Tag Archives: KDE

Vacations, netbooks and…anchors ?

Vacations are great (and probably nobody will disagree on that, right ? 😛 ). It’s a time when you can relax, think about your life, check your health (doctor, dentist, etc..), set new work goals, evaluate the old ones and also visit your family: I’m spending all the time at my girlfriend’s house and that’s awesome!

However this vacation is special because I can also work on KDE a little bit more than usual, giving GSoC students a little bit more of attention, bug fixing here and there, triaging bugs and working on our new baby project “Plasma for Netbooks”. Aaron already talked a little bit about this and we have been discussing this a lot through mailing list and IRC. Right now we have a pretty solid plan and some code in playground. Marco did a great job with one of the containments and already has a screenshot for that (come on Marco! I’ll let you have the pleasure on this one hehe).

Basically we’ll have a new desktop shell that is lighter than current’s plasma-desktop and we’ll provide two basic containments: newspaper layout and SAL (Search and Launch – I keep writing search and locate for some reason all the time =P). These two containments reflects the ideas that we have to solve some problems and to bring innovation. As soon as we have more code for that I’ll post details about this ideas (maybe Marco or Aaron will do that also :P). In the end I think we’ll end up with a very nice solution that will make users happier and also more productive while using their notebooks (besides the fact of being much more beautiful thanks to our artwork team hehe).

The last three days I spent time working on my paper for Akademy and I’ll post it as a serie of posts in this blog after it’s reviewed by some native english speakers :). This paper talks mainly about the research I did regarding “desktop-shell” solutions out there for netbooks. However no more spoiler here =P. Anyway if the paper get approved you can read it at Akademy and you can also check my talk about this subject and even see some real live demos. I hope vendors see all the potential around this and don’t make silly moves like this one. With all the features and bug fixing around 4.3 and 4.4 I really see a possibility of KDE coming to a larger audience in the next years…

Before Akademy I’ll attend FISL (unfortunately my paper was not approved) and meet old good friends there. Brazilian KDE community will be there with the Live Blue guys and the other brazilian guys that always have posts in planet KDE 😛 .

News from work (yes, I still read my e-mail while on vacations hehe): as Qt is in the public repository now we are able to release the code we have been working the last months: animated layouts and also anchor layouts! Animated layouts needs some fixing to reflect some new API on Qt but it’ll come just after anchors. Some co-workers should post about anchor layouts and as soon as they post I’ll tell you ;)…Qt is going to rock even more with all this new layout stuff! Please, don’t forget to check this presentation during Akademy to learn more !

I'm going!

Tokamak II

Bossa Conference 2009

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It’s coming! Finally! Every year before the conference I have this feeling of happiness mixed with a lot of expectation. This is the third edition of this conference and the other two was just awesome….

It was after the first one that we started working on the base of Canola2, after the second one we started working on QEdje and….what will be this year ? hehe…To be honest I already have some idea of what we are going to do but, I’ll just wait 😉

About this edition I can say that we’ll have people from even more open source communities, having the pleasure of receiving KDE people. Who comes to Bossa Conference will have the opportunity to watch talks about Qt Kinetic, declarative UI’s, Webkit, Plasma, Enlightenment (EFL), software security, HAL/PolicyKit, Python, wireless technologies, free software licenses, Openembedded, VoIP, Maemo…..ouch, a lot of topics 😉

Besides that we have hacking times with code camps, discussions inside the pool, parties, beach and a lot of food =) hehe…

Being honest: It’s just great! It worth it =). I hope I can meet some of you guys there (some I already know I’ll meet).

So after a year of conferences: aKademy, Maemo summit, linuxconf.au, Camp KDE, here comes Bossa Conference. Take a look in the video below to see what happened last year….

Bossa Conference 2008

If you want more information just visit the conference’s website or talk to me on IRC / email!

And just a month before this I’m going to Tokamak II (btw, thanks pinheiro 😉 )….how wonderful is life =P

See you 😉

Let the paste begin

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Now almost all my wishes to pastebin plasmoid have been accomplished: the possibility of configuring the plasmoid to post to your own pastebin server.

So, for those who have a pastebin inside company’s intranet or even prefer to use one of the subdomains that the pastebin servers provide, all you have to do is go to settings dialog from pastebin plasmoid and put right there, in the “Servers” section, the address of your server. I must say that it only supports servers that runs one of the 4 backends (pastebin.ca, pastebin.com, imagebin.ca and imageshack.us). If you would like more backends, please just send a patch or tell us in #plasma 😉

Next step is to give some UI love to it: some “title” label, so you know with server it’s using, a nice icon….

pastebin server section

Trolls, QEdje and Plasma

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Last weeks I was at Qt Software’s (formely known as Trolltech) office in Oslo working a little bit with those amazing guys. I would like to thank everybody there for everything 😛 . It was an awesome time!

Well, talking about Oslo it’s obvious to say that I had a lot of time during the flights to hack Plasma! It was very good because I could understand a little bit more about Plasma script engine’s API and could finally make the QEdje Script Engine work 100%. Hmm…ok, maybe it need some love during package install to avoid the install of invalid files, but I’m working on this right now, right Aaron ? 😉 (just commited this fix: revision 866487)

It’s really nice to have a way to easily select an edje file and it automagically(tm) becomes an applet that can be used as a gadget. Of course QEdje needs some more love in order to support some more features from the original Edje as gradients and some other stuff, but the current version supports the most common use cases. Hey, and don’t be shiny…just git clone qedje (instructions at http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/qedje) and contribute to the project too =D.

While finishing the script engine I found some problems with Qt’s proxy widget. After some discussions with Alexis (darktears), Aaron and Thiago I finally understood the problem and was able to fix the segmentation fault: first I applied Alexis’s patch on Qt (it’s inside qt-copy now) and then used valgrind to understand the next problem I had. With that I just followed Aaron’s tip about setting the proxy’s widget to 0 (zero) just before deleting it in the script’s destructor. Just worked \o/ =D.

So, after some test and review it just went to kdebase as our friend CIA-54 (aka bot) told us:

<CIA-54> asouza * r866456 workspace/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/ (6 files in 4 dirs):
<CIA-54> QEdje Script Engine arrives to kdebase
<CIA-54> Working version. Still needs improvements on package install to avoid
<CIA-54> install of invalid files.

Screenshot showing a lot of the kde logo edje animation on my desktop as well as canola’s deepblue theme (the player group) with it’s settings window (it has a preview so you can see what it’ll look like if you select that group).

my desktop

Next steps ? Wallpaper API !!!

Cheers!

Plasmoid with QEdje

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Akademy was really great! It was awesome to give faces to nicknames and to chat, have dinner, learn and talk with a lot of people…just awesome!

My first plasmoid is done, right now. It took some time to take care about details and I had to wait before we could publish the last QEdje’s version. Unfortunately, our server is going down for maintenance this weekend but you can get the snapshots in this post. After the servers go online on Monday, we’ll also put our git repository online (actually it’s already there).

It’s a simple plasmoid and it took more time to create the animation frames (using blender…) than to code the plasmoid. Thanks to ervin and darktears who helped me with little doubts 😉

Required downloads: QEdje 0.2 , QZion 0.2 , EET , KDE logo Edje File. I put the KDE logo here because it doesn’t fit well inside the svn. If you want to compile your own themes, you’ll need some tools from EFL. We are working on a solution for this but meanwhile you can use this hacked tarball: Edje Utils.

You can also find the release notes here and some QEdje examples here.

Just take a look at svn inside plasma’s playground and look for qedje inside applets folder. Now, some screenshots:

The first ones shows KDE logo animated in different positions and I wanted to show it working with a full transparent background in the third screenshot.

Next step: wallpaper plugins, here I come!

PS: you must take a look at the “dangeroo” joke. The best part of the joke is the listener’s faces (right ervin????) 🙂

PS2: for those asking for Zack’s photos during Bossa Conference 2008, sorry but a llama ate all the photos 😛

Update: instructions to use Edje Utils: http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/qedje/wiki/EdjeUtils

QEdje – Init()

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This is my first post that is aggregated by planet kde. My name is Artur (a.k.a. MoRpHeUz) and I work for Openbossa (open source stream of INdT– Brazil). We develop solutions for mobile platforms like the Nokia’s n8x0 devices and we are responsible for projects like Canola, Carman and Mamona. I would like to introduce the QEdje project, but to talk about QEdje I need first to explain Edje (from Enlightenment Foundation Libraries – EFL).

From Edje’s wiki: “Edje is a graphical design and layout library based on Evas (the canvas used by EFL) that provides an abstraction layer between the application code and the interface, while allowing extremely flexible dynamic layouts and animations”. Let me detail a little bit more: with Edje you can create dynamic and animated user interfaces easily and can make designer’s dreams really true (without “hurting” developers), with much less code than other approaches.

This way programmers doesn’t need to become designers (what usually results in bad usability or even bad interfaces) and designers doesn’t need to become programmers (that results in not so good technical approaches or even bad code) 😉 . The fact is that Edje puts the control of the usability and beauty in the hands of designers and artists, separating (until some level) the application and the UI logic. It’s important to say that it’s different from other styling systems since you can change even the behavior of the widgets on the screen, not just it’s look.

The image below show more about the Edje work flow. Where it says “designer” you can read developer too. If you work like this, you can have designers creating the interfaces and developers translating them to Edje Script Language or even an automatic tool (sometime ago we developed a python script for GIMP which takes a photoshop file and creates the edje file – without the animations, off course).

Edje Workflow

Using EFL we created animated and themed applications for mobile devices, bringing beauty to the end user. The end user just love fancy stuff on their mobile devices, we have iPhone phenomenon to show that for us.

Canola's Main Theme Crystal's Theme
Canola's Black Theme

You may be asking yourself: “but how does this affect the desktop and does this have anything to do with KDE/Qt world ?”. Let’s go to the answers…

We always wanted to use Qt and now we have the chance! Our first need was something like Edje, that just changed our lifes regarding rich ui applications development. The first move was to create a port of Edje, and then QEdje was born. So at this point QEdje is a port of Edje, leaving the EFL world and coming to Qt world. We still have some work to do (features, bugs, …) but it’s already working in a nice way. In the future we plan to create some new features that the original Edje doesn’t have right now, but may be included too.

If you take a look at e17 (enlightenment window manager) you’ll see that it has a lot of cool stuff. The first thought was that Plasma could benefit somehow from it (and it looks like that Aaron thought the same – let’s see if we have something in this area after Akademy 😉 ). This way Plasma, for example, can easily use QEdje to have fancy plasmoids and other applications can have rich UI looks (anybody thinking about image viewers, multimedia players, educational games, etc .. ? 🙂 ). We’ll also make this easier by providing support for embedding QWidgets inside you Edje interface, so you can benefit from the huge widget’s library provided by Qt.

So, if your are going to Akademy and is interested, please watch our presentation. We’ll give more details, explanations, future plans, etc..etc..etc.. . And if you are not going to Akademy, please contact us at #qedje@freenode.net and take a look at the project’s website: http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/qedje . If you wish, contact me by email also.

That’s all for now, hope to have more news and demos soon! 🙂