KDE Plasma 5.18.2 is here just one week after the first point release, and promises to improve support for Flatpak apps in the Discover package manager by fixing several bugs, improve support for the Plastik theme by patching two crashes in the KWin window and composit manager, as well as to make the KRunner Activities runner usable again.

Furthermore, this second point release updates the new Emoji panel to make it snappier, support all locales and languages, and allow filter by annotation. It also improves the shadows of files and folders shown on the desktop to display correctly when using a HiDPI scale factor.

Today’s post will essentially describe how quick and easy it is to work with localization for KDE software. My latest post might have sounded intimidating or people might have gotten tired from reading it in the middle, which is a shame; hence the reason for this post.

Oh, existing translators should also have a reason to read this post, as I’ll be showing brand new functionality in Lokalize too.

As a brief note, I’m currently using openSUSE Krypton with Plasma from master, meaning it’s as updated as possible. I’m also using the XWayland session, because it’s dope af. It doesn’t affect my workflow at all, either.

But well, let’s keep it short and begin.

Supported workflows for example include visiting a restaurant website where dropping them a call to ask for a table should be no more than two clicks away, or when surfing a trade show website, adding the dates to your calendar should be straightforward. If you want to read more about how the data gathering and processing in the background works, check out my previous blog post on the subject.

If you want to give it a try, install a recent kitinerary library (something along the lines of libkpimitinerary5), check out the itinerary branch of the plasma-browser-integration repository and follow the “How to install” instructions from source code on its wiki page. Once up and running, visit your favorite event, restaurant, and hotel sites and see if they have any structured data we can process! If you click “Inspect Element” in the popup’s context menu, the developer console will have some basic debugging information on the extractor.

• GNOME Shell + Mutter See Changes For Tracking Software Rendering, VNC To Toggle Animations

  GNOME Shell and Mutter saw a set of patches land today for GNOME 3.36 that have been around for a few months and deal with the tracking of software rendering and VNC usage where GNOME Shell should in turn disable animations to ease the rendering workload.

  The GNOME Settings Daemon has until now been responsible for controlling the animation heuristics when they should be disabled while now Mutter has added support for tracking software rendering situations and in turn GNOME Shell is relying upon that for determining when to disable desktop animations.

• How not to lose the alpha channel
  

  Working on color imagery for QiTissue recently, I realized we were accidentally losing the alpha channel in multiple places. For efficiency reasons, we keep colors in memory using the QRgb type, and convert that to/from QString for serialization purposes via QColor as needed. Here’s what I discovered about why that doesn’t work, and some ways I fixed it.

  Firstly, be aware there is no QRgba in the Qt API . There is only QRgb, for 8bit color channels. It can hold an alpha value too, despite the lack of a trailing a in the type name. Then there is QRgba64 which uses 16bit per color channel. For our purposes, 8bit per channel is sufficient. So where do we lose the alpha channel, when QRgb can store it in principle?

• Fosdem and Plasma Mobile Sprint

  From January 31st to February 8th I went on a little tour, first at the two days of Fosdem in Brussels, then to Berlin for a KDE sprint about Plasma Mobile.

  It was the first time i went to Fodem: it’s an awesome experience, even tough big and messy: which is the awesome of it… and the bad of it at the same time

  Even tough there were 800 talks I didn’t attend that many, some about the Elixir language, some about retrocomputing, some about iot stuff. At Fosdem the best thing to do there.. is meeting a lot of interesting people, rather than attending talks, which are very interesting never the less, which you can find videos here.

• Norbert Preining: Okular update for Debian

  The quest for a good tabbed pdf viewer lead me okular. While Gnome3 has gone they way of “keep it stupid keep it simple” to appeal to less versed users, KDE has gone the opposite direction and provides lots of bells and knobs to configure their application. Not surprisingly, I am tending more and more to KDE apps away from the redux stuff of Gnome apps.