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Issue 124
17th August 2008
by Danny Allen
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This Week...
New "Browser History", "Konqueror Sessions", "Konsole Sessions", and "Kate Sessions" KRunners in Plasma. Proof-of-concept of simple uploading in Plasmagik. A MythTV data engine for retrieving data about a MythTV installation (upcoming recordings, etc), and the start of a RSIBreak engine. An applet for displaying new message information from KMail, Kopete, etc for use with the Plasmoids-on-Screensaver project. Support for panel form factors, and a configuration dialog in the Lancelot alternative menu. Various improvements in the "Desktop Grid" KWin-Composite effect. More bugfixes for Kicker in KDE 3.5. A backtrace browser plugin for Kate. Code completion for PHP in KDevelop. More levels added in the Stepgame project. Lots of improvements in KGo, support for themes in Kapman. Window title tagged images in KSnapshot to assist indexing by Strigi. Support for reading form actions and removing annotations in Okular. Animated image support (eg. GIF) in Gwenview. First steps towards a Mailody Kontact part. More work for Amarok 2.0, especially regarding playlist handling. Start of a PDF import filter (for KOffice 2.1, using Poppler) in Karbon. Initial Kross integration in the Shaman package manager. More user interface work in KColorEdit. New device notifier moved into kdebase, new KsCD moved into kdemultimedia. Removal of viewer functionality in KPilot to become a syncing application only. Import of Kaffeine video player into extragear. Tagging of Amarok 1.4.10, a security fix release.

Cyrille Berger introduces "Darkroom", a new KDE application for batch processing RAW imagery:
Darkroom is a batch processor of RAW images, which are images produced by Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras, basically it's a dump of the internal memory of the sensor, in a sense it is the digital version of the film, while a JPEG/PNG image would be the digital version of the photographic print, hence the application name "Darkroom", since it was the name given to the room where silver films are transformed.

The target user profile of Darkroom is "William", a passionate digital photography amateur. William takes a lot of pictures, and since he wants to be sure he gets the maximum out of his pictures, he shoots photos as RAW. But William likes to share his passion with friends, or on the internet, or print them, and this means he needs to convert his RAW images to a file format that can be easilly seen and used by other people, Since William takes a lot of pictures, he needs to be efficient when doing the convertion, and have the possibility to easily handle a lot of images at the same time.

There aren't many applications in the Free Software world that enable this workflow: there are some GTK-based applications, there is a command-line tool, dcraw, which is used by Darkroom, Digikam, and Krita when decoding RAW images. But there was nothing that would integrate nicely in KDE. I see Digikam as good for managing my collection of pictures, and quickly do some light editing, while Gwenview is a fine light-weight image viewer - the KDE4 version is really good, but it seems unable to open RAW files at this time. Krita is specialized in high-end single image editing and creation. And now, Darkroom comes to complete the set of KDE tools for photographers.


The goal for the future is to keep making William's life simpler and smoother, allowing him to work faster. There are many interface improvements that need to be implemented, for instance adding filtering support to the list of pictures, and so on. I am also wondering how KDE technologies can be used in Darkroom: though I don't want to see any collection management features in Darkroom, it could still be interesting to populate the list of images to process by using a NEPOMUK query, for example.

Ben Cooksley talks about his work on "KDisplay" (for On-Screen Displays in KDE applications):
KDisplay is a daemon that is designed to be used by applications that want to have an On-Screen Display (OSD) without the hassle of coding one. It also has an attached library named "kosdwidget", which means you don't have to use the daemon (which is actually for testing). This means that, for example, Amarok and KMix could have on-screen displays that have the same look and feel, which makes KDE applications seem more integrated.

When I finish, I hope to have a library and daemon that any KDE application could use to quickly display some information, such as the song currently playing, changes in volume/brightness, etc. The possibilities are actually quite endless... it has the ability to show an icon/image that is automatically scaled to fit, some text, and a progress bar (for the brightness/volume/battery people), and anything you don't use won't be shown either. KDisplay can also close when clicked, and close after a certain amount of time. It currently solves the problem where every application must have their own implementation, for example Amarok and K3b, which leads to consistency problems, and massive coding jobs for even the simplest OSD.

Currently, the framed rounded edge, progress, text and image display capabilities as well as the ability to close on time or on click, are complete. In the near future, I do not know where it will go: I could play videos/sounds, or integrate with KNotify to send events when a on-screen display hides or shows itself, but I am really out of ideas (any additional ones are welcome). Of course, I hope to move to a KDE module in the future!


The only technically difficult problems I have had actually relate to the positioning of the image and text, and figuring out how to get the rounded corners to actually work without giving X a hard time (i.e. 85-92% CPU usage with one OSD), but the OSD code from Amarok 1 was a big help.


Statistics
Commits: 3552 by 265 developers, 6878 lines modified, 1873 new files.
Open Bugs: 16663
Open Wishes: 14364
Bugs Opened: 364 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 409 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/KDE
908
/trunk/l10n-kde4
681
/branches/stable
425
/trunk/playground
325
/trunk/extragear
225
/branches/work
205
/branches/KDE
157
/trunk/koffice
104
/trunk/kdesupport
96
/trunk/l10n-support
86
Lines Developer Commits
207
Laurent Montel
93
72
Jonathan Riddell
69
132
Ivan Čukić
69
86
Ralf Habacker
61
52
Marcell Lengyel
52
51
Yukiko Bando
51
94
David Nolden
50
46
Karl Ove Hufthammer
46
88
Marta Rybczyńska
44
61
Sebastian Sauer
44

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Portuguese
99%
Ukrainian
99%
Swedish
99%
Greek
98%
Estonian
96%
Galician
96%
French
92%
Low Saxon
91%
Japanese
89%
Spanish
88%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Dirk Mueller
51
Christoph Cullmann
40
Lydia Pintscher
36
Pino Toscano
27
Thomas McGuire
20
Leonardo Finetti
20
Thomas Baumgart
15
Harald Hvaal
13
Ian Monroe
12
Harald Sitter
12

Program Buzz
Amarok
  9815
K3B
  4875
KMail
  4840
Kopete
  3320
KDevelop
  2595
Plasma
  2489
Kaffeine
  2037
Kate
  2001
Solid
  1873
Kontact
  1790


Person Buzz
David Faure
  2110
Stephan Kulow
  1749
Aaron Seigo
  1390
Torsten Rahn
  1367
Jonathan Riddell
  1132
Laurent Montel
  1030
Stephan Binner
  782
Thiago Macieira
  668
Zack Rusin
  638
Adriaan de Groot
  631
Commit Countries

Commit Demographics
Sex
91.4 %       Male
7.55 %       (unknown)
1.67 %       Female
Motivation
48.1 %       Volunteer
40.9 %       (unknown)
11.6 %       Commercial
 
Ages
58.3 %       (unknown)
20.0 %       25 to 34
15.4 %       18 to 24
3.13 %       35 to 44
2.33 %       45 to 54
1.34 %       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 [*]

There are 198 selections this week.

Bug Fixes
Development Tools
Manuel Breugelmans committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdevelop/plugins/xtest/qtest:
Truckload of memory leak fixes.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (+ 1 more) Revision 847274

Educational
David Capel committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/parley/src/practice:
Fix for the switch-between-image-mode-and-non-image-mode bug. It required a small redesign, but it didn't take as long as I feared.

The list of nasty bugs is diminishing...
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Revision 847035

David Capel committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/parley/src/practice:
Fix of the final nasty flashcard bug (and more image related small bugs)! Flashcard mode now completely works!

Code cleanup.
Code robustness++
Small API change

Change in theme requirements: the background surrounding active areas is called 'mode_background' (eg written_background) instead of 'mode_box'.

The combination of mode + image_box and mode_image + box caused a nasty naming conflict (which was part of the flashcard problem).

The techbase page has been updated.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Revision 847055
View Visual Changes (to 1 file)

KDE-Base
Alex Merry committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/applets/pager/pager.cpp:
An optimisation too far: the selective update doesn't work properly when dragging windows between desktops with Active Borders.
Bug 166619: Pager shows the window twice if it is moved from one virtual desk...
Diff Revision 845984

Benoit Minisini committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdebase/kate/app:
Kate is finally restored on the correct desktop.
The opened files progress window displayed at session restore is now put on the current desktop now, so that the user can see it.
Bug 117618: kate: windows are on wrong desktops in restored session
Diffs: 1, 2