Meanwhile, we finally released a game that I’m really proud that is called “Incredible Circus”. It’s the kind of game that is really addictive . In three weeks we achieved 200k downloads on Nokia Store and today is available for the N9. It’s also a really good showcase for Qt. If you have a Symbian^3 or MeeGo device, just follow the link to try the game.

You can also check it out on the video below.

Apart from that, I’m updating my machine and as soon as I have a developer environment again I’ll start hacking on Plasma again. Probably fixing some bugs, right Aaron?

Picture by The Rocketeer

You can find kdeplasma-addons on https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdeplasma-addons and you can easily clone the repo using:

git clone kde:kdeplasma-addons

Assuming that you did the trick below in your ~/.gitconfig file:

[url "git://anongit.kde.org/"]
insteadOf = kde:
[url "ssh://git@git.kde.org/"]
pushInsteadOf = kde:

I have been working with git for almost four years now and I used a lot of tools to create projects and help with visualizing repositories. With ReviewBoard and RedMine all integrated, the commit mails, integration with BKO and other features (a lot of them were already present with svn) I can say that KDE’s git infrastructure is one of the most complete and professional that I’ve ever seen. It’s really very “PRO” and I would love to have any of our sysadmins working on my IT department. Guys, you really rock! (besides doing an amazing work).

I think that it’s fair also to thank KO that sponsored Ian to work and do the conversions of kdelibs and kdebase. This was not an easy job and it’s really a pain to do the conversion *right*. Of course we may find some rough edges right now as we still need to get used to new workflows and new tools but IMHO we will overcome that and soon we will feel the benefits of git

Invest in sharing! by Toban Black

Following the awesome work done by our sysadmins, I implemented a backend for the share data engine that supports the use of KDE’s official pastebin service: http://paste.kde.org .

This way people using trunk will already have this support upstream and people using earlier versions (which includes 4.6 !) can also use the script provided by Andrea Scarpino thanks to the brand new Get Hot New Stuff support that I integrated into the Pastebin applet for 4.6

Today I also signed up to Flattr, in order to test this micropayment service that sounds like a great idea to donate small amounts to people that do great work and create awesome content. I must say that I signed up after wanting to Flattr the work done by Lydia (aka Nightrose) and Tom Albers (aka toma).

Of course I don’t expect to earn a lot of money this way, but It’s awesome to be able to help some great workers and also add the possibility of earning a little bit of money, specially in the year of your wedding

The Cloud - by web@kstp.com

Since some time ago I started to worry that some “vital” information for me was on the “The Cloud” and that most of the service providers didn’t provide a way to retrieve my stuff or a support line.

I started to worry also about privacy for the first time in my life: what if companies suddenly becomes evil? Hmm. That could be bad. The “big players” are able to know everything about me: the email I read, the news I read, who are my friends, my family, my pictures….and much more! They could relate all this information to know what I like, what I dislike and so on.

Of course there are benefits. By knowing me more, they can offer better services that could be refined search, special advertisement or even make it easier to find that friend from kinder garden that I’ve never met after I was 4 (?)…

But what is the problem if they turn evil or decide that I do not deserve anymore these goods?

Some months ago I started to “migrate” at least some of my important stuff to open source and “controlled by me” services. I’m now sharing a server with one of my friends where I have my own email service for instance. I also contributed some patches to Akregator to let me share my news with my friends. I started to just use identi.ca and let Twitter “replicate” that, so my friends from Twitter get my thoughts. But in worst case I can just install Status.net on my server and voilà. I’m also looking forward ownCloud.

Yesterday and today I had the proof that I’m not (completely) paranoid (and trust me, I’m one of the last ones to be paranoid about subjects ).

Starting from yesterday: after getting an invitation to try Diaspora (thanks Lydia!), and linking my twitter account there I discovered that my Twitter account was “suspended”. Ow great. I was supposed to get an email when this happens and there was nothing on my inbox neither on spam. I tried filling a support request and I always get the “Could not perform the task. Wait a few minutes” message.

I don’t know how but I finally received an automatic email from one of this support tickets that actually managed to be sent (all the time I tried I received an error…). I followed all the guidelines and answered the email asking for my account back. Tom pointed out that twitter had some security issues…but it has been already 24 hours that they disabled my account without sending even an email. If it wasn’t Diaspora I would never discover that it was suspended.

Today, while reading my morning news, I discover that Richard had a problem with Google and can’t solve that. He tried email, forums and everything else he could. Ah, great! He even has an Android phone that is pretty useless without a Google account. I’m sorry Rich

“The Cloud” is awesome, isn’t it? That’s why we need projects like StatusNet, Diaspora, ownCloud and Open Desktop (UPDATE: thanks to the ones that pointed out that open desktop isn’t actually open source).

However, just to keep everybody updated before I do a full post or read an article on the dot here it is a simple video that means a lot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKdLCGCTu8w

Basically we put Plasma mobile to run on top of MeeGo and thanks to a lot of Marco’s work we already supported screen rotation! Besides the “fail” that drivers don’t properly report that the screen is being rotated on this device, pressing some keys we can make the view rotate and then comes the magic

Of course we also put the Plasma netbook to run on the device but the mobile one was really nice to play with our hands Keep your eyes on the Planet as I think more people have news to share

More about the sprint and the conference after the break

You may be asking yourself: “why the heck is this useful?”. The answer is: everytime you share some article on Akregator it publishes the title of the article, the link to the article and put’s a tag “#share”. This way you can use the tag feed to retrieve the news that your friends are sharing: just add the RSS feed to your feed reader and voilà This provides a feature that looks like the one that Google Reader provides, but in completely open environment!

If you are interested in reading my shares, just add this to your reader: http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share/rss .

I’m on vacations so it has been hard to keep doing any development as I’m busy traveling with my fiance but I can post about some stuff that I’ve been developing before my vacations!

See you!

The “Join the Game” campaign was launched to create another way of contributing to the project: you donate some money to the project in order to help organizing developer sprints, to represent KDE on conference and trade shows, maintaining the current infrastructure and help the e.V. to legally represent the project in different manners.

As soon as the campaign was launched I wanted to be part of it too because I know how hard it is to sponsor all the activities that we have and how important the activities are. Some weeks after joining the game I received this awesome gift from the KDE e.V. It came in a simple box and when I opened I could find a blue box (no, it’s not a T.A.R.D.I.S. ) and a letter.

It was really a nice emotion to read the letter that was sent to me, signed by the president of the KDE e.V. (really signed, not that image of the signature that organizations usually use). Opening the blue box another surprise: a nice silver card with my name, the KDE e.V. logo and the number of my membership: 0006! It was a surprise and I am very very happy to be an early adopter of this! And the cherry of this awesome cake: a playing piece (the same that you see on the posters), made of wood and with the KDE logo painted on it and also my membership number. Just great! Congratulations to everybody involved on this campaign! Check below some pictures:

The Letter - really signed

You can see the KDE logo in the center of the box

What you see when you open the box

The Membership card

Playing Piece - front

Playing Piece - back

And you? What are you waiting for? Help KDE and be part of it: Join the Game!

I started to hack on this new dataengine and now it’s ready! Since some weeks ago I moved from kdereview to kdebase and now you can write plugins for your favourite services using any of the scripting languages that Kross supports today. Later I will enable GHNS on the pastebin applet so if you have a special service that you want to write a plugin you don’t have to wait for a KDE release (that’s what happened with the old dataengine), you will just write it using JavaScript/Python/Ruby/etc and upload to kde-apps.org . Neat! I hope that a lot of users will use this feature and that this dataengine will be specially useful for mobile devices.

To complete the cycle, yesterday I finished the port of the pastebin applet to use the new dataengine and I advice everyone out there that is using the “pastebin dataengine” (I really don’t think there is anybody, but….) to change your plasmoid to use the new one. People running trunk are already experiencing the new dataengine Ah, almost forgot: now it supports remote files because I use KIO for all the file operations. So just grab your samba/nfs/webdav files and share them using your favourite text/image service!

Playing with dataengines I started to hack on another topic: sharing of articles on Akregator. I started to feel too much dependent on Google’s infrastructure and decided to move some of my stuff “out of the cloud”. I started with Google Reader and put all my feeds on Akregator. Kudos for Google for allowing me to export my list of feeds and kudos to Akregator that imports the file. Everybody is happy and Google is not evil trying to hold my data.

The next step was the “share” feature of Google Reader that I like very very much. First, to read my friend’s shares I could just get the URL from their “details” on Google Reader and put the URL on Akregator. Kudos for Google again for using rss feeds into this “share feature”. It made my life easier and I could subscribe to my friend’s shared items.

The missing bit was my shares! How could I share with my friends articles that I wanted? I started playing with Plasma’s  Microblog dataengine and successfully started sharing articles using my microblog account on identi.ca. Thanks to identi.ca the shares also went to my twitter and could also go to facebook!!!!! When I shared an article it made a post with the title of the article plus the URL to access the article and the tag “#share”. People interested in reading my shares can subscribe to my dents or tweets or go to http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share or even subscribe to http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share/rss on their feed readers. Identi.ca did a great job here providing feeds for everything. I couldn’t find the feeds for my tags on tweeter but maybe it was just me lacking knowledge. By the way, thanks to Lydia for helping me to figure out this URLs. I couldn’t have done without her hehe

Update: to have feeds synced between my different computers I’m using automated scripts with unison. Every time I login and logout unison syncs the feeds with a server. So I just need to login on a different computer of mine and I have the same “status” for my feeds.

Right now I started to move all the code to a proper Akregator plugin and I hope that soon it’s finished and merged into trunk so everybody can enjoy this feature!

As I was playing with dataengines I decided to fix some bugs on the weather dataengine as one of my friends (Aloisio) just migrated to KDE and faced this annoying bugs related to network and retrieval of the weather. There were a lot of small issues here and there but at the end of the day (after a lot of hours hacking and not so much lines of code =/) I could fix the problems and some others that I found on the way.

Summary: 5 pastebin bugs/wishes closed + 3 bug fixes on weather that were not reported yet (I couldn’t find them at least).

Busy, busy, busy day!!

Next post: a little surprise that I received for joining the game

The Bug - watch out the way it looks to you!

To be honest I wasn’t expecting anything “technical” in the sense that I wasn’t expecting a technical explanation to the problem itself (you can find it in numerous places on the web) or for a possible solution, but I wanted to watch how Jobs would deal with with the situation.

Being honest again, he did what he does best! At first, he acknowledged the problem as it couldn’t be denied. Then he said that actually they did a favor to the smartphone’s industry because there were other phones with the same problem (showed pictures of other phones having the same issue – what doesn’t prove much, but…) but instead of “hiding” the antenna and hiding the problem, they actually put a big “X” on the problem (see picture below).

iPhone4 antenna

From my point of view it was just what we would call a “n00b” mistake . I mean, Apple is doing phones since not so many time ago. It’s their 4th device (iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone4 now), and they just didn’t face this problem before and had the brilliant idea. The problem may show up on other phones? Sure, but I’m sure that the other manufacturers know about the problem and try to “fix” it, being that hiding the antenna inside the case or whatever.

The next steps were just the table’s “turn over” (not sure if this expression exists in English, but it works pretty well in Portuguese ): some (small) numbers about the how many people were actually affected by the bug. It was less than 1 in a 100 users (a beautiful way of saying less than 1% hehe). They get these numbers from the people that actually complained at Apple Care about the issue so those out there that just reading Engadget and Gizmodo about the issue were not counted of course.

But besides the number being so small, Apple does care about it’s users. All of them. See the kind of words used here? This is the place to do the magic trick. This is the place where you say that you’re not evil or bad but you actually care. Just after stating that you human enough to make mistakes, you ensure your “human position” showing that you care about others. Genious! It’s a statement that just makes the others stronger .

In order to take care of those 1% Apple will give for free cases for the iPhones, what prevents the bug and users will even be able to choose colors! And if they do not want the case, then a refund is offered. In Brazil this would be something that they would need to do because of the law: if you sell something that doesn’t work, you need to refund. I’m not sure how this works out on US but anyway, he transformed the user’s “right” into a company’s “feature”. Points again for Apple and Jobs for playing nice with the words.

After that, it was just more slides about all the nice features of iPhone4, why you should have one and more and more statements that Apple loves it’s users (yes, the word love is used in all the slides).

Apple and Love

Summary: from the technical point of view it was just “we don’t have a way to fix this as this is a hardware problem and it’s a huge problem then.”. But saying so is the same as pushing the picture of our fellow bug in every user’s face.

Instead of doing that, they will solve the issue by giving the users a rubber case that costs less than 1 dollar and then create a link between the users and the company that is: “we are all humans. have you ever made a mistake? this is our first mistake. sorry. take this gift. ah, by the way we love you.”. This creates compassion (every human did something wrong once in his life) and then people stop bashing the company and it’s product. This “love history” also reinforces that they are humans, enabling them to screw things eventually. So with a few minutes, Jobs got our fellow and dressed him properly transforming The Bug in a Feature:

The feature - not so ugly anymore!

From my point of view, the truth is that Apple is a company with a product that costs you some money and just like any other company in any other industry, the products should be properly tested and should not have this kind of problems that are not solvable (what if they didn’t have the luck of the case solving the issue?). The good about open source products is that at least from the software side we can fix stuff as quick as possible. So please vendors: pay attention to the hardware you manufacture and leave them as open as possible to software that we want to put into that!