Since I am missing important features from the kdedevelopers.org blog system I am moving my blog to wordpress. From now on all Nepomuk related blogs will be posted there.

Amazing how long it always takes for me to write a log entry. So many times in the last months I told myself I had to write the next entry... well, new year's resolution (a little late I know): more blogging about what I am up to (regarding KDE of course).

Well then, let's see, KDE 4.2 is around the corner and the Nepomuk features look pretty stable. Strigi is nicely integrated, it can be suspended and resumed (which is does automatically in battery mode or if the harddisl is full), the folders to index can be configured including subfolders. Krunner comes with a Nepomuk search plugin which means you can simply run queries from there. The KIO slave while not yet nicely integrated into the GUI, allows to query stuff from Dolphin or the file open dialog (something I blogged about a long time ago). Almost everything is multi-threaded for your non-GUI-blocking pleasure and tags can be reused in Gwenview. The only thing still imperfect is the storage backend based on Java (too much mem usage), although even that will be solved soon thanks to the nice guys from Openlink. But that is a story for another day (remember: new year's resolution).

Thus, finally we have a good foundation to build new stuff upon and that is what this blog entry is actually about. So let's have a look.

I always thought that some KDE apps looked a bit cluttered. Yesterday I finally tried to do something about it. I started with Gwenview. Two things bothered me: 1. the status bar buttons were too small for their text. Easy to solve by simply not forcing the height of the statusbar. 2. the sidebar had a different color than the status bar. Now this is due to Oxygen using gradients which is cool. It turned out to be rather simple. And this is also the actual reason for this blog.

It has been a while since I blogged. The reason is simple: the birth of my daughter turned my brain upside down (as in: "as far as I can tell there exists only one thing in the whole world and it is not this blog"). Now, thousands of hours of staring at her later (and also after the very successful last Nepomuk project review) I am finally back to blogging.

The new Strigi service a blogged about before is in svn trunk now. With it Strigi is now enabled by default. But that is no need to be alarmed. I think it behaves quite nicely. After 1 hour and 42 minutes of initial indexing (I did not feel any slowdown of the system in that time) I got this:

[image:3577 size=original]

It took me one and a half day and Jos will not be happy about it. That is because I have to start this blog entry with apologizing to him:

"Jos, I am sorry, you will probably not like what I am about to present here. But this makes it so much easier for me and all the KDE people. And strigidaemon simply does not provide the needed features, which I can understand since you are doing this in your spare time. But I cannot wait any longer and in the end really want to reuse all the nice KDE features instead of reimplementing it all just to keep away from QT/KDE dependencies. I hope you understand."

No, I did not forget about the virtual folders, but I also did not implement subfolders or a graphical query editor. Shame on me, I know. I thought it was more important to focus on stability and a clean API first. And that is what I did.

But before that let my point you to the blog of my Google Summer of Code student Daniel Winter who uses Nepomuk to improve Amarok playlists. Cool stuff.

After more than two weeks of vacation I read up on my email and of course am also sickened by some of the stuff I have to read there. Let me open with a quote:

Here's a real suggestion: give us back our Desktops!

Really. I just got my awesome KDE metal gear award for my work on K3b and I have to say: work of art. This is so cool and such an honor. I can't find better or more words....

[image:3490 size=preview]

Well, maybe "The Next Level" is overstating it but I improved the query API a lot. Not only can we now properly handle all sorts of literal comparisons but we can also use plain SPARQL queries. The latter allow some nice stuff like "Recent Files".