KDE News

It has been a year since launching our KDE.org.pl site, which has an aspiration to be a real "gate to the world of KDE" in Poland. During the last months, our site received 220 pages and articles, most of them are translations of news, articles and interviews from dot.kde.org and kde.org. We have got 480 photos, artworks and screenshots. In order to reach more people intrested in KDE, our goal is to simplify the language and keep the quality.

We have accompanied Polish KDE users by providing translations of The Road to KDE 4, and now we're keeping on with news on KDE 4. The central items on the agenda are topics like Amarok, KOffice, Education, Akademy or interviews with KDE developers.

History and Contributors

The work, based on the flexible Mediawiki technology, were started a long time before the launch - in early 2007. In February, we have started translations and categorising of the knowledge, sometimes exceeding the contents of English pages.

Over the past months, more people have been joining the Polish KDE Team. Words of appreciation for hard and thorough job especially goes to those who have belonged to the team from the beginning: Paweł Szubert (pbm, unquestioned record in number of translations), Bartosz Kozłowski (joker) and Łukasz Strzępek. Content and language-related corrections are maintained by Jarosław Staniek, who has also customised the KDE Oxygen Mediawiki style for the web site.

As a part of the evolution of the web site, forum.kde.org.pl launched in July 2007 in cooperation with JakiLinux.org (polishlinux.org) portal, and blog.kde.org.pl in November 2007. The latter has been designed in similar style to kdedevelopers.org blog, thanks to Bartosz Kozłowski (joker). Hosting for the kde.org.pl web site and our blog is provided by OpenOffice Software, LLC.

Bug Day 4 will take place on Sunday 18th May from 0:00 UTC - 23:59 UTC. (That's a start time of 02:00 CEST, or 17:00 PDT Saturday). For this Bug Day, we will be sorting and testing bugs reported against Konqueror.

Bug Days are hosted by the KDE Bugsquad approximately once every two weeks. Their purpose is to check back through the large numbers of bugs stored in the KDE Bug Tracking System and investigate how to reproduce them. This means that when developers come to the bug reports to fix them, all the information they need is available on the report and they don't have to spend huge amounts of their time investigating the bugs - they can just focus on fixing them. During each Bug Day, we will focus on one area of KDE in particular. For this Bug Day, we will be focusing on general bugs in Konqueror. More information can be found on the Bug Day 4 Techbase Page.

Joining Bug Days is a great way to help the KDE project. The only things you need to take part are a computer running KDE 4 and an internet connection. No programming skills or previous contributions to KDE are necessary. You can join at any point during the day, and stay for as long or short a time as you like. If you are a KDE user hoping to contribute, then this is a great way to get started - there will be plenty of experienced Bugsquad members on hand to answer any questions you might have. To get involved, join our IRC channel, #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net, where we will help you get underway.

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 9, codenamed "Sulphur". As your periodic table will tell you, Sulphur is the element below Oxygen, a fitting release name for the third major distribution to ship KDE 4.0 (congrats to Mandriva and Kubuntu for getting there first) and the first to make it the only version of the desktop. Fedora 9 includes KDE 4.0.3. Unfortunately, KDE 4.0.4 was released too late to make it in, but there is no need to despair, it is already available in updates-testing and is expected to become a stable, tested update in a few days. To support your existing KDE 3 applications such as Kontact, Amarok and K3b, Fedora 9 includes compatibility libraries from KDE 3.5.9. As always, the KDE Live CD is installable. New in Fedora 9, the live image can also be converted to a persistent USB key. The release notes have a section dedicated to KDE 4.

In addition to the inclusion of KDE 4 as the default KDE, Fedora 9 also comes with other major new features, such as the switch to Upstart to handle system startup, an improved NetworkManager including support for mobile broadband and systemwide configuration, a new, fast version of X.Org X11, TexLive replacing tetex, unified spellchecking dictionaries and much more.

If that was not enough to convince you, you can have a look at some screenshots showing KDE 4 on Fedora 9. (The first few screenshots are of the installer, so scroll down to see the KDE ones.)

The EmSys research group is hosting an "Embedded and Mobile Day" at Akademy 2008, this year in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium at Campus De Nayer. We welcome you to join the presentations and panel discussions about Open Source and Open Desktop technologies in embedded systems and mobile devices on Tuesday 12 August 2008.

We are looking for your contribution in the form of presentations, papers or demos about:

• Embedded Linux
• Mobile and integrated GUIs
• System Integration
• Embedded Development tools and distros
• Innovation based on Open Source and Open Desktop technology

The deadline for submission is June 16th 2008. Submissions may be send to akademy-emmobile@lists.denayer.wenk.be

Parallel with the presentations a Device Plugfest will be held in an adjacent room. Everyone is invited to bring their USB, Bluetooth, UPnP, IrDA or other consumer devices to test and improve the interoperability with Linux, HAL and KDE. Take a look at the huge donation from Conceptronic.

More information can be found at the Embedded and Mobile page on the Akademy 2008 website

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Alpha 7, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0. This version adds a lot of polish, some new features in Kexi and KPresenter and especially better support for the OpenDocument format. It is clear that the release of KOffice 2.0 with all the new technologies it brings is drawing nearer.

This is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series.

The Alpha 7 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features.

Ongoing Polish

The release notes for Alpha 6 noted the addition of snap-guides that will guide the user when he or she is placing objects near other objects in any direction, Alpha 7 adds a bounding-box snapping option for even more powerful snapping options. This release has also added the option for users to configure shape-shadows in the form of a new dock widget.

Report Generator for Kexi

There is a whole new set of features in Kexi, the most important of which is a new report generator. This allows the user to create a document based on the data in the database with features like charting and scripting.

New Features in Krita

Krita has received a lot of attention e.g. general polish and bugfixing. Krita has additionally received a new plugin type which will allow both KOffice developers as well as 3rd party developers to create new pixel-generator filters, such as clouds or fractal generators.

Developer Focus on KPresenter

The KOffice developers decided to focus their efforts to make KPresenter an application that will be released in the 2.0 suite. This has given KPresenter a lot of page-effects in this release, but has managed to do more work on master page editing as well. Much of the work on the KOffice libraries have been specially selected because it benefits KPresenter in particular.

Improved OpenDocument Support

This release is the first to see some results of the OpenDocument Format testsuite being imported into KOffice. The testsuite exists from a lot of little documents that each show one feature in ODF. Automated testing of loading those documents will allow developers to keep on working on the code without fear of breaking the already working code. This is known as regression testing.

In this release already 23 tests are added into KOffice and the results are visible in much better loading of text documents in KWord. KWord is also one of the target applications for 2.0, and NLNet has sponsored a developer working on that application.

KOffice 2 is still under heavy development. It is not meant as something to be used for any real work and can crash at any point. However, here are some of the highlights of the upcoming KOffice 2 series. Note that not all of the new technologies will be fully implemented in the first release, 2.0.0.

Another month, another update to the KDE 4.0 series. This time, we are presenting KDE 4.0.4, dubbed File-Not-Found to the audience. KDE 4.0.4 brings improvements to KHTML, Okular and various other components. We recommend that people who are already running KDE 4.0 releases update to 4.0.4. The emphasis of this release lies, as usual in stabilising, bugfixing, performance improvements and updated translations -- no new features. The developers have again squashed quite some bugs which you can find some of in the changelog. With this release, the KDE community continues to support the KDE 4.0 series that has been released for brave users earlier this year. KDE 4.1, to be released this summer (in the northern-hemisphere) will bring new features and applications. KDE 4.1 is based on the recently released Qt 4.4 while KDE 4.0.4 is still based on Qt 4.3 as is the case with the whole KDE 4.0 series. So put on your update shoes and install 4.0.4 today.

Trolltech have released Qt 4.4. This is a major release with many new features including WebKit, KDE's Phonon, Concurrency, Widgets on the Canvas and XQuery. This video covers what's new. Ars Technica has an in depth look while release dude Thiago has blogged with the now traditional developers' group photo.

In a new series of People Behind KDE interviews, we visit the United States of America to meet a KDE developer with an affinity for education, accessibility, and Asian culture, a person who works on getting you Hot New Stuff - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Jeremy Paul Whiting.

The programme committee of the Akademy 2008 KDE contributor's conference would like to thank everybody who already has submitted a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008. The conference programme is beggining to gain shape. Due to popular request the program committee would like to solicit additional proposals and has decided to extend the deadline for submission of proposals to Monday, May 12th. Tell the world about your contribution to KDE. Tell the community what cool things you have done with KDE. Submit your proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008 no later than Monday, May 12th 2008, 23:59 UTC, to akademy-talks-2008@kde.org.

KDE Italia is attending this year's Open Mind Free Software event from May 8 to May 10, 2008. This event is tailored for all people with an emphasis on young students. Giovanni Venturi and Daniele Costarella will give a presentation on KDE 4 as well as provide further information on KDE applications during their workshop. Open Mind is located at Villa Bruno - San Giorgio a Cremano - Napoli - Italy. There will be a KDE Italia booth at the event where you can go for more information on the team as well as KDE. Please stop by and say hello to Giovanni Venturi and the rest of KDE Italia.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The start of the Google Summer of Code with 47 KDE projects. Initial version of a kxsldbg plugin for Quanta. Kross-based scripting in KDevelop. Tabs return to the kdevplatform (KDevelop, etc) interface framework. A database plugin for Kommander, with Kommander widgets becoming accessible within Designer. Support for file attachment and sound annotations in Okular. Work on support for JavaScript runners, and an enhanced visual appearance for KRunner in Plasma. Desktop search returns to KRunner. An improved implementation of "Send Input to All" in Konsole. "Close buttons on the right side of tabs" in kdelibs. A search KIOSlave for virtual search folders across KDE. Get Hot New Stuff support for KDE splash themes and chat window styles in Kopete. A "wobbly windows" effect and non-linear timelines in KWin. The start of a WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) backend for Solid. Rewrite of connection management in Konversation. Work on playlist modes and tooltips in Amarok 2. A media player plugin to play audio and video files in KTorrent. Initial work on charting/graphing and spreadsheets for Kexi reports. Work starts on a Kexi Web Forms Daemon. Initial imports of KLesson, SuperPong, and a KDE 4 version of KNetworkManager. KBreakout and KSirk move from playground/games to kdereview. KSanePlugin moves from playground/graphics to kdereview. printer-applet moves from kdereview to kdebase. Okteta moves from kdereview to kdeutils. Read the rest of the Digest here.

Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica is at it again, this time with an early review of KDE 4.1 Alpha 1. He writes, "This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability." Features that are listed as planned for 4.1 can still be implemented for 4.1. Next, our friends at Polish Linux are at it once again, bringing us a visual review of KDE 4.1 of revision 802150, which roughly corresponds to Alpha 1. Buried in the article, I found this interesting bit of news, "Kwin features a new visual effect known to most of you from Compiz: the Wobbly Windows."

The KDE Community is happy to announce the first preview for the upcoming KDE 4.1, due in late July. KDE 4.1 is based on Qt 4.4's goodness, bringing performance improvements, WebKit, widgets-on-canvas and other goodies. Also new is Dragon Player, a KDE 4 port of the codeine video player which is famous for its simplicity and ease of use. KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 ships with Akonadi, the new data storage framework for our beloved PIM applications. KDE-PIM will also see its first KDE 4 release with 4.1, but is not yet based on Akonadi. More planned and already implemented features can be found in the KDE 4.1 Feature Plan. The Plasma desktop shell has just undergone major surgery, so expect some additional breakage there.

Following our interview covering KDE in Japan last week, we now turn to South Korea. Cho Sung Jae tell us about the Korean KDE Users Group, including some of the problems of using KDE with Korean and just how fast their broadband is.

조성재, Cho Sung Jae

How did the Korean KDE Users Group start?

The Korean KDE Users Group was started in 1999 by Kabby (Kim Kyoung Heon). But it was not active. In 2006, Kabby recommended for me as Translation coordinator, then our team had activity to bring information about KDE in public.

What does the Korean KDE Users Group do?

The group's work, is mostly translation. Park, "segfault" Joon-Kyu has developed programs like KLDraw and galmuri. He also patched the Hangul encoding environment for Qt 3.x, so we thank him. :) And individually team members give information about KDE around to people.

How many people are part of the group?

I don't know exactly. :) For formal commiters there are 3. Me, Park "segfault" Joon-Kyu, and Park Shin-Jo. But I think that many KDE users in Korea are Korean team members. Because they bring the tips, posts, information about KDE to present about our projects. So I wanna say thanks for some special KDE Users. atie is the Kubuntu Translation contributor. He's translating in Launchpad, sometimes he posts news about KDE to KLDP (The Greatest Linux User BBS in Korea).

barosl is posting about KDE and Hangul (Korean character set) in his blog and is an older translator than me. Ziriz (sounds in English like [ziriz], but in Korean '지리즈') is good fan for KDE. He is resolving the problems in the KDE desktop with Korean. Kim Sung-Joon is also a good user. Hong Chan-Beom is the great brother of KDE team. He's bring the information about parallel computing and Bio-informatics. Hong Won-Beom is anthropologist and is studying about our society (free/open source software society) in Korea. Krisna is the developer of Korean Input System, and he's supporting KDE input method environment. Of course, I also thank every KDE users in Korea.

Why do we rarely hear from Korea in the free software world?

I think the reason is complex to explain. :) The first reason is the environment. Many Korean people are using MS's products. They don't know about Free software. If some Korean developed the program (as like Star UML), most Korean computer user wouldn't know about that program. So many Korean developers have developed free software in a web environment for Korean people. For example, as like jsboard, Gnu-board, Tatter-Tools and zeroboard. In Korea, here are many contributors to distributions, translation, input method systems, design, kernel, etc. But they are not core developers in their projects. So they are not well known. But I believe Korean contributors are increasing and they will become well-known. If you want to check Korean Free Software Contributors, please visit the KoreanOpenSourceCommitter page.

How popular is free software in Korea?

Most people don't know they are using Free Software with Apache, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, etc. In web programming environment, computer programmers know about Python, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, Apache. (Oh! God! I coundn't stand for this.) For example, in University, many professors in computer science and computer engineering know about free software but can't use. As for students? Maybe they are studying and using. The young people are using Firefox, dev-c++, Qt and GTK in their report. But don't worry. Places which use free software are increasing. Many people engaged in a social movement are studying and using free software. They are making a film with GNU/Linux systems, have meetings to bring information about Free Software. I also engage in the social movement, and am making the nonprofit cooperation to bring people to meet free software. (Of course I have the plan to show KDE project.)

What are the most popular Linux distributions and software in Korea?

As you know, Ubuntu is the most popular distribution in Linux users group, Fedora is the most popular in general. The Firefox is the best well-known program.

Back in 2002 Hancom got a large government contract, is that still in place? http://dot.kde.org/1011075072/

It's bad news for you. Hancom went bankrupt in 2004. (That company was not related with Hannsoft which the biggest software cooperation in Korea.) After that time, the Hancom Linux developer team was moved to Haansoft, then they distributed Haansoft Linux. Until desktop version 2, they used KDE desktop for their distribution, after then they changed their default desktop environment to Gnome to develop a Hangul Word Processor.

What are some of the issues with supporting Korean writing in software?

The input method system, is known as SCIM. SCIM is developed by Chinese developers. But that is not useful on its own for Korean. The difference from Chinese and Japanese, is in the complex input system. In the Chinese and Japanese input method system they write English characters with the same pronounciation then change that to their character. But in Korean we type their character key (with consonant and vowel), then the input method system makes one compound character with those keys. krisna is developing the input method system Nabi, and library for Korean libhangul. SCIM also supports libhangul and the Korean Input system. But that's not as good as it could be for Korean, nabi is the best for us. And... Hmmm... Maybe I need to ask about that to krisna.

Krisna, libhangul developer

krisna There are many issues. There are no typical configuration tools for Input Method Systems. There is a lack of desktop integration with input method system. As you said, the difference of input method system between Korean and C(hina)J(apan). The distributed effort with Korean problem in Korea. No mailing list for Korean Input Method system. The loss of last character key input in Korea when input focus is moved. Maybe that's all.

Hmmm... That's very many things. The other issue is fonts. In Korea, there are few free/open Korean font. Unfonts and alee-fonts. That's all. That's not enough to use in a desktop environment. That problem is caused by the many compound characters. In Korean characters, there are 14 consonants and 10 base vowels. Base vowels are able to compound vowels, there are 11 compounded vowels. One Korean character has 3 sound position for each consonants and vowels. So the total compound characters are about 1.6 million. Could you make the fonts for Korean? Ah! It's too hard to make the set of Korean fonts. So many Korean Linux Users are using two font packages generally, some buy the commercial fonts to use.

In the KDE project, the problem is easily found. In KSpread, Korean characters are not able to be inputed because KSpread's focus tracking system make interrupt for Korean Input Method System. While inputing Korean characters the Input Method System need to keep focus to make the whole compound character and word. But KSpread snatchs the focus from the Input Method. I know there is no evil intention. But I couldn't recommend to people to use KOffice yet.

How well does KDE and KDE distributions support Korean writing?

After developing nabi-0.17, libhangul, Qt library's patches and improving CJK environment, supporting Korean writing is good for KDE and KDE distributions, especially KDE 4. Konqueror's address input form couldn't use CJK characters for web shortcut site's query, except for that all things are good for use. (Thanks for all the KDE developers.) But problems still exist with post codes, phone number format, address format, time showing format, currency mark (Won, ₩), Konqueror's shorcuts, and web environment API supporting. Maybe if these problems are resolved, Korean KDE user numbers will explode.

Are you in contact with KDE users in other oriental countries?

Really Few. Khoem Sokhem, he is in Cambodia. He is good person. I met him in Akademy 2006 in first. After that time we sent some messages. Except for him, I just met some oriental people in conference and events.

How active is the translation community for KDE in Korea?

Actually, I'm meeting many KDE users in offline. (I know that's really old fashioned method.) But they're feeling easy to request. If someone request translation of KDE application by e-mail, I forward the messages to Park Shin-Jo and we're trying to translate them. That's all. (I don't know why my team is active.)

Are there any KDE developers in Korea and how can we get more?

Park, "segfault", Joon-Kyu is developing KLDraw and galmuri. And I'll be the other one. :) I think there is little information about KDE. I'm also trying to translate many development documents from Trolltech and KDE sites. Maybe the problem is caused by my laziness. Korean Developers are not familiar with KDE and English Documents. So I'm trying to bring the articles about KDevelop and KDE environment to Microsoftware which is the oldest IT magazine. Recently a book about Qt development is published by Seo Young-Jin. That'll be also a good feature for increasing KDE developers.

And the Korean developer's environments need to improve. To make free software, they need to be free, but most of them are not. The work is too much to develop free software. Korean company's CEOs don't like them to develop free software. Maybe they think developers have no work to their own jobs for them. So they're increasing the work. If there are no more work, they'll bring jobs which need to use a fixed computer. :( The South Korean government planned to support the open source community with a large budget. But we couldn't see a coin about that. (Ah! No. I saw the cookies for them.) The Korean Government also need to improve their own plans.

After this interview, I'll do work as the president of Korea Free/Open Source Software Association. And I need to prepare the site fossa.or.kr and fossa.kr. If I do well in my job, almost all of the above problems will be resolved. Believe it or not. :)

Lastly, is it true you get 100Mbps broadband in Korea?

Yes :)

You can find the KDE Korean Users Group in #kde on the irc.hanirc.org network.

Piacentini blogs from FISL with information on Brazil's Ministry of Education ProInfo project. The project provides computers and internet connectivity to as well as open content to students in public schools. They are using a Debian based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games and have deployed it in 29,000 labs with plans for a total of 53,000 labs by the end of next year.

Google have announced the projects and students for this years Summer of Code. We received the biggest number of students allocated to a project with 47 taking part. Applications which will be worked on include Amarok, KOffice, Marble and entirely new features such as a collaborative text editor.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Complete source rewrite, with many improvements, in KInfoCenter. Important work on the "Quick Launch", "Folder View", and "RSSNOW" Plasma applets. Initial work towards future support for a list of timezones tooltip for the digital-clock Plasmoid. KMoon is obsoleted by the Plasma "Luna" applet. "Ozone", a fork of the Oxygen window decoration style which respects system colour preferences. Get Hot New Stuff support for icon themes in KDE. KNotify notifications interface now conforms to the Galago specification. Screen selection in "presentation" mode in Okular. Work on tooltips in Dolphin. Enhancements, including theming, for error pages in KHTML (Konqueror). WebKit adaptations for various applications with HTML rendering widgets. Support for the "Space Navigator" hardware device in KOffice. Work on duchain support for QMake in KDevelop. New "PIMOShell" tool for administration of data in NEPOMUK. Backup functionality and work on the system tray application in Akonadi. Initial import of WordKubes, and Parsek, a game implementing the Thousand Parsec framework. Various improvements in Kubrick, which moves from kdereview to kdegames. Skanlite moves from kdereview to extragear/graphics. KBoggle moves to the "unmaintained" module. Amarok 1.4.9, a bugfix edition fixing Amazon cover art downloading, is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.

Preparations for Akademy 2008 are in full swing, but KDE e.V. is already looking forward to next year and asks potential hosts to submit proposals for Akademy 2009. For the first time we also invite proposals to hold Akademy and GUADEC, the GNOME community conference, in the same location. More information can be found in the Call for Hosts for Akademy 2009 below or in the joint press release of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation.
Call for Hosts for Akademy 2009

KDE e.V. invites proposals to host Akademy, the yearly KDE contributors conference and community summit, during the Summer of 2009. Akademy is the biggest gathering of the community and includes a two-day conference, the general assembly of the members of KDE e.V., and a week of coding, meeting, and discussing.

For the first time we also invite proposals to hold Akademy and GUADEC, the GNOME community conference, at the same time, in the same location. Proposals should detail plans for hosting up to 800 attendees, with separate facilities available for Akademy and GUADEC planned sessions.

The conferences should be held independently, in the same location, with facilities available for joint sessions of interest to both communities. A co-hosted event would constitute one of the largest events on the planet dedicated to free software on the desktop.

Proposals for Akademy should be sent to kde-ev-board@kde.org, proposals for a co-hosted event should be sent to board@gnome.org as well. The deadline for proposals is June 15th 2008.

Key points which proposals should consider, and which will be taken into account when deciding among candidates, are:

• Local community support for hosting the conference
• The availability and cost of travel from major European cities
• The availability of sufficient low-cost accommodation
• The budget for infrastructure and facilities required to hold the conference
• The availability of restaurants or the organisation of catering on-site
• Local industry and government support
• Ability to organise sponsorship

See the detailed requirements on the KDE e.V. web site for more information about what it needs to host Akademy.

The conference will require availability of facilities for one week, including a weekend, during Summer. Dates should avoid other key free software conferences.

A few words of advice: organising a conference of this size is hard work, but there are many people in the community with experience who will be there to help you. Bear in mind that people coming to these conferences do so primarily to meet up with old friends and have fun, and so the hallway track and social activities are very important.

Tokamak, the first International meeting of Plasma was held in Milano in northern Italy over the last weekend. 14 people joined the fun and spent some days hacking on the KDE 4 desktop shell. For the most part, it was like meeting friends, only that some had never met each other in person before. The meeting was filled with small sessions, such as discussing target users for Plasma to optimise the Plasma interface for. Topics were target users, underlying technology, scripting, integration with other parts, webservice integration, visual presentation, porting of Plasma to new technology in Qt, Italian profanity and how everybody loves pizza.

Reaching out to new levels. More photos in the gallery. Widgets-on-Canvas

Part of the meeting was dedicated to large changes under the hood in Plasma. In Qt 4.3, which KDE 4.0 is based on, it was not possible to use QWidgets on the QGraphicsView canvas. Trolltech has addressed this problem in Qt 4.4, so we're now able to use QWidgets in Plasmoids. This deprecated quite a lot of code in libplasma, so the Plasma developers were able to remove that, reducing maintainance burden, size of the codebase, memory footprint, but at the same time Plasma becomes more powerful and easier to use for those that already know Qt. Moving over to QWigets involved tearing large parts of Plasma into pieces and putting them back together. Alexis spearheaded this effort and had other people jump in from both, Tokamak hacking place, but also via IRC directly. The worst breakage happened during Sunday, by Monday night, quite a lot of Plasmoids were functional again, some with reduced featureset, others with issues fixed. In any case, the Widgets-on-Canvas port will be well worth the effort and pain of porting and will allow for much more powerful Plasmoids.

A Plasmoid scripted with JavaScript Scripting

Richard Moore led the scripting effort that should result in a dual API that provides both easy and powerful ways to script Plasma. The developer base divides into two groups, people that prefer a very simple API to quickly do easy things, and people that want full access to the Plasma API and being able to use this powerful technology. This way, writing Plasmoids should be easy for everyone. Details about this can be found on Techbase. Richard has also shown the power of the Plasma scripting API by writing a nifty demo plasmoid. Fredrik Höglund provided a version of Richard's JavaScript demo that runs in a webbrowser (works with KHTML trunk, recent Firefox and Safari). In the future, we will be able to run more Plasmoids in webbrowsers, blurring the traditional lines between web and desktop. API review

In the KDE 4.2 timeframe, the Plasma developers plan to have libplasma moved into kdelibs. Kevin and Richard started going through the whole visible Plasma API shared thoughts about how to improve it, noted them on the whiteboard and provided detailed suggestions how to improve the API. Transscripts of the whiteboard are up on Techbase. Porting the API to this will start soon.

Artwork

Nuno Pinheiro presented his vision about Plasma. He made other developers aware of how artwork works, and how that relates to writing Plasmoids and theming capabilities. Nuno provided entropy to the developers by broadening the scope of the meeting and providing additional input from a non-developer's point of view.

Containments and KRunner

Chani has done some work on Containment switching. When zooming out, the Plasma toolbox now shows an "Add Activity" button that can be used to add a containment to the desktop. Those containments are 'customized' desktops that carry their own set of Plasmoids. This makes it possible to have, for example, a "fun" containment with twitter applet, a game plasmoids, comic and the like for freetime usage, and use another containment with RSS Feeds from commits and a folderview Plasmoid for coding work. This also lifts a bit of the curtain what this "Zoom out" button in the toolbox actually is about. How this feature is related to KWin's virtual desktop remains to be sorted, however.

Riccardo and Davide have been working on the new user interface for KRunner. While there is nothing visible yet (and the authors prefer to keep mockups for it private for now), there is not much to see yet. Some polishing of the artwork and text input has already been done, however.

New Technologies

Andreas Aardal Hanssen dropped by for one-and-a-half days to tell us about plans in Qt for the next months, and solve some problems with us we have with QGraphicsView. Performance improvements in Plasmoids are the direct result of this session, but it was also interesting to see how well Trolltech listens to the Plasma community by planning for implementation of features Plasma will greatly benefit from.

Another visit to the Tokamak people was paid by two Italian researchers who are currently working on a service oriented architecture that could be used in Plasma to decouple services, such as DataEngines from local machines and make them available on the network. Some Plasma developers agreed to work with the JOLIE researchers on a paper that will be presented to the research community later this year.

Target User Profile

After Celeste started the target user research project only a couple of weeks ago, the first results were presented to the Plasma developer to seed them into the community and reflect those changes in Plasma's user interfaces.

The First Meeting...

And most definitely not the last. The Plasma community, being quite young is already flourishing. The humongous amount of work done proves that this kind of sprint is an excellent means to jump ahead on technology. It is surely not the last Plasma meeting, and yours truly is already looking forward to "Tokamak II" (although there are no plans for it yet, and some weeks without pizza will be appreciated). Also, Tokamak would not have been possible without the support of the KDE e.V. and our friendly host Riccardo Iaconelli and his family for their great display of support for the Free Software desktop.

The Dutch NLnet foundation aims to financially support organisations and people that contribute to an open information society. Some time ago they decided to help KOffice in two exciting ways: to sponsor the design of a new logo for KOffice, with matching logo designs for all KOffice applications, and to sponsor Girish Ramakrishnan to improve the ODF support in KWord 2.0. The KOffice team is deeply grateful to NLnet for this support!

Girish Ramakrishnan, a former Trolltech employee, has already started on implementing a thorough test suite for ODF text loading. Helping him are Thomas Zander and Thorsten Zachmann, two old-time members of the KOffice team. In his own words:

"I am working on getting ODF support up to speed in KWord, my work being sponsored by NLNet. As the first step, I have spent my time now automating the ODF testsuite at the OpenDocument Fellowship....

"So far, I have found some basic tests are failing - loading of lists, possibly superfluous spaces/blocks. I have patches coming up."

KOffice has done without a real logo forever: we used to use the application icon of KOShell, a rainbow, but that was hardly a real logo, and besides, everybody, including the primary school your correspondent attended, uses a rainbow. But coming up with a good logo is hard, and we postponed and postponed the task.

But then NLnet proposed to retain the services of designer Michiel van Kleef of 30 Media. Michiel was faced with a very hard brief: to design a logo, not an icon, for KOffice which combines business and creativity in one, integrated package. After consultation with the KOffice team we arrived at the following logo:

This great design suggested to Michiel the possibility of doing variations on it for the individual applications that KOffice consists of. While KOffice itself has got the KDE color blue, the business applications get orange:

        

And the graphical applications get purple (and it's good to see that Karbon2 opens the official SVG sources correctly):

     

KPlato, the project planner application that is coming along amazingly well for KOffice 2.0 is the odd one out, and gets red:

The helper applications KChart and KFormula are green:

  

There is also a logo for Kugar, the report writing component in KOffice 1, which will probably be replaced by Adam Pigg's promising new report component in KOffice 2:

All with a subtle, but apposite variations on the design in the circle.

Now all that remains to be done is updating the KOffice website and prepare some t-shirts for Akademy!