• KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 75

  Week 75 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here! It’s a little lighter than usual because we’re all feverishly preparing for the dual Plasma and Usability & Productivity sprints nest week in Valencia, Spain. I’ll be there, as well as the whole Plasma team, a bunch of VDG people, and a number of folks who have stepped up to work on apps for the U&P initiative. Sprints like these promise the kind of face-to-face contact needed for big projects, and should be a fantastically awesome and productive time! I’d like to offer a special thanks to Slimbook (makers of the KDE Slimbook II laptop) for hosting the sprint!

• KDE Frameworks 5.60 Bringing More Baloo Optimizations

  Making KDE's Baloo file indexing/searching framework really efficient appears to be a never-ending task. Baloo is already much less bloated recently than it's been hungry for resources in the past and with KDE Frameworks 5.60 will be slightly more fit.

  Baloo's indexing process with KDE Frameworks 5.60 will now pay attention to when extended attributes on folders change, no longer does unnecessary work when a folder is renamed, is faster now at un-indexing files, and is less intensive running on laptops with battery power. All of these Baloo improvements will be in the next KDE Frameworks monthly update.

• International number formats

  KMyMoney as a financial application deals with numbers a lot. As a KDE application, it supports internationalization (or i18n for short) from the very beginning. For accuracy reasons it has internal checks to verify the numbers a user can enter.

  The validation routine has a long history (I think it goes back to the KDE3 days) and we recently streamlined it a bit as part of the journey to use more and more Qt standard widgets instead of our own.

  This led to the replacement of the KMyMoneyEdit widget with the newer AmountEdit widget. Everything worked great for me (using a German locale) until we received notifications that users could only enter integer numbers but no fractional part. This of course is not what we wanted. But why is that?

  The important piece of information was that the user reporting the issue uses the Finland svenska (sv_FI) locale on his system. So I set my development system to use that locale for numbers and currencies and it failed for me as well. So it was pretty clear that the validation logic had a flaw.

  Checking the AmountValidator object which is an extension of the QDoubleValidator I found out that it did not work as expected with the said locale. So it was time to setup some testcases for the validator to see how it performs with other locales. I still saw it failing which made me curious so I dug into the Qt source code one more time, specifically the QDoubleValidator. Well, it looked that most of the logic we added in former times is superfluous meanwhile with the Qt5 version. But there remains a little difference: the QDoubleValidator works on the symbols of the LC_NUMERIC category of a locale where we want to use it the LC_MONETARY version. So what to do? Simply ignore the fact? This could bite us later.

• The state of Terminal Emulators in Linux

  Now it has more developers and more code flowing, fixing bugs, improving the interface, increasing the number of lines of code flowing thru the codebase. We don’t plan to stop supporting konsole, and it will not depend on a single developer anymore.

  We want konsole to be the swiss army knife of terminal emulators, you can already do with konsole a lot of things that are impossible in other terminals, but we want more. And we need more developers for that.

  Konsole is, together with VTE, the most used terminal out there in numbers of applications that integrate the technology: Dolphin, Kate, KDevelop, Yakuake, and many other applications also use konsole, so fixing a bug in one place we are helping a lot of other applications too.

  Consider joining a project, Consider sending code.

As the battle of the NLEs continues between the big four (Premiere Pro, FCPX, Avid, and DaVinci Resolve), there are a few underdogs that aim to conquer the market. One of them is Kdenlive.

It’s important to mention that this NLE is not new. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002 and is now maintained by a small team of developers. Being an open source project constitutes as a significant advantage since it’s backed up by a massive community of contributors that have the privilege of improving and making the software to be more sharpened from an R&D point of view.

• Jonathan Riddell: KDE.org Description Update

  The KDE Applications website was a minimal possible change to move it from an unmaintained and incomplete site to a self-maintaining and complete site. It’s been fun to see it get picked up in places like Ubuntu Weekly News, Late Night Linux and chatting to people in real life they have seen it get an update. So clearly it’s important to keep our websites maintained. Alas the social and technical barriers are too high in KDE. My current hope is that the Promo team will take over the kde-www stuff giving it communication channels and transparancy that doesn’t currently exist. There is plenty more work to be done on kde.org/applications website to make it useful, do give me a ping if you want to help out.

• Done with boost

  One of the so called pillar of the c++ world, boost, sucks a lot when it comes to documentation, I wouldn’t have to write more than one blog post if they had their documentation in place. It has been almost a month that I have started working on the Magnetic Lasso and I wasted most of the time fighting with boost instead of working on my algorithm. Okay, fine I am getting paid for it, I shouldn’t complain.

• Meet KDE in València

  During the next days, we’ll be having several sprints in València.

KDE neon 5.16 is out featuring Plasma 5.16. Download the ISO now or upgrade your installs.

With Diversity in mind this edition features an Ice Cold themed wallpaper to make those in the southern hemisphere feel included.