New year means some snow and cold noses here in Warsaw, and a new job to me, this time in the mobile industry, what has rather diversified my day, and that's good. Happy 2009 to you, to your friends and family.

But I am on the KDE board too, it's not going to change. What's recently time-consuming for me is refactoring of the Native Kexi Forms. The most serious and anticipated decision is dropping the (implemented in 2004..2005) idea of the forms component reusable at a rich API level for other applications. The idea has introduced too man layers after months of development, too many to have things maintainable, with just proof-of-concept KFormDesigner being the only app using the framework except Kexi.

The confirmed rumour at least on the IRC has it that I am in process of switching my job after 5 years at OpenOffice Polska / OpenOffice Software. Much of that really interesting time was devoted to Kexi within KOffice and quite a bit to various aspects of KDE on Windows. The switch has been planned about one year ago so is largely gradual. These KDE-related tasks have been already my spare time activities since then. My will is to invest a lot there.

I've been enjoying the time (bikes!), meetings (absolute record # of attendees) and technology (n810!) at Akademy since 9th August. And a young student from Poland, Michał Bartecki has been invited to come, what adds one to the number of the gfx individials around and made the KDE ping-pong team stronger. Kudos for the Team for such an unique event, for their time, sweat and tears

As the recent KDE Commit-Digest unveiled, it's visible that I've delivered Qt3-only incarnation of KexiDB to branches/kexi/kexidb-qt3/ in the KDE Subversion. KexiDB is a high-level database connectivity and creation library with database backend drivers for SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Its development within the Kexi project started in 2003.

Have some pictures? Share with us at http://techbase.kde.org/Events/Akademy/2008/Photos...

The social event in "Het Anker" brewery, Mechelen

The brewery mascot or so...

That's not new but perhaps you'd like to know... ;)

How to write a KDE app or a GNOME app.

And of course,

Hi!
We, at KOffice, are looking for volunteers to make screenshots for 'visual changelogs' of each release. It's really welcome especially alpha and beta stages. Someone would just interview the devs on time, asking about important features, make the screenshots and publish them.

I am not asking for writing whole articles, but hey, it's welcome too.

Then we could avoid comical cases like the one in the article where GIMP is presented instead of Krita ;=)

That said, a habit like “every maintainer delivers (from whatever source) at least one screenshot of "his" app“ would be still nice.

Microsoft:

"ODF has clearly won. We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible. We couldn't do that during the release of Office 2007. We're looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators."

It looks like honest words, so ... welcome to market based on competition, guys.

Full text of valuable book "An Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4" by Alan and Paul Ezust (Suffolk University) is now available online at http://cartan.cas.suffolk.edu/oopdocbook/opensource/ under OPL license.

Great news: Robert Kubica (Poland, 23) has won his first F1 Grand Prix (in Canada). Moreover, in the same time another Pole, Lukas Podolski, scored two goals in Euro 2008 match, the first one was assisted by Mirek Klose.