Category Archives: BlaBla

CampKDE, return

I’m writing the first part of the first entry in Newark airport waiting for the connection (bloody networkmanager, why don’t you want to connect to the free access point?). This night didn’t went to sleep at all, some of us kept watching silly movies until 3am (then farewells and seeya next time, with the usual sweet/bitter taste), when I left for the airport.

First flight pretty tiring and the second one even more massive (long flights and carbon footprint ftw!)

Now that i get home there will still be a list of work that i really hope i will be able to do in time, some last minute refinements and bugfixes of the last minute before the 4.4 release, both in code and assuring all the artwork in plasma is up to the job, so hectic days ahead, yay!

CampKDE, day last

CampKDE is coming to an end, I’m writing this during the last tutorial session, Qt embedded is a quite different beast compared to what we’re used to, but cool stuff indeed

Those days have been pretty intense, many talks and tutorials, too much rain, too much beer, lots of “healthy” american food… so in the end, all good stuff, (except of course for the rain, since i was expecting the sunny California a little bit more well… sunny :p)

Seen several old friends, met some new dudes, too bad i’m about to leave (a plane in the eeearly morning is so much fun :p)

I never really manage to do much hacking on those meetings (much more code done in sprints) but many neat ideas come up for the future, by talking with great skilled people and some whiteboard sessions 😀

Anyways I managed to hack something, a new little block in the Plasma animation framework, (a class to do smooth pixmap based transitions) that will hopefully let us get totally rid of the old animator code and complete the migration by KDE 4.5

campkde, day 2-3

When I’m at KDE events usually I don’t really find time to write that much, by the way, this week I’m in San Diego at CampKDE, we’re now at day 3, the third day of talks, today the lighting talks, together with tutorials and BOFs. All the talks were really interesting, I also gave a talk on the netbook stuff, you can find slides here 🙂 It was probably one of the first important KDE talks i gave and gone pretty well (since all the english still don’t belong to me :p)

I basically talked about what netbooks are now, what they should be and why the situation right now isn’t so happy. This driven us to do something about that, so i described what the principles behind the Plasma Netbook project are and what its components are (i.e. why the shell it’s done the wqy is done, why the Search And Launch and why the at first strange concept of the newspaper thinghie) maybe one of this days i’ll write a longer synopsys of the talk or hmm maybe not 🙂

Then, later in the night, watching all night Chani and Troy attempting to sing Eagles and Sinatra was, hmm, how we could say it… “fascinating” :p

Kdenlive

For the last screencasts I had to do, I needed some tool were it’s easy to cut little pieces of various short movie files and that could have let me to assemble them togeher, maybe with some simple not too heavy transition effects.

I have tried some apps that promised that, but in the past i never had much luck. Cinelerra and Blender uis are simply painful, kino is just linear, pitivi doesn’t have any transition effect, lives insists to convert each movie frame in a separate png…

Now Kdenlive… in the past i never had much luck with that either, it was way too crashy to actually be able to get some work done with it… but some days ago I tried to compile Kdenlive from subversion…

And oh boy, everything is sooo right. I could do all the work in really short time, not a single crash, seeking frame by frame is really fast and using it is really easy.

Kdenlive is the exact balance between an easy to use app and one powerful enough (the interface could look a bit busy at a first glance, but is really simple and trivial compared to tools like Premiere, Vegas or Final cut)

I think it’s an application that really shows what the KDE development platform can do, because is something that is really unmatched in the Linux desktop, if you think the current version is still unstable and a bit impractical give a shoot at the next one as soon as will be out, it will shine!

Since it seems nowdays I can’t finish an entry without a screencast, here it is s quick and dirty “making of” of the Plasma multitouch video, well not actually that one, but shows how fast is possible to create a simple montage.

OGG version

Kubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10

So today Kubuntu 9.10 was released. I wish to the whole team my congratulations for the release 😀

I want to sped two words about a new additin in the Ubuntu fleet: Kubuntu Netbook Remix. This particular version of Kubuntu ships (and uses as the default user interface) an early preview of what will be the Plasma Netbook project.

We (as both upstream KDE people and Kubuntu people) wanted to quickly put something out of the door, to give people an easy way to test it, and make it a bit more known before the final release, and requiring people to run trunk is not really reasonable, while a livecd poses a way lower entry barrier.

While you are testing it, please keep in mind is software in a really early stage of development.Kubuntu Karmic Koala of course uses KDE 4.3, because it’s what is out at the moment :). Since some months ago the Netbook project uses some important new features that will be in the Plasma library for KDE 4.4, so the version shipped in Kubuntu is a snapshot a bit older that what is in svn now (plus some backports of more recent fixes), that’s why it looks pretty different to the last screencasts i did.

So keep in mind that the “real deal” on Kubuntu will come just with 10.04 (or as soon as KDE 4.4 packages will be released), but I’m confident that what is shipped now is something already quite fun to use, and gives an idea how it will be, so try it, have fun 🙂

Netbook: what are you?

Some time ago Michael Dell said that netbooks delivers a really poor user experience. Now it’s pretty easy to infer that this is because netbooks sales are starting to erode the higher margins desktop and notebook markets, putting the manifacturers in a really difficult situation: one of the most successful type of device of all timesis killing the most expensive ones.

In the end Michael Dell is even right: as a general purpose pc they deliver a pretty poor user experience for both performance and screen real-estate, but this infortunate situation is in a great extent fault of hardware manifactures.

The first netbook attempt, the old EeePC 701 was pretty much a device on its own: it had an ad hoc user interface and it was clear that it served just a limited set of use cases, casual web browsing, audio/video consumption and things like that. Not entirely different from smartphones use case, but for situations when you can carry around a slightly bigger and more convenient to use device.

Then, seeing the fantastic amount of sales of those thinghies the hardware manifacturers figured out that if they put Windows XP and bigger hard drives on them they would have sold even better and this was totally true, to the point that people only want to buy netbooks instead of regular machines, rather than using them as a secondary companion device (bad economy, the easiest way to still get XP rather the much hated Vista, pick the reason you want).

This has taken away every bit of innovation those devices had, like a different operating syste, solid state drives and software specifically designed for those screen constraints: let’s just throw office on it, it will work perfectly no?

This situation is bad for users that are buying an hammer when they need a screwdriver and bad for vendors that are seeing their profits taken away.

I hope this will be taken as a lesson and manifacturers will learn to fear less to be innovative, rather than taking the path of least resilience. I’m hopeful that devices like the arm based ones, maybe with extensive use of the touch screen will make netbooks that really distincht and innovative class of devices that they deserve to be, rather than just slightly dumber laptops.

New job

A new quite interesting chapter of my life is started since quite some time, I didn’t want to say too much about it until everything was settled down and up to speed. But now i guess the time has come, let me introduce my new employer, a pretty familiar and constant presence in the KDE development:

Thanks to the generous support of those people, these days known as Qt Development Frameworks (and the mother company Nokia of course), I’ll be sponsored to work full time on KDE, in particular on the Plasma libraries and shells, especially the Plasma netbook project, that is taking up shape quite nicely. Plus there will be another quite cool Qt-related project

I will remain based here in Italy, but especially starting from next year perhaps it would be more probable to see me wandering around conferences around the world, we’ll see 🙂

What i can say: Qt Development Frameworks (or: our little old dear trolls) rocks!

New hosting

Today I’ve moved the site hosting to a new provider. It should be way better than the old uber-cheap one. Transition gone pretty well, but the site has been kinda broken for some hours, now all should be back normal again.

I hope to not have lost comments during the DNS transition time.

Looking back at Tokamak 3

I’m starting this entry on the train on the way home from Tokamak (and finishing it at home). Looking back it was probably the best KDE event I ever been. I’m already missing each one on every person that was there.
>Fisrt of all I want to thank Mario Fux forhosting the event. It was a really big job for him and everything was gone perfectly smootly.
The place was of breathtaking beauty, I didn’t brought a camera myself but you can see from other blog entries on planetkde photos of this beautiful place. Last day we gone at the bottom of the Motterhorn mountain with the cablecar. This mountain is beautiful because it’s an huge block of rock of the exact shape you would expect from a mountain, really makes you remember how tiny human being are on this planet (yeah, sounds clich

Say something Tokamak

Didn’t really find much time to blog at tokamak. Anyways, what I’ve been doing?

The netbook shell has found a new home in kdebase, so now if you build trunk it will be here and will definitely be here for the release of KDE 4.4. This is realy important because it makes easier for people to try it right now without having to compile components from playground. Another important reason for the move is the reuse of the existing coomponents, in particular the new widgets explorer that has been merged from the Gsoc project of Ana, that makes the experience of both plasma-desktop and plasma-netbook much more pleasant. Not much to add right now but stay tuned for a screencast in the next few days.

The KnotificationItem library, that is the client of the new systemtray specification has been merged in the KDEUI module. This means is no more experimental and all applications can start to use it without fears of binary incompatibilities. At this point the start of a Freedesktop standardization seems much more realistic.

Ad oh well, we are all been busy in refactoring and moving aroundstuff, so while there could be some instabilities in trunk right now, the plasma library will become much more clean and robust in the future.

Anyways, many props goes to Rob and Ana that have gone trough the endeavour of merging their pretty big Gsoc projects, this did mean work and work and work, but i’m speechless about the quality of the projects. Ana’s widget explorer makes plasmamuch more usable and pleasant to use, Rob’s remore widgets are well, revolutionary, can’t find other words, but i’m not gonna to explain them here, they can do a much better job.

Mart

Tale of a little pixel