared out with simple bug triage. This is great progress but we have our eyes on the bug count table and, in particular, dropping from #2 to #3 in total bug count. That means another 170 reports to close. Come out and help us achieve that goal for an awesome 4.8!

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more plasma workspaces 4.8 news

In my last blog entry on Plasma Workspaces 4.8 I talked about a number of things that we've worked on in the last six months. I promised a follow up with more news in it, and so here we are.

Before we get to that, however, here's a little interlude showing Plasma Active One running on a Nokia N950 on Mer. You can read more about it here on Martin "vgrade" Brook's blog.

Plasma Active One on the n950

... and now back to the regularly scheduled topic of Plasma Workspaces 4.8. ;)

OpenGL ES and Compositing Performance

Compositing window management in 4.8 can be built with support for OpenGL ES. This means hardware acceleration using a more modern revision of OpenGL and one that is supported on mobile devices. 

During development of this feature, Martin Gräßlin did a lot of clean up to the existing code bringing performance enhancements to how effects are handled and windows are painted. The blur implementation also received a significant improvement to its performance thanks to improved caching written by Philipp Knechtges; this provides quite noticeable results on many systems. In all, many fewer cycles are spent rendering and displaying the beauty that is the Plasma Desktop.

Thomas Lübking also helped simplify writing effects by introducing the new AnnimationEffect class so that development in this area can progress with less effort required to achieve results.

Power Management

There was a developer sprint was held for hardware and power management in KDE software and it was quite a success. A large number of bugs related to stability and predictability were fixed, but perhaps my favorite two things are that power management became multi-screen aware (so, for instance, plugging a laptop into an external monitor and closing the lid works a lot more like you'd expect ;) and power management became Activity aware so that you can have different settings per activity. I love this for when I'm doing things like giving presentations or watching videos: just switch to the activity with all the relevant files and apps and I don't have to worry at all about touching the power management settings.

Bug Fixes Galore

As the version numbers climb, one would expect so would the bug fixes. KRunner got a number of bug fixes, including fixing the kill runner and making sure all runners always respect their settings. The microblogging widget escapes HTML properly, the virus wallpaper works more consistently compared to the other wallpaper options, the location DataEngine works with newer versions of gpsd now and on and on. Lots of little things that one might never notice because they now just silently work .. and others you may notice because you stubbed your toe on them constantly.

I'm really looking forward to the 4.8.0 release due to all of these improvements, and I hope you are too! :) Thanks to everyone who helps make this possible by contributing their finances, their time, their imagination, their passion ... and remember that you, too, can Join the Game even if you don't have the time or energy to get involved directly.

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Plasma Workspaces 4.8

Having returned from two weeks away in Morocco, things have been hectic and Busy-with-a-capital-B. I've been working on some exciting new possibilities for Plasma Active which are not quite at the point that I can speak openly about them, but it's been taking a fair amount of my time and energy .. and I think it will pay off next year.

Rather than blog about Morocco (which I will do once I've processed the experiences a little more) or Plasma Active, I want to catch people up with what's coming in Plasma Workspaces 4.8.

Screen Locking

Screen locking has been moved into the KWin window manager. We did this to improve security, performance, X11 independence and the overall look and feel of things. 

The security improvement comes from the fact that since the window manager, which is responsible for placing windows and when in compositing mode even making sure they appear at all on screen, now knows about the locker window it can ensure that no windows or glimpses of the desktop ever happen 100% of the time, something we could not achieve reliable elsewise.

The performance improvement comes from the window manager knowing when things are locked (and not). When locked, the compositor can simply not paint anything else but the lock screen, simplifying things a lot in the locked case.

The X11 independence and look and feel improvements come from supporting QtQuick (read: QML) for the lock screen. This allows us to provide non-password based systems (think: touch screen device friendliness) and simplify the interaction between what is being shown and the unlock mechanism significantly (limiting maintenane costs and eliminating bugs). It also allows us to simply make things that look better. Plasma Active uses this to provide a very beautiful lock screen that blends with the rest of the system and shows the current time along with a simple swipe-to-unlock gesture.

The X Screensavers are not supported with the QML lock screens due to the design of X Screensavers, which dates back to 1992 when things were a little different. QML gives us a huge amount of flexibility, however, and the opportunity to create things that are as good and better than what X Screensavers offered. (QML will support OpenGL shaders, at which point possibilities really open up wildly.) We surveyed our users first before making this change, and there was overwhelming support for the benefit/cost involved in this change.

QtQuick Splash Screens

A new splash screen implementation that uses QtQuick has also been added, thanks to the efforts of Ivan and Marco. It loads QtQuick, which implies Qt, so can not be as performant as the very small and slim tool that Lubos coded for the KDE desktop in the past. However, in our tests, the user experience is not diminished in the least by the difference and the ksplashx option remains and in fact is, in Plasma Desktop 4.8, still the default.

Just as with the lock screen changes, this gives us the ability to deliver visuals that are more beautiful, more flexible and easier to change. The start up splash in Plasma Active uses this new splash screen facility and it looks beautiful. The ability to add animations and position the images and other information on screen completely freely really opens up the field here.

Right now, we do not have documentation on Techbase for this new addition but if one looks in kde-workspace/ksplash/ksplashqml/themes it becomes very apparent. Writing a small tutorial would be an awesome way to give something back to the community that doesn't involve coding. Hint, hint ;)

Input Method Panel

The KDE Input Method Panel, aka "kimpanel", got a complete and much needed rewrite for the 4.8 release. It has a nice separation between visualization and logic, using the standard Plasma approach of Applet and DataEngine. It resolves many long-standing issues, has simpler code and a very active maintainer in Weng Xuetian.

On-screen Keyboard

Speaking of input, the on-screen keyboard has seen numerous improvements in terms of bug fixes and performance, some of which take performance from "sort of acceptable" to "so fast you don't notice its doing something anymore". There isn't much here that is user visible other than "it works better". For the next release, we plan to offer support for integrated layout switching, quick access to accented characters and more X11 independence.

Taskbars, Docks and libtaskmanager

We are in the middle of merging the improvements to libtaskmanager from Craig Drummond's Icon Tasks Plasmoid. Icon Tasks itself will end up in the Plasma Addons repository (kdeplasma-addons) as well. This means much improved support for launchers, nicer context menus, a few new features and a number of bug fixes. It's a very significant effort as Craig's fork was quite large: 2639 lines covering 30 files. Seeing as the library is only 6,300 LOC, that's a significant set of changes.

We also managed to track down and squash, though many heroic hours by Alex Fiestas and others, several of the last very visible bugs in the tasks widget and libtaskmanager. Things like the ghost items that would sometimes appear have finally been fixed once and for all. Some fixes exposed problems in Qt itself (in particular: an issue with event loop reference counting whenever inside of x11EventFilter) which we have worked around until proper fixes appear upstream.

Picture of the Day, Picture Frame

This one started quite innocently enough as a patch by Greg T who noticed that the Picture of the Day feature in the Picture Frame Plasmoid caused it to check the picture every two seconds. Wow!

While merging and testing his patch (and the next two he submitted :) a whole number of other issues jumped out at me. Picture of the Day now behaves a lot saner, only waking up at most every five minutes and changing the picture only once it's been on your system for 24 hours (making it your picture of the day, regardless of when it changes on the source server). 

While working on this, I realized with a start that there was no wallpaper plugin that used this. I could hardly believe this, and so wrote one while sitting on a train. In Plasma Workspaces 4.8 you can now have a new astronomy, flickr, Wikipedia or other picture on your screen every day.  Currently I am using the Wikipedia picture of the day.

Picture of the Day is plugin based, so new picture sources can be easily added. Just as with the new QtQuick splash screen, however, we don't have documentation for this. Looking in kdeplasma-addons/dataengines/potd/ should give a would-be tutorial writer everything they need, however.

This also led to cleaning up a few issues in the Picture Frame, such as not stalling on images that were deleted from disk but just skipping to the next available picture automagically.

Plasma QtComponents

This is a hugely significant addition as it means we now have a full set of QtComponents for use from QtQuick that integrates beautifully with Plasma interfaces. It is the result of Daker's highly successful Summer of Code project, which Marco mentored with patience, care and brilliance. We have also had interest and contributions from people who came by way of the Mer project.

This is a vital step towards even better looking Plasma user interfaces and the ability to step into the OpenGL-driven world of QML2 when we get there.

Documentation is being written and will be available in coming weeks.

QtQuick'd Devices Notifier

Building on the components project, a number of Plasma widgets and other UI pieces are being ported to QtQuick. The first completed one of significance that debuts in 4.8 is the devices notifier, which was part of Viranch's Summer of Code project. To the user, nothing changes except it feels smoother and looks a little nicer. It was a long, long path to get to the point that we could use QtQuick as a better-than-QGraphicsProxyWidgets replacement in Plasma .. but we're there now!

In upcoming releases we will have a new QtQuick battery widget and panel controller, among other shifts. This is part of the strategy I described at the end of last year of not distrubing Plasma Desktop or requiring that we rewrite everything all at once, all in the name of respecting our available development resources and not disrupting the user in the least while still marching towards an all-QtQuick world for Plasma Workspaces.

Control Panels in Plasmoids

By adding a X-Plasma-ConfigPlugins= list entry in the metadesktop.desktop, scripted Plasmoids can now have arbitrary control panels integrated into their settings dialog. It's a small thing, but it allowed the QtQuick devices notifier to be fully realized.

Improved Window Switcher

KWin, in its usual and amazing pace of improvement, also brings a new window switcher UI system that ... wait for it ... uses QtQuick. ;) You can read more about this great work on Martin's blog.

... and so much more

These are just some of the highlights and doesn't really cover the many performance and stability improvements that have also been worked on. Alas, already this blog entry is too long, and dinner becons as well, so I'll leave it here and follow up later with more changes in another entry.

Hopefully this already gives you all the reasons you need to try out the alpha and beta pre-releases when they become available to help us test and make Plasma Workspaces 4.8 the most stellar release yet. :)

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activities

Several years ago now I had a minor epiphany while doing field research in the offices of friends and work associates on how people use their computers. The ideas led to the concept of "Activities", which I originally called "Projects" (we changed the name because it was about more than just things we could call a "project").

The idea was fairly grand: you communicate to the computer what you are currently doing and it adapts to that. You would be able to teach it what it means to be doing that thing: "I use these files, talk to these people, need this network connection, want these applications ..." The teaching would happen over time as you engage in your activity, whatever it might be.

Where to start with such an idea? Well, I started simple and small. In part because I was the only one working on it at the start and so I had to eat this elephant in small bites, but also in part because I had a lot of open questions as to how to implement things. I couldn't just easily look over someone else's shoulder who was creating the same thing and see how they did it: no one else was doing this as far as I could find. That made it exciting .. but it also made it a lot more like research than development. ;)

So it was that the beginnings of Activities were as different widget layouts in Plasma Desktop. You could zoom out and see each collection of icons and widgets and switch between them. It let you, for instance, open different folders in a folderview for different projects you were working on. Some people got it right away and started using Activities. Most people didn't, and I don't blame them at all: it was very hard to communicate something that was new to me as well and which we had only the basic sketches of implementation to demonstrate.

In a few days we release Plasma Active One. I just finished up my part of the release announcement and I have to say ... it brought up a certain amazing feeling that has no name (at least none that I was taught :) inside of me. You see, Plasma Active embodies Activities.

When you start it up, you get a view of an Activity and everything in it. You can add things to it. You can connect a web site or an image to an Activity while you are viewing said site or image. Applications launched are automatically associated with the current activity. You can quickly switch between them using a great little wheely switcher thing that's a pleasure to use. Activities sit at the core of Plasma Active's tablet UI and it works wonderfully.

I've shared my tablet around at BBQs and parties I've attended in the last few months and people immediately get it and see the value. I get questions like, "This is perfect for use in our office where we work on multiple projects, could we share Activities live with other people in a meeting or while we're working from our desk?" When people respond like that after just a couple minutes of seeing and using the device, it gives me tingles. :)

It's not all Plasma Active, though. When I read Dario's blog entry on Power Management and activities I just about cried. Ok, not really, but almost. ;) Finally we were seeing very cool usages of "how to teach my computer how I live and work". I now have a "Movies" and a "Presentations" activity on my laptop which I plan to use extensively in this manner. ;)

We're nowhere near the full capabilities of Activities yet, and I know that. We have so many other things to integrate and work on, so many possibilities that we haven't even dreamed of yet on how to use them, expose them, teach them.

But after these past few years of efforts, to see the idea and concept blooming in the open like this .. damn .. what a rush! This is what I identify as the "KDE feeling". :)

On that note, I have an activity ahead of me that I rarely engage in. Someting called a "vacation". I hear they are good for you or something. I'm taking two weeks off, and I dread to think of my inbox size when I return. ;) However, I'm looking forward to a couple weeks in the sun and culture of Morocco, a place I've dreamed of visiting since I was a young adult.

See you on the other side and happy hacking!

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meego.next();

Henri wrote a really nice blog entry yesterday entitled "Where is the future for openness in mobile?".  What he wrote spoke me quite deeply: as do may in our community, I deeply believe in the need for a truly open device stack.

As developers, we need it to be able to create on our terms.

As companies working in this space, we need the ability to innovate on our terms in a collaborative environment without creating dead-end separate silos. It simply makes the most business sense for us. (Though, admitedly, perhaps not for, say, Google ;)

As users, we need our technologies to enable freedom, not quietly rob us of it while we play Angry Birds.

To accomplish that goal we must have a community infrastructure that mirrors the end goals deeply. This is why previous efforts to do this have failed, in my opinion: while there was the stated desire (and probably real desire as well) to create something open, the path there was driven by engines that were most comfortable with closed systems and top down control.

While I was in Tampere, Finland last week I had the opportunity to meet with a diverse group of people from the MeeGo community: companies, their employees, volunteer developers, hardware hackers ... and they kept saying these same things in their own words.

Plasma Active, which is a mere five days away from its first release, has had such openness and collaboration as one of its two core principles from day one. (The other core principle has been to make beautiful things which add to and support your experiences in life; we believe this to be an important ingredient in making objects of desire and is the inspiration for Activities.)  So when we watched the events around MeeGo and Tizen unfold, it just reinforced in us all that we felt about other options out there: if we want an open platform, we're going to have to make it.

The question, of course, is who is "we"?

There is a large and vibrant community of driven, intelligent and experience people and companies that had gathered around MeeGo. As Henri's blog entry noted, there is a forward migration to Mer as an open, collaboration-driven platform. We'd like to support that.

We also feel, however, that some of the necessary parts won't magically occur on their own. That includes purposeful vision, clear goals, community growth and interfaces for interested companies. In addition, we'd like to bring our open UX work, along with that of others doing similar things, to the forefront here. So where do we begin?


To help determine that, we've scheduled to meetings over the next two days in #mer on irc.freenode.net. The first will be tomorrow (Wednesday) at 13:00 UTC and the second on Thursday at 18:00 UTC. Hopefully if you can't make the first, you can make the second one. Individuals and companies around Plasma Active will be there to start the process of discovering how we can integrate our efforts and foster the community processes around it that will lead to success. We announced the meetings with an open invitation on the meego-dev, meego-community and active mailing lists today.


I hope to see all the MeeGo-heads and Mer-folk (I had to say it ... ;) there so we can get to the business of building significant momentum together.

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plasma active workshop wrapup

What can I say other than "that was a very, very fast four days in Darmstadt". I had expected to have the time and energy to blog more during the event, but that was obviously not to be. There were only three people working on the actual code there, but we managed to make over 60 commits over the course of the event, not counting backports and similar janitorial efforts. That isn't a huge rate of commits given the people who were there, however, though it is certainly respectable. So what else were we doing?

The first thing we did was review all open bugs for Plasma Active, turned our draft agenda into a kanban board on the wall and then torture tested the user interface on both MeeGo and OpenSUSE to identify issues that need addressing. We sorted and prioritized these items into the kanban and got to work on them. I will be spending some time today creating new bugs.kde.org reoprts for the items that remained on the wall at the end of the event. We focussed these efforts on the main part of the tablet shell: activities, recommendations, the running-applications peak area and the application launcher. We had an "other" category as well, and it become rather well populated, but we want to make sure that the core components work very well in our first release.

One outcome of this was that recommendations are getting too much work done on them this close to release to include the recommendations UI by default in Plasma Active One. The recommendations system will remain in place, so when the UI is revealed there will be things you can immediately use it with. However, we just didn't feel that we had enough time to ensure the quality of it when a major code drop happened just a couple weeks before release. The recommendations are, thanks to Ivan, working better than ever and proving more and more useful. They will be the key feature addition to the tablet UI in the next release, in fact.

This decision was one consequence of us clearly defining and examining the release engineering needed to get Plasma Active One out. We have a new release manager, Javier (who also works at Basyskom), who will be providing additional oversight on that process. Improvements made in the code are being reviewed so we know that they are really done (or not), tagging dates have been set (release tag on the 3rd of October) and packaging details were sorted out. We cut down the number of branches in git specific to Plasma Active to zero, allowing people to build Plasma Active using standard branches of KDE modules (KDE/4.7 of kdelibs, kde-runtime and kde-workspace; master for plasma-mobile and kactivities). This meant we had to adjust our packaging as well, which got done thanks to the tireless efforts of, among others, Maurice (aka "Pirate Moe": he does the best pirate "arrrrrr" I've heard in a long time).

We put together plans for a website that will support the release to be unveiled on release day, along with a messaging plan that includes writing, screenshotting, filming (video-ing?) and reaching out to the press. We also came up with a naming scheme that we will use for at least this and next year that is wonderful simple: Plasma Active One, Plasma Active Two, Plasma Active Three .. I'm sure you see the pattern. ;)

The first release is still scheduled for October 9, 2011 (9-10-11) and we will be doing our next release prior to Christmas so that people can have an early gift from the Plasma team and play with it during the December holidays that are traditional in many areas of the world.
It wasn't all about the technical side of Plasma Active either. We worked on plans for how to bring more effectivity and formality to our business ecosystem development around Plasma Active, for instance. We will be sharing more on that later in the year.

Finally, we also looked into the future and asked ourselves what we would like to work on in the coming year. A major take-away for me is that we don't want to concentrate too much effort on simply playing around with the base tablet shell. We like the design of it and it works very well in terms of driving an activity-centric experience. Once we've (re-)integrated recommendations and a couple other small UI bits (such as re-introducing the category tag cloud in the launcher), we'd like to shift our focus slightly to the workflows we want to see enabled. Since we had not one but two interaction designers at the workshop, they did some extensive story-boarding for a few target workflows. We also gathered requirements for applications we want to see fulfilled for use in Plasma Active and will be spending more time on meeting those goals in future.

Some of these tasks will improve the Plasma Desktop and Netbook experiences as well as they are not tied to or only applicable to tablets. Things like having an application-neutral mechanism for recording (and accessing) your online accounts, better workflows for transfering information to and from removable devices (or online services), sharing and synchronizing Activities (both between devices and people), no-config cross-device cooperation (assuming they all have Plasma on them), Share Like Connect plugins and more elegant application interfaces are efforts that will land on all of the Plasma workspaces in tandem .. but that's the future, and we're still in the "now" that includes making it across the finish line for Plasma Active One.

To that end, I have a bunch of bugs.kde.org forms to fill out, new images are being worked on, more testing is underway and a heck of a lot of documentation and public communications writing is going on. The #active and #plasma channels on irc.freenode.net are going to be busy, as will the active@ and plasma-devel@ kde.org mailing lists. See you there :)

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plasma active workshop: day 0

The last couple of weeks have been ridiculously busy. Or, if you prefer (and I do): ridicubusy. On the personal side of life, I managed to squeeze in a two day paddle-and-camping trip the other weekend, played dinner host to Lawrence Krauss (made some of my favourite dishes, and one new one (for me, anyways): egg yolk ravioli), co-hosted a "Ready, Steady, Cook!" evening at the house along with S. All of that was enjoyable, and great breaks between the long hours of working on Plasma and general KDE "stuff".

A lot of what I've been working in the last two weeks has been involved writing source code, but working on community, technology roadmap and business issues. I've managed to get some good hacking hours in, too, but not as much as usual as I've been paying more than the usual attention to these other, also-important areas.

Some of what I've been working on will (if all goes well) get to the next step this week. A half dozen or so of us are congregating again in Darmstadt, Germany to collaborate on Plasma Active issues. We'll be focussing on getting to a high quality Plasma Active One, what we wish to do after that, our plans for libplasma2 and Frameworks 5, the next iteration of UI implementation concepts as we fully realize the Contour concepts, hardware related issues and the business case around it all. All in four days. I don't expect to get much sleep.

I'm the first to arrive at the Basyskom offices, who is sponsoring the workshop, so I'm about to start turning our draft agenda which Fania (Contour's UI designer) put together into a set of sticky notes for use in our kanban board. (This is the part of the blog entry where Kevin Ottens gets all happy and excited. ;)

With Sebastian, Marco, Martin, Fania, Eva, Stephan (Binner and) Werden), Thomas Pfeifer, Karlheinz and Javier all around, it's going to be an excellent few days and we'll keep the world updated via blog and microblog (and mailing list, and wiki, and... ;)

Ten is a good number of people, though I had half-hoped that with the public announcement on the plasma-active mailing list and having published it on sprints.kde.org there would have been one or two others wanting to join us. For those who find what we're doing in Plasma Active exciting, intriguing, interesting and something that wets their appettite: I'd be very interested in hearing from you what would make for an exciting, engaging Plasma Active themed event that you would Not Want To Miss(tm), and what would enable you to move from spectating excitedly to participating fervently.

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easy building with git split modules

Since the beginning of the git migration there was one issue that suffered for lack of resolution due to competing needs: to split or not to split the repositories? On the plus side of splitting the repositories, we get smaller repositories that are more focused on individual projects making it easier to fetch and work on just what you want. On the plus side of keeping the repositories more "monolithic" is ease of following development since you don't have to `git pull` and build a bajillion tiny repos in the right order and as new projects arise they magically appear in the repositories for you. The monolithic repositories is also how we've done things in the past and so keeping some continuity, at least for a transitional period, would have been great.

For better or worse, more and more repositories were split up. To my personal frustration, not much attention was paid to these issues by those working hard on creating all those small repositories. They would say they were already too busy with what they had to do, let someone else address the problems that were being created ... and I ended up simply not following the development of many of these repositories anymore as it was too much work to do so.

I refused to give up hope, however, and kept pushing at this issue. Until we had a solution, I was not going to close my eyes to the problems. See, I'm one of those silly, silly people who want to have their cake and eat it to. Or at least be able to watch someone else eat it. Cake that nobody eats just seems like a waste, doesn't it? And I'm a bit of a food voyeur: I enjoy watching people tuck into something really tasty to see their reactions and hear their opinions. *cough* Ok, maybe I got carried away on that analogy, but you get the point: I wanted pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.

Fortunately for all of us, there are people working on solutions to this precise set of challenges. The solutions have gotten much better in recent times and I figure that since I did a lot of pushing and prodding for us to pay attention to the issues, now that we have solutions coming of age that it is only honorable and right that I should help recognize those solutions and spread the word about them.

Eventaully, I'd like to see KDE eventually adopt one solution as The Recommended Way To Build Stuff. This would mean reworking the content on Techbase and whatnot. That's work for the future ... let's see where we are today!

The solution that most catches my eyes and heart right now is kdesrc-build. It's been around for a long while now with many, many users ... but with the git migration and some of kdesrc-build's new features that lets it integrate with projects.kde.org, it has earned one more: me. It has allowed me to once again follow all of KDE development on my system without spending too much of my time tending to git and make.

The key features of kdesrc-build for me are:

• It is simple to use: there is rather good documentation and it ships with a sample config file


• It integrates with projects.kde.org to get entire "modules" of git repositories, such as "kdeutils" which is actually a dozen or so individual modules, without you having to do anything special .. just like the old monolithic repos!


• It automates the entire process into a single command; when I wish to update kdeutils, I type: kdesrc-build kdeutils. That's it. Of course, I could have it run through everything it knows about by just typing kdesrc-build

There is currently a first-run install-and-setup helper being created and development in general continues, so this is not only useful now but growing more useful all the time.

For me, setting it up was pretty easy: copy the sample rc file to ~/.kdesrc-buildrc and then change a handful of options. In particular, I changed kdedir (I install outside the normal system path so I don't disturb the OS-provided packages), qtdir (ditto), git-repository-base (a matter of just uncommenting the correct line for someone with a commit account) and make-install-prefix (I use sudo) and build-dir. The defaults are pretty much perfect for someone just following development and installing into their home directory for testing, which is probably the right thing to optimize for.

So, if like me, you want those fluffy dancing unicorns ... I very much recommend grabbing kdesrc-build and using it. It eliminates the pain points of the split repositories in a jiffy.

Huge, huge thanks to Michale Pyne for putting so much effort into this tool.

Small but important update: Tom Albers noted in his blog today that we have Eike Hein and Ben Cooksley to thank for the projects.kde.org side of the magic that kdesrc-build uses. Cheers to those guys as well! :)

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the on-screen keyboard

We have an on-screen (or, if you prefer, virtual or software) keyboard for Plasma. It can run independently of the shell by way of the plasma-keyboardcontainer application (which we use in Plasma Active) or the Keyboard Plasmoid that comes as part of the kdeplasma-addons repository.



We've been working on may improvements to both the code and the user interface in the last few months. These include improving how it works with a hardware keyboard, being able to move it around the screen on a device, better performance, features like caps- and num-lock (by double-tapping the respective buttons).



There is much more we'd like to do with it, however. If you go to Plasma Active's open tasks page you can find a number of tasks open for the keyboard. This includes things like adding arrow keys to it (these are already supported in the code, we just need to enable them, in a nice way, in the tablet layout), adding locale support so people can easily get to their ü's and ç's, providing copy and paste functionality and more.



These are all bite-sized projects and the code is easily accessible in the Plasma Addons repository under applets/plasmaboard. The stand-alone shell is in the Plasma Mobile repository in the virtualkeyboard directory.



If you're looking for an easy way to get involved with Plasma development that will help Desktop, Netbook and Active simultaneously, look no further. This is a really nice little project to get started with, and we're happy to help you get your legs in the code. :)

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more on Active strategy

We get a lot of questions about Plasma Active, and I'd like to address a few of the more common once in this entry.

Openness

We do all of our design and development in the open. We have the plasma-mobile repository that holds things specific to the Active shell. The rest of our code can be found in the kdelibs, kde-runtime, kde-workspace and kdeplasma-addons repositories.



Design is done collaboratively on the active at kde.org mailing list, #active on IRC and occassional VOIP/video calls. The core team gets together in person every few months as well to sync up, and we hope to grow those over time.



We're very open to people taking our work and making something different with it as well. git and our general open door policy makes this very easy. In fact, we hope that over time people making various sorts of devices, from tablets to set top boxes to phones to netbooks, will do just that. Differentiation with compatibility due to a common framework.



We're also very open to 3rd party applications and are hungry to see to more touch-friendly F/OSS applications join us in building up a truly open device ecosystem. Your applications can help define what tomorrows devices are capable of.

QtQuick / QML

While the bulk of our interface work in Plasma Activfe is being done with QtQuick technologies such as QML, this is not a requirement for 3rd party stand-alone applications. We recommend QML, but it's not a requirement. We feel it is unrealistic to expect many applications to suddenly jump into the QML world today. Many can be made touch-friendly and device ready with fairly minimal changes to the existing code base. Still .. QML is pretty impressive stuff, and you may want to check it out! :)

Plasma Desktop / Netbook

What we learn about using QML in Plasma Active will eventually impact future releases of Plasma Desktop. We're already using components in both directions (from Active to Desktop and vice versa), and this is something we want to expand and continue.



However, we do not believe in the "one interface that runs on both your desktop and your tablet". We believe in code reuse, in component-reuse (and, where beneficial, drop-in-replacement), compatibility and interoperability; but we also believe that a tablet interface and a desktop interface are not, and should not, be the same thing. The use cases and form factors are just too different.



We have no plans of bastardizing Plasma Desktop into a watered-down attempt at a tablet interface that also sort-of-makes-sense on a laptop. We feel this only produces interfaces that perform OK but not great on either kind of device. We want interfaces that work great on each sort of device. This is why we designed Plasma to be so flexible: we can afford to have different interfaces, and trivially keep them compatible with each other, without pouring gigantic amounts of resources on it.



So those who are concerned that we're going to do something nasty to the desktop interface: breath easy. We will continue to improve and work on new ideas on the desktop, as we did with Folder View and Activities, but we're also respectful of how people (including us) use our laptops and desktops.

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Plasma Active entering beta

At the beginning of this year, the Plasma team was itching to extend Plasma's coverage of the device spectrum. We already had Desktop and Netbook interfaces, and while maintaining and incrementally improving those, we wanted to show case the possibilities of Plasma by creating a full fledged touch interface for devices.



After being shown the concept of Activities, Eva, founder of Basyskom (who is now a major supporter and investor in our efforts), had an epiphany as how they could be applied to a touch based device like a tablet. She christened the concept "Contour". OpenSLX was looking for a new halmark feature to help expand its appeal and so we found a home for packaging efforts and OS.



We also wanted to start working with the newest QtQuick technologies without disturbing the Desktop or Netbook interfaces with our experimentation. It all came together at the right time and Plasma Active was born.



Our goal was to create an innovative object of desire, one which people will want and, once they have it, build a personal connection with over time and through usage. We also knew it has to be 100% open, from planning through to development, and we gave ourselves just six months to come up with the first version of it.



After months of effort, Plasma Active has gone "beta". We're currently a little more than a month away from the first release, and so starting this month we are focusing on polish, integration and fixing defects. So how does it look? Judge for yourself from this quickly-made five-minute video of Plasma Active on an ExoPC device running packages that are just a few days behind our upstream development:

Even though we haven't even reached our first release, it's already quite usable. Many people have been installing and enjoying Plasma Active since, as one can see in any number of blog postingss recently, such as John Layt's and Sune Vuorela's from today. I've also been seeing more and more tweets and dents about it, and the IRC channel (#active on irc.freenode.net) is getting fuller by the day.



We've been able to make these strides because we did not start from scratch. We started with the Plasma framework that builds upon Qt's and KDE's libraries. The component-based approach has allowed us to re-use components and rework what was needed, allowing us to expend a minimal amount of effort to achieve an interface that is radically different from what we deliver on the Desktop and Netbook. They are completely compatible, however: what I run on my Plasma Desktop, I can run on the tablet. Activities also are compatible and can be used across the different Plasma shells. I was doing this just the other day during development while running Plasma Active in a window and switching between activities: it showed the activities I'd created using Plasma Desktop and when it switched the activity, so did Plasma Desktop!



Plasma embraces diversity, and this is how we have been able to create something that looks so different from the Desktop and Netbook interfaces without having to go through a painful and expensive "write everything from scratch". What we have written has also at times benefited Desktop and Netbook comonents, and many of the components in Plasma's tablet UI are actually straight from those more traditional interfaces. What we did write custom has mostly been done using the highly time efficient QtQuick framework.



Above all else, this shows how Plasma interfaces can be reshaped into nearly any sort of form one would want without suffering rewrites or incompatibilities. What we have now is a Deskotp, a Netbook and a Tablet interface which are all 100% compatible with each other and share the overwhelming majority of their code with each other.



Development continues at a fast pace as we head towards Plasma Active One in September. Today, unified browser history and plugin support(yes, that means flash) was added to the WebKit based browser and numerous bugfixes made their way in as well. Those following development are greeted with a slightly better experience every day when they update.



How can you get on board? You can run it on a normal laptop PC, of course, but you don't get the full experience. So we recommend snagging yourself an ExoPC device (WeTabs can be found rather innexpensively online in Europe, for instance) and following the instructions on the wiki here. The Balsam live image was just updated yesterday and new packages come streaming in through OBS for openSUSE installations quite literally every day. We also have MeeGo packages which are not quite as advanced as the Balsam / openSUSE ones, though we're working on that, too.



You can also contribute with testing, documentation and code. There are many tasks still open, many applications that could use some love and we're also looking for things like a high-quality introduction video that you can play on first-start that shows you the basics of the interface.



Beyond the shell itself, many of the KDE applications such as Calligra, Kontact and Marble are being "Activated" with touch-friendly UIs and you can use all the apps that are in the normal repositories as well. We're hoping to see even more applications get improved interfaces for touch and, in fact, I believe this to be one of the biggest opportunities for contributors to get involved. The KDE games, for instance, are 99% of the way there: they work beautiful with touch ... if only they'd lose the menubars (and in some cases the toolbars too). Okular makes a rather good eReader already, but it too needs adjustments to the chrom. These little bits of work would help catipult these apps from desktop-only to be desktop, netbook and tablet champions.



I'm excited for October and our first release. We've been showing the tablet at various conferences (and BBQs, pubs, cafes, offices and other such places ;) and the response is universally positive and, more importantly, curious and inquisitive: people want it when they see it. One of the responses we get at conferences all too often is, "Where can I get one of those?" Well ... we're working on that, too. :)

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tracking what happens in your DataEngine

Whether you are writing or using a DataEngine it can often be very nice to see what the heck is going on in there. Today I had the need for doing just this while making some improvements to the Contour activity switcher in Plasma Active. So I whipped up a rather small but very useful (as it turned out) class called DataEngineTracker. You simply hand it a DataEngine and an option QObject parent and it will print out every source that comes, goes or gets updated.



For lack of a better place, I plopped it into the kdeexamples repository so that others (and the future me ;) can easily include it into their project (DataEngine, Plasmoid, application, ..) and see what a given DataEngine is doing. It's BSD licensed, so it can be used pretty much anywhere.



In today's case with Plasma Active, it showed up an unintentional update was happening on the activity thumbnails for the switcher every second. If you had a lot of activities, this added up quite a bit. We've also killed some other performance issues and the polish is really coming together in general now in all those little ways that one probably won't even notice in the final release .. but certainly would if they weren't there. ;)



On a side note, kdeexamples now contains over 7,000 lines of code. Sweet.

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planet kde chinese update

Things move fast once they are moving. It was only 2 days ago that I announced the existence of Chinese language blogs on Planet KDE. Since then, several things have occurred:

• There are now a total of six Chinese language blogs being agregated on Planet KDE 中文!



• The community decided to change the url from "ch" to "zh" so you can now access it via http://zh.planetkde.org or http://planetkde.org/zh



• Franklin Weng, who is also a KDE translator, is now the maintainer of Planet KDE 中文. He has been reaching out to as many of the Chinese speaking communities as he can to find relevant and interesting blogs by KDE contributors that are written in either simplified or traditional Chinese. His enthusiasm and efforts will ensure that Planet KDE 中文 prospers under his care.

What next? Well, we are still looking for more Chinese language bloggers to add and we need to spread the word that Planet KDE 中文 exists so that people may benefit from it. :)

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chinese language blogs on planet kde

On my recent visit to Taipei, I worked with some of the local KDE community members to identify ways in which we could help support both the various Chinese-speaking KDE communities as well as the local KDE community in Taiwan. One of the things we identified was getting the same level of support and exposure for Chinese language community content, such as blogs, as we do for other language groups.



Upon arriving back home, I set about adding a Chinese language section to our blog aggregator, Planet KDE. With the support of our sysadmin team, this went live today and you can now read Chinese language KDE blogs from Planet KDE.



We only have one blog on their right now, but it's a great asset to the Chinese KDE community: it contains primarily translations of KDE related news and information found elsewhere. With your help, we can add more blogs and original content. How? Well, if you have a Chinese language blog that is KDE related, or know of one, please let me know and I will make sure it is added to the new Planet KDE area for Chinese language blogs.



My next step is to remove myself from this role and pass on maintenance of the Chinese language blogs to someone in the Chinese KDE community. Seeing as I don't speak/read Chinese nor live in a relevant region, I am a language and geographic barrier that we don't need here. :)



This is, of course, only the first of many steps towards increasing the support for our friends in Asia and elsewhere who contribute to, use and generally appreciate KDE and feel most comfortable communicating in Chinese. It's also a step in helping bring together the local Taiwanese KDE community by providing more visibility for them to each other. We have more planned, but all great journeys start with such small steps.

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collect.kde.org is live!

A quick update to my previous posting about collect.kde.org during the Berlin Desktop summit is in order for two reasons.



First, collect.kde.org is now a fully functional battle station .. er .. Synchrotron installation. Things that are added to the shared sources repository will automatically appear there. As an application (or application add-on) developer, you can quickly and easily set up your own provider and start populating it with items. It takes all of about 2 minutes to set it up. How to do this is documented in the Quick Start section of the README.



Second, we now have three applications using it: KDevelop for API documentation downloads, the share plasmoid for updates to the Javascript backends (covering the case where the web API for any of the services change) and Dr. Konqi (so that its configuration controls to help users generate useful backtraces can be updated over time). Just as exciting, it looks like at least one (non-KDE) application may end up hosting their own Synchrotron instance to service their needs. Cool!



So If your app has data that you wish to control the updates to (as opposed to user-contributed and -curated content, which is better done through opendesktop.org), you may wish to consider using collect.kde.org.



I'm collecting questions developers have as they start using collect.kde.org and will be writing a Techbase page in the future that provides a clear tutorial that covers both the basics and these questions. Don't let the lack of that tutorial stop you though, check out the README and get started.

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system tray icon hiding

To all application developers who create a KStatusNotifierItem in their application, please consider making your icon as friendly to the user through automatic hiding as possible. The system tray is a very valuable bit of real estate and unless your application's entry there is actually useful to the user, it ought to be hidden. KStatusNotifierItem allows you to set the status of your icon to Passive, Active or NeedsAttention. Setting it to Passive will automatically signal the system tray to hide the icon automatically. The user may always override this in the settings, so if they always want it shown .. they can!



Of course, what is the meaning of "useful"? That's the trick here. We're trying to make the system tray as "quiet" as possible for the user so that the entries that do show up are a good signal to the user that they actually matter.



So now the battery icon goes away when the system is plugged in and the battery is at 100% charge and the information icon (jobs and announcements) goes away when it is empty. I've patched a few other applications such a konversation and ktorrent to also go Passive when they aren't actively downloading or there are no message alerts (respectively).



If your application doesn't have something to actually tell the user: set the icon to Passive. The system tray icon is not a replacement for the task bar. (In fact, in 4.8 it is quite likely that application entries will appear in the tasks widget instead of the system tray by default!) There is an exception (as usual ;) which is applications which provide user interface in their system tray entry, such as media players. We generally discourage such usage, but it can make sense in specific cases. Over time, we'd like to see these uses also phased out in favour of merging those interfaces with the relevant UI; media player controls and the volume control, for instance, or instant messaging accesses and a proper presence Plasmoid.

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COSCUP and Taiwan

I arrived back home from the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters (or, more succinctly, COSCUP) yesterday. Staring at the cursor blinking in the big open text box in front of me, it's hard to know where to begin. Really, there is more than I can possibly share in a reasonable amount of space. So I'll try to summarize and keep it to the point.



First off, people would not keep their hands off the tablet running Plasma Active with the Countour user interface. Despite it being alpha software, people loved it. They got the idea of the four essential concepts right away: Activities, Recommendations, Peek (at your running applications) and Launch. Several people asked how they could get one. They also provided me with tons of valuable feedback, some of which we'd already heard before and had on our worklist and others that were new to me. This is great!



The presentations were varied and several were excellent. Even though most were (of course :) in Chinese, many of the slides were in English so I could semi-follow along. The really telling thing, however, was the audience: rooms were full to standing-room-only and the audience was quite evidently fully engaged. The topics were mostly about mobile, server, web and embedded. This is where the attention was, even though there was a laptop in front of nearly individual. We are taking the desktop for granted now (not a bad thing, but a natural stage) and looking into the near future that is around us. We need to keep giving people a great desktop experience, and move forward into the new form factors as well.



I also noticed a few people with tablets and keyboards, using them as lightweight laptops, if in two pieces, when seated at a table. It's another tween-category in the device spectrum, which is going through a fantastic time of differentiation, though it will almost certainly be followed by a period of post-experimentation consolidation.



I met with a number of companies while I was in Taipei, both at COSCUP as well as outside of it. I have a lot of follow up work to do, but having a tablet UI which is a truly open ecosystem and which looks as good as this already does gets us attention and interest. That is shares so much code with the Desktop and Netbook interfaces also fascinates people. There is great potential in these relationship building efforts for KDE in terms of increased support and investment.



I also continued talks started by Armijn about hosting a KDE event in Taipei, possibly alongside COSCUP, next year. Many people affirmed their commitment to help us achieve this, and while we're still working on the details (and will be for a few months yet), I'm confident that we will pull this off. It will be beyond amazing to follow the successes of KDE India in Asia (an example I used many times with people in the local KDE community in Taipei) with a strong KDE event next year! I was highly impressed with the level and efficiency of organization at COSCUP: it's a large event, and it ran very smoothly with a lot of very nice features like on-site lunches (and even some dinners!). The people who can make a KDE event in Taipei a roaring success are there, and now we need to do our part in making sure it comes to fruition.



I also spent time working with people in the area on how to bolster the KDE community there. We held a really nice BoF at the end of the first day (where people kept playing with the tablet some more ;) and, among other things, out of that came the decision to set up a Chinese language section on Planet KDE where people can blog in Chinese. This should be appearing in the very near future and I'll post a follow-up announcement when it goes live.



A few days after COSCUP, I gave a presentation for the local Linux User's Group which was well attended. It was held in the upper floor of a lovely restaurant. People ate dinner together first and then out came the projector and the presentation started. We talked about KDE for a couple of hours, most spent in the Q&A period. We looked at KDE from a community perspective as well as a technological one and examined KDE's past, present and future. I even fixed a small problem live on the projector that we ran into during one particular question and when the `git push` completed successfully after testing the fix, everyone aplauded. That was a very nice experience. Again, people played a lot with the Plasma Active tablet. :)



While I did a lot of working in the 5 days I was there, I did manage to find time to experience the city itself. It is a complex city full of flavor and texture. It was hot and sticky (and rained a few times most intensley), the food was amazing and the people were even better. I exchanged gifts with a few of the people there and, I like to think, made some great new friends that I hope to see again soon. I also took a few hours before my flight left on the last day to visit the National Palace Museum, which has an astounding collection of diplomatic documents, jade, pottery and bronze work. I managed to see a few other sights at night after the business of the given day was over. However, I also learned that it is impossible to really experience this city in such a short time. I passed more gorgeous temples, more markets, more interesting looking shops, more restaurants eminating curious and wonderful odors and more interesting sights than I cared to .. I wish I had had more time.



My take-aways from this trip are, in short:

• We have to get the word out more about our direction on tablets, both within the KDE community and outside of it. Not enough people are aware of what we've been cooking up, and it's time they did. This is a unique offering in the F/OSS space, and compliments our desktop efforts beautifully.



• We also need to work on our HTML5 and Android compatibility stories, starting with deciding what they are.



• I have a lot of follow-up work to do in the coming weeks with people I met. The reach of KDE in Taiwan is in its infancy, and we can improve that situation with attention and outreach.



• I have a lot of business focused writing to do to support our new efforts



• A KDE event in Taipei next year will be wildly successful if we make it happen (and it looks like we can and will)



• I need to go back ;)

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kde email list unsubs

If you, like me, are the administrator of one or more KDE emai lists, you may have recevied a small (or large) flood of emails a few hours ago letting you know that various addresses had been automatically unsubscribed from your list. When I received my share of these emails I grew concerned: why were 80 addresses suddenly axed from the plasma-devel list?



Well, fear and worry not. It's just our sysadmins doing what they do best: making our infrastructure better. The new mailing list server is now handling bounces correctly and if an address bounces too much then it automatically unsubs the address. The mailing list setup on the old and venerable ktown server wasn't doing this, and so stale addresses had piled up over time.



I was relieved to find out that's all it was when I asked in #kde-sysadmin on irc. Whew! :)

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COSCUP day 1

I arrived in Taipei at a bit past nine in the evening yesterday. I had started out at 19:30 CEST the day before, flying through my least favourite airport in Europe (Heathrow), on to Hong Kong and finally here. I got a good five hours sleep after doing the usual evening-before prep work, woke up, showered and had breakfast with John Corbett in the hotel cafe. Then it was off to COSCUP by train.



The metro system here is modern and efficient. I bought a metro card and filled it with NT$100. At the last station we were approached by another conference goer: a Finn who now lives in Taipei and has a company that specializes in MeeGo. They also have offices in Tampere, where I'll be next month. What a small world!



My presentation on KDE's Plasma Active was very well received and the live demo seemed to impress. Many people came up after to ask questions and discuss. I exchange business cards with numerous of these people and with some arranged to talk at greater length after the sessions. There is a real appetite for a truly Free and Open device OS right now, due a variety of factors, and we're bringing exactly that to the table.



Even though we're only in alpha and just starting the polishing and stabilization phase of development for our first release of Plasma Active with Contour, something I made clear to those in attendance, the ExoPC demos definitely made ripples, and perhaps even a few waves.



After meeting with Jos and the OpenSuse guys here in town and discussing how we can arrange for a KDE event in Taipei next year with organizers of this year's event, I wrapped up the day with an extended BoF with KDE contributors and enthusiasts. A couple of translators along with some coders and enthusiastic users attended. We ate pizza and talked about KDE. They asked questions and I did my best to answer them accurately and to the point. I did a little KDE trivia quiz and handed out some Swiss delights (chocolates, cheese) to people who came up with the best answers. Then we huddled around my WeTab and explored Contour together.



I got back to the hotel sometime after nine, twenty four hours (and a bit) after I had first arrived in the country. I could feel the energy the day had taken out of me, but I also felt elated at the progress that was made and the wonderful people I had the opportunity to meet.



I decided to reward myself by wandering down to a night market in the area where I hunted about the various stalls for some food. I had a pancake wrap thing that was quite delicious but it wasn't for a few hundred more meters until I struck true gold: a small wheeled cart parked next to a wok half filled with oil. An old wisened woman stood behind the cart which was filled with trays holding various ingredients: tempura vegetables (some of which I'm not sure I know exactly what they were..), mushrooms, tofus and seafood. I picked out three of the most interesting looking vegetables, which she measured out and then dropped into the hot oil. They bubbled away for a minute or so and then she drained them and coated them in a wonderful spicy powder.



I picked up a Taiwan Beer, to see if it is as disappointing as Armijn keeps telling me it is ;) , and wandered on home in the wet heat of the night and digging into this huge bag of wonderful, deep fried, spicy vegetable wonderness. I'm back at the hotel, still have some left and just cracked open the beer to calm the riot in my mouth.



What an excellent end to a first day here. I get up about six hours to do it all over again tomorrow. I can't wait.

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the circle is small

Yesterday I added virtual keyboard support to konsole: select the text area and the software keyboard, if any, appears. This frees me from having to lug around a keyboard with my tablet just to do command line stuff. It was a small patch, nothing fancy, really. Took me maybe 10 minutes.



Today I `zypper dup`d my tablet to get the latest packages and to my wonderment there was a new konsole package. After it installed, I started up konsole and sure enough: on screen keyboard delight!



Less than 24 hours from development to deployment: I wrote and tested it on my laptop yesterday, this morning it is on my tablet which only has packages (to keep it semi-sane for demos and user testing). What more could a developer dream for?



Suse's OBS, which we are using for these things, absolutely rocks. And with this tool enabling their passion, Sebastian and the other Plasma Active packagers are quite simply rocking the house and helping keep the development-deployment-testing-feedback circle small and tight.



Beautiful.

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Taiwan, or: no rest for the weary

Tomorrow evening I leave to participate in the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters, or COSCUP, in Teipei, Taiwan. I will be presenting on Plasma Active and helping spread the KDE and Qt story (and love!) while I am there.



My presentation will be in the second conference room at 11:30 on the first day of the conference, the 20th. I will be laying out the concepts behind Plasma Active, the four elements of the Contour shell and wrapping up with a live demo. All in 30 minutes. It has become an exercise in cutting away everything that can be, but no more, in a drive for clarity with impact. :)



There will be a meet-up of KDE enthusiasts on the evening of the 20th in form of a KDE User's BoF which I will be attending. If you are in the area and are a fan of KDE or just interested in what we do, please join us!



I'll also be around for a few extra days meeting with various people, though I do still have some spaces in my schedule which I plan to fill as I meet people at the conference.



A big thank-you to KDE e.V. for their support in this endeavour, to COSCUP for the opportunity to present and to Armijn for helping make so many vital connections in all this.

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every new beginning

The Berlin Desktop Summit was a roaring success from my experience at it. We, as they say, pushed forward on all fronts: cross-project collaboration, KDE Frameworks (the next major version of KDE's libraries and runtime requirements), application development and, of course near to my heart, our Plasma workspaces.



We had a lot of opportunity to work on Plasma Active things, including a BoF in which we combed over the various elements in the Contour shell and beyond to come up with a very nice set of issues that need working on. This is critical as we've moved past feature addition in the UI and are now focussing on polishing for the next ~2 months which will lead up to the release of Plasma Active One.



This is a perfect time to get involved as a developer, especially as a few hundred more of those who attended the Desktop Summit have ExoPC devices. ;) We've built a very big wiki page housing our task list and will be triaging this list to something more workable than .. well .. a giant wiki page. So there is lots to do and much of it is a "low hanging fruit", which is usually the sort of thing those just getting started find easiest and most rewarding to work on. If you'd like to join us and take on one of the open tasks, visit us in #active on irc or send an email to active at kde.org.



Of course, with all the activity around Active, I got the innevitable complaints from some that we weren't paying enough attention to the desktop. I found this personally a little frustrating for a number of reasons that can be best summarized as "that doesn't match reality".



I fixed a number of bugs while at the Desktop Summit, all of them for Plasma Desktop. I've personally spent more time on Plasma Desktop issues than Plasma Active so that our desktop shell does not bit rot. I'd love more hands helping there, and we do get regular patch submissions from new faces fairly regularly. In addition, I've been putting significant efforts into libplasma2, which is what underpins all of our shells, particularly Plasma Desktop.



All keep in mind that we've worked on the desktop and netbook shells over the last ~four years. We've spent less than four months now with some of our resources (not all!) on Active. This is not a zero-sum game, either: Plasma Active has brought us new resources we would not have had without it, such as our interaction designer Fania who comes to us by way of Basyskom thanks to Eva's interest and involvement.



Moreover, a good portion of the work going into Plasma Active also helps out the other workspace shells due to the amount of infrastructure and code shared between the shells. This is part and parcel of the design of Plasma: a way to affordably create purpose-specific shells through code and design reuse.



Finally, ignoring the device space would be eventual suicide. The future absolutely contains the desktop (sales are still growing for desktop and laptops, by-the-by), but it will be augmented by devices which people will increasingly expect to work together. Their choices in one category will (and already do) affect their choices for other form factors: my choice in tablet may affect my choice in laptop.



On top of all the logical argumentation, there's also the fact that it's fun and enjoyable work. It's important to me to keep our Plasma project injected with joy and fun. It keeps people motivated and moving, it gives life greater meaning, it makes it more worth doing.



Since I've wandered this far off topic, I may as well say something that often comes into my mind while working with my fellow Plasmaters: we feel like much more than just a team of people banging out code next to one another; we're good friends and supports, an understanding and gracious support for all our dreams and efforts. It's not often in life one gets to be a part of something like that, and I am quite grateful to be a part of it.

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Getting Plasma Active on your tablet

Want to get Plasma Active on your tablet device? We'd like to help you.



Join us on IRC in #plasma-active #active on Tuesday, July August 16 at 14:00 UTC or Friday, July August 19 at 12:00 UTC and we will hook up with a choice of operating system that gets you with Plasma Active on your device ready to use and ready to contribute.



See you then!



Update: That's what I get for pounding out a last minute entry on the way out of the appartment. Yes, it is August (not July) and #active (not #plasma-active) .. :)

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collect.kde.org

I am about to leave Berlin to go back home for almost an entire week before heading off agian to Taiwan. While visiting wiht my good friends Marco and Sebas over beer I finished installing Synchrotron on the server the amazing (and award winning!) KDE sys admin team allocated it for.



Synchrotron is a simple way to offer Open Collaboration Services on top of a git repository. You commit to the git repository and in a few minutes time (configurable) Synchrotron will add it to the OCS service. Plasma will be using this to ensure that we can update Javascript addons on the fly. This is most important when online services change, such as how the BBC UK Met weather service changes the other year. KDevelop will be using it to offer single click downloads of API documentation.



There is a lot of ways that Synchrotron could be made even beter, such as internationalization based on HTTP requests or supporting multiple git repositories for the sources.



In any case, for KDE software: if you have an application that could use a way to push new or updated data or content (Javascript, documents, data, etc.) you can put your data into the synchrotron-sources repository and they will magically show up via OCS ready for integration with your application's GUI using the KNewStuff library. Let me know if you need any help getting started. :)



This is a very nice way to end my time here at the amazingly productive Berlin Desktop Summit. I'm leaving with a smile on my face.



Oh, and did I mention that we fixed (or at least we're 99% sure it's fixed) the bug in the taskbar which causes blank spaces to show up when using "Only show windows on the current desktop"? Turns out it was also possible to duplicate with other similar "Only show ..." features. Thanks to Alex Fiestas for pushing on me to fix it. It's one of the half dozen or so annoyances that I fixed, added to the innumerable ones others fixed, in KDE software while here at Berlin Desktop Summit.



All while we move forward with Frameworks 5.0. All while Plasma Active is looking better than ever on hardware like the ExoPC Intel gave out the other day: it took one evening to install it and work out kinks to get it to an easily usable and demoable state.



This is an amazingly exciting moment in our community. 2012 here we come!

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Important Announcement Coming Today at Desktop Summit

Today at 17:30 there is a panel presentation here at Berlin Desktop Summit that is unfortunately titled "KDE Platform 4 Roadmap" and the schedule says I'm presenting it. This was submitted prior to the Platform 11 meeting in Randa so it could make the speaking schedule here at the Desktop Summit. At the time I didn't know what precisely we'd decide on at Platform 11 .. and the title reflects that.

What I did know was that we would want to communicate the results (whatever they would be) from Platform 11. That is in fact what we will be doing. Better yet, I will be joined by David Faure, Kevin Ottens and Stephen Kelly in doing so.

Interestingly, however, the presentation will not be about KDE Platform 4. It will be about KDE Frameworks 5.0.

Yes, you read that right. Coming out of Platform 11, we have a roadmap for the next major releast of KDE's libraries and runtime requirements. The emphasis is on modularity, dependency clarity / simplification and increasing quality to the next level. Our goal is to give us better tools for desktop app development, give our KDE mobile projects a leg up and make KDE's libraries something that Qt developers can and will use.

There are many steps to get there: reexamining what is in KDE's libraries that ought to be in Qt proper; dividing up the libraries along the lines of the new organizational charts we've drawn up at Platform 11 and subsequently presented on kde-core-devel, etc.

We do not wish to introduce anything highly disruptive, however. As with Qt5, we want this to be a mostly-under-the-hood set of work. We will be taking this opportunity to adopt some new technologies behind the scenes to increase interoperability, such as introducing a Secret Service implementation that can phase out KWallet. (Yes, we have automated migration code ...)

Application development will not be pausing as we do this: releases every six months of application improvements will continue based on the 4.x codebase. When Frameworks gets to the point where it is ready for serious banging on, then we will start repurposing our highlight applications to the new codebase. We don't want application development to be held up by the library development, and we don't want the library development to create much, if any, need for "porting" application code. We want "just recompile and test" to be the common case, with whatever changes do become necessary to be of the simple and even automatable sort.

If this sounds rather different from how we approached 4.0, that's because it is. The requirements, needs and context for this release are utterly different. We're after evolutionary improvement and broadening our developer ecosystem, and our plans therefore need to, and in our opinion do, reflect that.

We will be communicating these developments over the next months in more official and comprehensive means than this personal blog entry written while I'm sitting in presentations at the Desktop Summit. ;) However, I wanted to make sure people knew what was coming in our presentation and hopefully motivate people to therefore show up and participate!

So one more time: Today at 17:30 in our panel discussion in Kinosaal room at the Desktop Summit we will be discussing the plans for Frameworks 5.0 in detail, taking questions and entertaining the thoughts shared by those who come. Be one of those people! :)

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more minimalist panels, off to berlin

Yesterday I cleaned up a few bugs in the system tray, particularly with how it was refusing to resize smaller after icons would automatically hide. In the process I cleaned up a few other issues I noticed; e.g. I made the notifications icon autohide by default and got rid of the vertical line which was looking more and more vestigal as the rest of the chrome around it had been ripped away. The bug fixes will be in 4.7.1, some of the visual changes will only be in 4.8.

This follows rather nicely in the steps of work we did for the Plasma Desktop 4.7 relesae in making things a bit cleaner and easier to get around. Yes, we added a button for the activity manager to expose that more, but we cleared up a number of other things. In fact, that's what prompted me to take ten minutes out of my day today to write this blog: I read a user comment lamenting virtual desktops and how they don't like to use them. This was a problem for them due to some other desktop environments being increasingly tied to virtual desktops as part of critical workflow. Which reminded me of a little thing we did for 4.7: if you have only one virtual desktop (or, put another way: you don't use them), then pager in the panel disappears. If you change your mind later and bump the number of virtual desktops up, the pager reappears. This elminates the oddness of having a pager with just one virtual desktop on your panel.

Also related to the pager is some work Martin put into KWin recently: starting in 4.8 KWin will define the layout of the virtual desktops. Previously, and as is documented in the NETWM spec, this is up to the pager. This made sense back then: everyone had a pager, and probably only one, and the window manager didn't do nearly as much with window presentation as modern compositing window managers do. Today, it makes little sense. You can have multiple pagers and the window manager exposes virtual desktops in all sorts of ways through desktop effects. So, we've moved that functionality to the window manager, which makes things simpler and more consistent.

One other small thing we did in 4.7 on the panel is make the default launchers in the taskbar for file manager and web browser follow your prefered applications as set in the system settings. Which means we have one configuration that we ship, but it matches what you want. Including if you change your mind later. Since they share space intelligently with the tasks, it means less space used: when the app is running, the launcher goes away. (Btw, a bug in 4.7.0 around that feature has been fixed for 4.7.1, so if that isn't working for you properly, the fix is just a patch level update away.)

Merging application system tray icons with task entries is only on the roadmap for 4.8. Yes, I know: FINALLY! :) All of these efforts to streamline and simplify are making for a more polished result. It isn't all just trimming and rearranging, however: I plan on adding Share Like Connect to the panel by default as well. We will be working on these things in various BoFs and hacking rooms over the next week in Berlin.

Speaking of which .. I've finished packing for the Berlin Desktop Summit and am working on my presentation now until I head down to Zürich HB to board the night train. I have my football boots, a WeTab, a PandaBoard, collections of various cables, writing books and the necessary amount of clothing for the week there. I can't wait to see everyone there, listen to the talks, collaborate with people that I only get to see in person every year or two, hack until my fingers bleed and my body demands sleep and, of course, karaoke in Alexanderplatz. It's going to be amazing.

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wetabirific

Last week, I received a WeTab, hansomely provided into my care by the folks at OpenSLX so that I can track Plasma Active development on that device. Getting it set up was quite straight forward, particularly as the one I received already had firmware that supported booting from external media. Perfect. After a few small glitches related to the release of Plasma Workspaces 4.7, which caused some of the repositories to move around for us, I got the thing up and running. There are still some rough edges, and I'm hoping Sebastian and I can huddle together during the upcoming Berlin Desktop Summit to file some of them off as he probably currently has more experience with the WeTab and Plasma Active than anyone else.

One result of having the WeTab in my hands is that I've been able to start collecting a list of tasks that need attention between now and the 1.0 release of Contour. It's also giving me great hands-on opportunities with Plasma Active on a device of this form factor.

The WeTab itself has more than enough horsepower to drive the system and the battery life isn't too bad either. What things I do find odd are the result of some understandable design trade-offs. For instance, the screen size is huuuge compared to other mainstream tablets. This makes it awesome for reading books, watching videos and other types of media consumption. It also makes it rather less portable than the 7" tablets out there, to say the least, and it also costs on battery life (which is still in the satisfactory range, however). It's intel based and not really what I'd call "perfect for tablets" hardware: it has a cooling fan in it for instance.

All the quirks aside, it's a terrific platform for developing and testing Plasma Active with and I think it hints at some really interesting potential use cases. The screen is big enough and high quality enough to be used as a desktop. One our first stable release of Plasma Active is out, I want to explore the interesting possibility of "mult-form-factor" devices with it. Namely, I'd like to be able to put it in a cradle on my desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse (which I already have and which work great with it as expected) and use it with Plasma Desktop. When I remove it from the desk and take it with me to the, say, the living room or off on a train ride, I'd like it to switch seamlessly to the touch-friendly Plasma Tablet interface with Contour. While the WeTab has a built-in screen that would be suitable for both, smaller tablets and even smaller pocketable devices (e.g. phones) don't and that then brings in the idea of a device that can drive a second larger display when docked and show Plasma Desktop on that external display.

There are already a couple of devices on the market that have experimented with this "mobile when you take it with you, a desktop experience when you dock it" idea, though to my knowledge none have yet really taken off. However, as tablets continue to improve both power consumption and compute muscle, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a sizeable market of people who would prefer to have just one computer that can switch between modes.

For now, however, I'm focussed on detailing what is left to do to make Plasma Active ready for release. I'll be bringing my list with me to the Berlin Desktop Summit and once we've BoF'd on it, I'll share the tasks, particularly the "low hanging fruit", so that it will not only be documented but so that people who would like to get involved have easy and well-defined entry points into KDE's foray into mobile.

Once again, a big "thank you!" to OpenSLX for their belief in this project and for putting their support behind it with time, effort and investment.

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new Plasma Active repos

If you are having issues with software updates with Plasma Active, the reason is that the repositories have changed around a bit with the release of Plasma Workspaces 4.7. Such is life in a pre-release project of this scope. We've documented the new repositories on the wiki in the Repository Setup section.

For quick reference, if you already have an installation, do the following:

zypper rr kusc
zypper rr plasma-active
zypper addrepo --refresh http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/47/openSUSE_11.4 kr47
zypper addrepo --refresh http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Active/openSUSE_11.4/ plasma-active
zypper mr --priority 90 plasma-active
zypper dup

Things should be back to good again after that.

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