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Akademy 2007 kicks off in Glasgow, Scotland. Continued work in Plasma, with improvements in the Photoframe and Dictionary Plasmoids, and the addition of ChemicalData, Akonadi and Battery Plasmoids. Support for Solid-based network status support in Mailody. Support for multiple blogs in KBlogger. Automatic downloading of map tiles in Marble. Theming support added to KBounce. Load and Save support in Kollagame, a game development IDE. More work in the Kaider translation utility. Support for the PEF raw format for Pentax cameras in KPhotoAlbum. KPhotoAlbum begins to be ported to KDE 4, with more progress in porting Digikam to KDE 4. Initial work in the OpenPrinting and Context Sensitive Help Summer of Code projects, with continued work in the KRDC project. Initial steps toward high-precision computing support in KSpread. Attempts made to ensure Sonnet is ready for inclusion in KDE 4. Systemsettings moves to kdebase for KDE 4.
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This week hosted the build up and then strong start of the KDE World Conference, Akademy 2007 in Glasgow, Scotland. As with any well-attended event, there are many perspectives. Kevin Ottens has written a brief overview of the first day, which I reprint below (for further coverage, read the official reports from the talks, and remember to check the Dot and the Planet throughout the week!):
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This year, the opening was a talk by Lars Knoll, and a very good one in my opinion. I think it was important for the community that Lars gave us more insight on how the things are working inside Trolltech, and to call for more co-operation in both way. It's so nice to see the Qt developers so committed to the KDE platform.
The talk about Sonnet was interesting, but I was a bit frustrated about the lack of in-depth information. That said it's completely understandable, Zack being back on business on this library only recently.
The second keynote by Mark Shuttleworth was interesting, but obviously raised some controversy about release processes. Apparently he'd like to see all Free Software projects release in sync every six months. That looks very optimistic to think it could be even done. And even if we suppose for a second we could apply this to the whole community (good luck!), I'm not impressed at all. Doing this to such a scale looks like the best way to kill innovation in my humble opinion.
The talk about Akonadi was pretty informative, and it's nice to see code running. In particular, demoing a Plasmoid giving the state of your mailbox in real time was a very good example. If you add to that the fact that'll be an unified and semantic rich way to get all your PIM information... nice features are coming.
Then I attended Zack talk on graphics, and his new framework named Quasar... well, it was a talk made by Zack, enough said. It rocked, and it even gave me some motivation to do crazy graphics stuff.
The KDEGames panel was a very very good idea. It gave a pretty good overview of the kdegames maintainer team, on the state of the module, where it's going on, etc. I'd love to see more of such panels, for other modules too.
Lars Knoll had another talk, but this time about WebKit and KDE. I think he gave a pretty good picture of the current situation and of the advantages to use WebKit now. And the best of it, is that it's not science-fiction, we already have a KPart for Konqueror which use Webkit (it's in playground right now, and completely working).
Then we got the "beautiful features" talk by our renowned serial-hugger: Aaron Seigo. As usual, great talk, he's speaking really well... a real born speaker. He gave quite some clues on the direction we should follow to make our UIs more appealing.
And last but not least I attended Inge's talk about large installation and thin client settings. That's nice to see KDE works quite well overall in such setups, but I have to admit I share his concerns about Kiosktool. It could become one of our best assets, but right now it's really suboptimal and probably needs rethinking.
On the evening we got our first social event. We went to a bar, got nice food and drinks. The place was really nice, and I've been able to chat with many people. Very good stuff... except for the music. It was overall too loud for my taste, in particular when one of the DJ played us some experimental music^Hnoise. It was extremely loud, and unfortunately it made quite some people leave. That's really unfortunate, the place was very well chosen otherwise, but you can't control everything.
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Traditionally one of the highlights of the conference, the "Akademy Awards" preceded the closing ceremony of the contributors conference. The winners were chosen by a jury composed of the winners of the previous year - the recipients of the Akademy Awards 2007 are:
And in a new category this year, Kenny Duffus for Akademy Organisation.
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So after 65 issues, it seems that this is now the award-winning KDE Commit-Digest. Though I am aware of the broad appreciation of the Digest, to receive an official award and recognition (and in such an impressive peer setting) really means a lot to me.
I was completely entranced at the time, and with a microphone suddenly thrust upon me, I could only utter an extremely short acceptance speech! However, if I was in a normal state of mind, I would have expressed my thanks to Derek Kite, the original producer of the Digest, and who was the natural inspiration for the current effort.
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Rivo Laks makes a proposal to move his speedily-developed Summer of Code project, Icon Cache, into kdelibs for KDE 4:
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I'm the SoC student working on the icon cache.
I've already made some progress, e.g. at startup of apps KIconLoader ctor (which is called for pretty much every app) takes 500 ms less with cold caches, 30 ms less with hot caches. And the loading times of individual icons will be improved as well. As a result, I'd like to discuss a possibility of including the cache in 4.0 (instead of 4.1 as originally planned).
The code can be found in /branches/soc-iconcache/
API changes to kdelibs would consist of one added method to KIconTheme (internalName()) and the addition of the KIconCache class.
KIconCache's public API is pretty much complete (at least for 4.0). The most important methods are find() and insert() plus static deleteCache(). There is also possibility for apps to use their own caches, e.g. for saving pixmaps rendered from SVGs (at least kdeedu and kdegames might want to use this). A small app demonstrating this can be found in /branches/soc-iconcache/kic_demo The internals are not finished yet (and some of the code is quite messy), but I can finish that before the feature freeze.
There will also be some buildsystem changes (I think these should go into 4.0 even if the cache itself won't). Whenever new icons are installed, the icon theme dir's (e.g. share/icons/oxygen/) mtime has to be updated, then the icon cache will pick up the changes. There's already the kde4_install_icons() cmake function which can easily be modified to do that. But another function will need to be introduced for installing icons into app's data dir (i.e. share/appname/...). It would install the icons and then update mtime of hicolor icon directory. What about adding something like kde4_install_app_icons() for that?
So what do you think? Should it go into kdelibs for 4.0? If yes, I can do the merge before or on 25th (libs freeze).
And any API improvement suggestions are of course also welcome :-)
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