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Issue 63
17th June 2007
by Danny Allen
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This Week...
Work on engine configurability, data management, a packaging system for Plasmoids and themes, and new refinements in desktop icon interaction in Plasma. The Oxygen window decoration and widget are both moved into kdebase. Further work in the Icon Cache, Kopete Messenger update, KRDC and Context Help Summer of Code projects. Improved highscore handling and network management across kdegames. New keyboard engine becomes live in KTouch, whilst the Step physics simulation package receives support for annotations. Support for many new text styling options in KOffice. Further work towards Amarok 2.0, including work on the context view and the display of lyrics. More recent and precise elevation data added to Marble. KColorScheme colour roles are added to aid usability. User documentation is started for Dolphin. More work in Strigi and NEPOMUK. Work on vector selections and a smoothing algorithm for drawing implemented in Krita. Many improvements in the KMix sound management utility. Digikam begins to be ported to KDE 4. Large scale reorganisation in the kdegraphics module: KColorEdit, KIconEdit, KPovModeller, Kuickshow and Ligature move to extragear/graphics, whilst Kooka and kmrml are removed completely.

Riccardo Iaconelli produces a new video, Icon Interactions in Plasma:
I’m really glad to announce that finally I finished implementing the icon interactions for Plasma. I initially got inspired by one of the David’s mockups (a result of the internal Appeal project of last year): he was showing it to me to see if I could implement something similar: he knew I was already working on icons for Plasma.

What he showed me was essentially this Flash animation that shows the concept live, and the design PDF that actually explains in detail what the animation does.

I immediately loved his idea, and I told him that I would immediately begin to implement it. This morning, I proudly showed the results of my work to Nuno, and he refined the look of those Plasma icons.
Download Icon Interactions in Plasma video (6.1 MB, AVI)

So, this is basically how it looks right now. The icon in the top-left corner actually represents one of those "quick actions" you can read about in the PDF and look at in both the animation and in the screencast.


Rafael Fernández López records an update with the progress since last week on KListView:
I finally committed today KListView into kdebase/apps/dolphin. It still requires a little speed optimisation work on the setSelection() and mouseReleaseEvent() methods. There are a few problems when you change the sorting role on the fly, as well as if items are added/deleted externally. If you experience strange issues, just press F5 key to make it update everything.

That said, here is a screencast of the latest work on KListView, with sorting by Files/Folders and by Size.
Download More KListView video (27.8 MB, AVI)

I am going to continue my work on Dolphin too, to make the rest of sortings work, as right now, the only sortings implemented are by Name and by Size.

Loïc Corbasson, a Summer of Code student, introduces his project, Theming in KOrganiser:
Today KOrganizer's theming interface, CalendarDecoration, is not widely used. Plugins using the interface have to be written in C++, and the functionality remains simple.

My goals during Summer of Code would be:
  • to allow for more features (background images, image/quote of the week/month, etc)
  • to write some example plugins (national calendars, "This day in history" links, ...)
  • to make it easier to write simple decorations for KOrganizer using a portable and easy-to-use format, which may be extended in the future (like the KDE themes).
Looking for a way to distinguish customisations on calendars, I found that paper-based calendars use two types of customizations:
  1. not combinable decorations, like color themes, backgrounds, etc.; these are making the overall look of the calendar;
  2. combinable decorations: quote of the day, day number in the year, moon phases, etc.; these are restricted to an area of the calendar, e.g. the top of the day columns in the weekly calendars.
KOrganizer currently looks like this:


An interface for the second item is already implemented: CalendarDecoration. During SoC, I will develop a few additional plugins for it, as well as an interface and plugins for the first item, the CalendarTheme part.

I think the best way to extend/create the needed interfaces is to make each feature specific to a particular view. Pictures of the day are would be too small in a month view, and showing the picture of the month in the week or day views doesn't seem very useful to me either. Different views allow for different customizations, the first criteria being of course available space, which is for example very narrow for a day, and larger for a month. This makes the whole more featureful and entertaining too: imagine if all your calendars, from the year planner to the daily agenda all looked the same! How sad and boring! :)

Decorations should also be able to be more than text, so I plan to implement at least support for images. This could use either widgets directly (current solution), a HTML widget for richer text (Qt or KHTML depending on the features we want to make available), or KParts. KParts would of course be the most generic, but would have to create few overhead. An HTML widget seems a good point to start to me. Cornelius also thought about using moon phases from KMoon (a KDE panel applet); maybe some general KPart mechanism could be used to achieve this, but it's not high-priority. With some decorations (here, Wikipedia's Picture of the day as well as the days since beginning and till end of the year), KOrganizer may look like this:

Notes
  • Some co-ordination with the calendar printing plugin may also be useful to allow the user to either print the calendar as it is on the screen, or to print the background image on apart from the calendar entries (e.g. at the top, like in many paper-based monthly calendars), using a specific background color for the whole sheet of paper, and using a different color theme. But this is not high-priority either.
  • I think the most convenient way of storing themes would be an XML file, or something more or less à la CSS, packed together with the background images in a zipped archive. (This will be implemented after experimenting with hard-coded themes of course)
  • Using a portable format would allow to make use of KNewStuff et cetera.
  • Building on something already there being generally easier than starting from scratch, I will probably start by extending CalendarDecoration, which will allow me to better know the codebase.
As most of you probably already know, the Summer of Code has already started. I'd like to collect as much ideas as I can before implementing - feel free to suggest improvements or alternatives!

I hope I made clear what I planned to do, and why - if your pet feature isn't planned, complain! :)



Statistics
Commits: 3133 by 222 developers, 6193 lines modified, 1436 new files.
Open Bugs: 13904
Open Wishes: 12757
Bugs Opened: 206 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 124 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/KDE
1039
/trunk/l10n
752
/trunk/extragear
259
/branches/extragear
182
/branches/stable
179
/branches/work
156
/trunk/www
135
/trunk/koffice
117
/trunk/playground
105
/trunk/kdesupport
57
Lines Developer Commits
506
Gilles Caulier
236
366
Laurent Montel
166
245
Stephan Kulow
160
178
Aaron J. Seigo
69
90
Andreas Pakulat
66
122
Pino Toscano
57
61
Inge Wallin
39
45
Christian Ehrlicher
34
66
Frank Osterfeld
32
63
Dirk Mueller
31

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Swedish
99.49%
Portuguese
98.80%
Dutch
93.72%
Spanish
92.14%
Greek
92.24%
Estonian
91.45%
Danish
88.19%
German
86.75%
Italian
84.17%
French
81.28%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Christian Esken
21
Thomas McGuire
19
Mark Kretschmann
11
Joris Guisson
11
Luboš Luňák
7
Bram Schoenmakers
6
Arnd Baecker
6
Seb Ruiz
5
Jan Kundrát
4
Mikolaj Machowski
4

Program Buzz
Amarok
  5375
KMail
  4000
K3B
  3620
Kate
  3530
Kopete
  3468
KDevelop
  2780
Quanta
  1982
Kaffeine
  1843
Kicker
  1639
digiKam
  1604


Person Buzz
David Faure
  770
Adriaan de Groot
  661
Stephan Kulow
  608
Allen Winter
  592
Waldo Bastian
  450
Aaron J. Seigo
  434
Troy Unrau
  341
George Staikos
  328
Jonathan Riddell
  283
Gilles Caulier
  279
Commit Countries

Commit Demographics
Sex
95.3 %       Male
4.77 %       (unknown)
0.776 %       Female
Motivation
40.5 %       (unknown)
36.9 %       Volunteer
23.3 %       Commercial
 
Ages
78.2 %       (unknown)
13.0 %       25 to 34
4.92 %       18 to 24
2.94 %       35 to 44
1.51 %       45 to 54
0.155 %       Under 18


Contents
  Bug Fixes Features Optimise Security Other
Accessibility
Development Tools [*] [*]
Educational [*] [*] [*]
Graphics [*] [*] [*]
KDE-Base [*] [*] [*] [*]
KDE-PIM [*] [*] [*]
Office [*] [*]
Konqueror
Multimedia [*] [*]
Networking Tools [*] [*] [*]
User Interface [*]
Utilities [*] [*]
Games [*] [*] [*]
Other


Bug Fixes
Development Tools
Richard Dale committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebindings/csharp/qyoto:
* When the stack was allocated for a virtual method callback, an entry wasn't being included for the reply value
* When the arguments for a virtual method callback were copied to the C# arg stack, they were off by one
* The colliding mice example currently crashes with memory corruption problems
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4 Revision 674410

Educational
Anne-Marie Mahfouf committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdeedu/kturtle/src/kturtle.cpp:
Fix critical bug when the user language is UTF8
Special thanks to Andrey and Bozidar for the time they spent on that.
Bug 82462: load and save don't work with german Umlauts, utf8
Diff Revision 676298

Games
Johannes Bergmeier committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdegames/ksudoku/src/logic/sksolver.cpp:
Fix a bug in difficulty:
* old difficulty was from -1 to 2 (2 = easy)
* the GUI difficulty was from 0 to 4 (0 = easy)
* addopted internal difficulty to GUI
Diff Revision 674925

Dmitry Suzdalev committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdegames/katomic:
- Fix adding score to highscore.
(yet another bug in KScoreDialog - it doesn't write score when using second addScore overload. Plus I have one more crash in my collection :). Leaving them unfixed atm, I need Matt as a fixing mentor :))

- Use KUser to supply default user name until we will decide on a common way to get user name for highscores.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3 Revision 675512