I've worked a bit on the scale dialog for Krita. Neither the old one from the 1.x series nor the new one in current KOffice2 alpha releases were good enough. I've mailed a bit with Ellen which only confirmed that it is indeed a difficult dialog to get right.

In the end I reordered some items, so I hope it's a bit easier to figure out how to use it. I think it has become quite good, but judge for yourself. So much cool stuff coming in KOffice 2.0

I have had so much struggle finding a decent html editor that I finally wrote one on my own:

• mozilla composer cannot handle the fish://-protocol
• openoffice dito
• quanta crashes when it sees me
• I finally started using kword, which cost me several months of fighting and finally even contributing code, but there are too many problems for using it where I work.

The usual monthly game: a new KDE bugfix release, openSUSE packages and a new Live-CD which as already said looks more and more less like KDE 4.0 but like our openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 desktop (while still being based on openSUSE 10.3):

Qt 4.4 brings lots of goodness. Packages are now entering hardy-backports.

If you want the latest unstable trunk Qt, kdelibs, kdebase and amarok on a regular basis without the hassle of compiling it yourself, project Neon has a Launchpad Personal Package Archive with regular builds.

Lastly, these were left on our doorstep today, free to a good home. Cuteness.

From the cross-blogging department, Qt 4.4 has been released and is entering Factory for openSUSE 11.0 with packages for older openSUSE releases being available in KDE:Qt44 (this will move sooner or later to KDE:Qt). Dirk Müller thinks that's boring news as "everyone has packages of it" and I should rather mention that he has created packages from Qt 4.5 development snapshot within the KDE:Qt45 Build Service repository.

Time is passing by. Sometimes I'm also amazed that it was more than 5 years ago when I wrote my first KDE application and soon after I joined the Quanta Plus project. And a few months later Quanta Plus become part of the KDE releases, I think with version 3.1.
Probably many of you know that I worked full time on Quanta in the past years, thanks to Eric Laffoon and many other supporters, who made this possible. But things have changed, and I cannot spend all my time anymore on this beloved project. I don't abandon it, just realized that alone it would take just too much time to get a release for KDE 4.x series out in time. Therefore I call for help, I'd like to ask the community, existing developers or users with some C++ knowledge, developers who would like to find a challenging project in the open source world to come, join us. Help to make Quanta4 a reality and make many users happy throughout the world. You don't have to be afraid of the size of the project, one of the goals of Quanta4 is to have a modular code, build up as KDevPlatform (KDevelop) plugins.

There are other projects inside the KDEWebDev module that need help, some even maintainers:

- Kommander: just take a look at www.kde-apps.org and you will be amazed by the number of Kommander scripts uploaded by the users. Help to have a good Kommander for KDE4 as well!
The executor is already ported, but we have lots of new ideas waiting to be implemented.

- KFileReplace: useful search and replace tool, unfortunately without a current maintainer. It works, but needs some love.

- KImageMapEditor: don't let web developers without a KDE image map editor!

Of course our priority would be Quanta Plus and Kommander, but if you are interested in either of the above, just contact us on our developer list.

Yesterday was a busy day on the akademy-talks mailing list. Proposals were rolling in constantly. This is because today is the deadline for submissions of presentations for Akademy 2008. So you still have a chance. Have a look at the Call for Presentations and submit your talk now.

There are so many interesting topics we would like to hear about at Akademy:

• You have ported your application to KDE 4? Tell about your experience.
• You run KDE on one of the fancy small devices, be it an Internet tablet, a phone or a tiny laptop? Show us how this works.
• You are working on one of the pillars of KDE 4? Tell us how to make use of them.
• You are working on a distribution which includes KDE? Present to us what made your life hard and what made it wonderful.
• You were a GSoC student last year and are still with the project? Let us know what you have done.
• You have written a cool Pasmoid or a rocking Akonadi agent? Submit your talk now. We are also accepting lightning talks, if you feel like five or ten minutes are enough to present your work.
• You are working in the community as a non-coder? Tell us about what else than writing code is important for KDE.
• You are using KDE in your business? Share your experience.
• You are working on a related Free Software project? Give us ideas how to collaborate.
• You are doing something completely different which is related to KDE? Submit your talk now.

I'm looking forward to another wave of exciting talk proposals. Keep it going.

Collaboration

I am pleasantly surprised to hear from Aaron Seigo and others that there has been more collaboration going on that most people might not know about. Learning that Qt 4.x now can use the Glib event loop gives us a lot of abilities to create glue between KDE and GNOME interfaces which is really encouraging.

I don't know why, but often I have the impression that KDE fonts are quite big, and this can be changed by modifying the X11 dpi settings.

Let's head over to good old Slackware. How is it done here ?

Different groups of people use different ways to measure performance of computers. Kernel developers test their kernels by, well, compiling the kernel. KDE developers may measure the startup time of KDE.
So what does the buildsystem maintainer do ?