If I had to sum up in one word what I have done this year in KDE I’d say BlueDevil. In the first entry from 2011 I’m asking for help on testing the 1.0.2 version, now 12 month later we are ready to release 1.3 which fixes “all known bugs” and we are preparing ourselves for 1.4 and 2.0.

Let’s take a look month by month on what happened in this blog:

• January: we ask for help on testing 1.0.2, we’ve fixed SSP pairing which is a super important Bluetooth feature.
• February: Aleix and I release first snapshot of Kamoso 2.0 which uses QtGstreamer and is demonstrated to be rock solid. By the end of the month we release BlueDevil 1.0.2.
• March: BlueDevil 1.0.3 is released improving stability.
• April: BlueDevil 1.0.4 is released and a lot BlueDevil 1.1 features are presented to the community.
• June: Aleix and I release Kamoso 2.0, currently it only has 1 reported bug we can’t reproduce. Also I’m part of Platform 11 which for me was an turning point, since then I really feel part of the KDE community.
• July: I explain my priorities for the next 6 months, I consider that I’ve done 5/6 which is not a bad rate. I spent one weekend fixing a few bothering bugs. A few days after I sat down and decided to fix the current XRandR code before I start to write the new one, patches are included in 4.7.1. BlueDevil 1.0.5 and 1.1.1  are released. I finish the firsts improvement of BlueDevil 1.2 [1] [2] and made a video of nepomuk awesomness.
• August: Apart from attending Berlin Desktop Summit, BlueDevil 1.2 RC1 is released.
• September: New plans for BlueDevil are done while I continue to work on it.  Another weekend fixing annoying bugs in kuiserver and KDirWatch. Forge 2011 take place,
• October: The month started while Forge was taking place, we continue with usability changes, and though I didn’t mentioned it in my blog I manage to understand a lot better libsolid as well of fixing few bugs here and there. Finally BlueDevil 1.1.2 and 1.2.1 are released.
• November: I attended to UDS (damn I have to blog about this) and found little time to release BlueDevil 1.0.6, 1.1.3, 1.2.2 and 1.3-rc1. During this month I confirmed that I was moving back from Madrid to Barcelona.
• December: Even though I haven’t blog that much I have been working on XRandR and more recently in some Calligra bits I will explain in a future post.

I’d say this year has been quite intense in the KDE front, I have done less than I wanted (which is normal) but more than I expected so I’m happy with the result. Also it is worth to mention that I’m now “Solid Overlord” though I haven’t done much yet I know for sure that 2012 will be the year to amend that.

Happy new year 2012 which for sure, Is going to be a good year for KDE as it was 2011

I have been moving from Madrid to BCN, cities which are around 650km away and that is keeping me busy because I can’t neglect work time for doing it and even if I could the process put pressure into your head so you spend more time procrastinating than before. Nevertheless the moving is almost complete and I’m going to be using more and more time in KDE.

In what I’m going to use my KDE time:

BlueDevil:

• Finish 1.3 release
• Bug triage, fix’em all
• Fix a known bug in Wizard

When I started the bug triage process, I realize that we had too much crashes so I decided to sit down and fix’em all, well I think I did and because of that we’re releasing new versions for each branch including a new one (1.3) which is the only one that includes a huge change in the KDE Daemon that fixes a bunch of crashes.

Fixed in 1.0:

• 270064: Crash in bluedevil-wizard while broswing a device in dolpin
• 280908: Crash in bluetooth input helper
• 282280: Crash upon removing bluetooth device
• 269814: kde service krashed on blueman-manager start
• 271427: bluedevil crash renaming a disapeared device
• 277992: Removed mouse from device list in KCM while using the connection wizard crashed the KCM
• 273144: Crash after recieve a file
• 274772: Cancelling transfer from mobile phone results in technical error message
• Fixed pairing when the PIN is asked from outside (this happened only some times)

Relevant posts about BlueDevil 1.2 (with videos and pictures  :p):

• BlueDevil 1.2 RC1 released (changelog here)
• Support for DUN and PANU (use device as modem)
• kio_bluetooth improved

• Network Management
• Power Management
• Places View

The day has been a little weird since sadly some metalworkers were not able to make it :/ but we had to start so, this being a “Ervin driven sprint” we started creating a kanban.

That took us a few hours, good thing is that now all we have in front of us is hacking, thats it!! 3 days of non-stop hacking

At dinner time our usability messiah arrived, showing us the light in how to do an “user centred development” model, I will blog about it if nobody else does :p

I’m arriving at the office so the rest of the blog entry will have to wait until later.

Happy Hacking !!

Ps: Donations of high quality Sticky notes are welcomed :p

Yesterday I pushed a couple of fixes that fix annoying bugs and because of that I belive that you may want to backport them to 4.6.5 or even to 4.7.1 if you don’t want or you can’t wait until 4.7.2.

Folder contents are not refreshing:

This happens only when using a kernel with two digits uname such 3.0-ARCH for example, commit to backport is:  kdelibs 7df5a79fb9f09e4a4a80cd541cc478b5fa6df00f

Empty jobs:

Some times jobs are shown empty though the job itself is working fine, this happen in a random situation depending on the system load etc, it was no easily reproducible but thanks to my slow and lovely computer I could then I fix it.

commits to backport are two in kde-runtime: 329a4fe6fe7b8a9262d5ef7fefba255e9c29fade and d769c74a5cab576e124666174a0b2bc5e2af8cde

These two fixes will be released with 4.7.2.

Cheers!

These last tree weeks have been crazy, apart from being busy sorting things out where I work, I have been doing an strict diet + sport to see if I can get rid of my extra weight, so far I’m not less Alex than I was tree weeks ago, exactly 10Kg less (22 pounds says google…). Well stop of talking about myself, let’s talk about BlueDevil!

BlueDevil 1.2:
Probably tomorrow we will be releasing the 1.2 version, since we released RC1/2 we have good good feedback, no new bugs seems to be reported so we think that we’re good to go.

BlueDevil 1.3:
This version was not in the plan, but after starting to work in the 2.0 version we found something we think that have to be “backported” to the 1.X branch. Basically more than a year ago when we started to work in the new stack, we found ourselves in a situation where the use of a thread  seemed correct and needed, so we use it. Now after a year 100% of the crash reports we get apparently came from that thread and so far we have not been able to find a solution since the crash is kinda random… I can’t reproduce it so I can’t fix it basically. Well the good news are that we found a way of removing that thread so in theory after this change we will be virtually crash free, yay!

So, to summarize: The 1.3 version will have only one change, which is the removal of the “AgentListener” thread in the BlueDevilDaemon (kded).

BlueDevil 2.0:
This is the next big version of BlueDevil, don’t worry we won’t be breaking anything Currently we’re using obex-data-server for a few things such receiving files, the problem is that it is almost un-maintained for example this bug which is quite critical for kio_oebxftp has not been touched though I pinged the author via bugtrack and email. But not worry, the BlueZ community has been working in a replacement for months or even years it is called obexd. We are already using obexd for sending files and so far it is working great so the idea is to port everythiing that uses obex-data-server to obexd.

There is one problem though, obexd is not done by desktop in mind so we will have to do some patching there in order to add the needed settings we need.

Dates, dates, dates, everybody love dates…  this is the non-strict non-hard schedule:

1.2: Tomorrow
1.3: Next Friday
2.0: By the end of the month

I will be focusing myself in BlueDevil the entire month, the sooner we finish these changes the sooner we can work in other stuff, personally I will work in KRandR.

Cheers!

Changelog:

Action Plugins

• Added support for DUN
• Added support for PANU
• A few description changed
• Fixed the Category mess we had in the .desktop

kio_bluetooth

• Show known devices first
• Perform discovery in the background
• Fixed the mimetype mess we had
• Will work when started without Bluetooth activated

Wizard

• Added another OUI for Apple Wireless Mice
• Auto select Mouse’s

Agent

• Be able to use Return or Enter to introduce PIN

Monolithic

• Use Configure icon on the configure option

KCM

• Use KMessageWidget if compiled against 4.7

According to Apple a smart folder is:

With Smart Folders, you can organize files by what they have in common, instead of by their location on your disk. Because they use Spotlight, Smart Folders can organize files by their contents, as well by attributes that describe those contents and how they were created. For example, you can create one Smart Folder with all your spreadsheets, another with the documents you modified today, and another with the presentations that mention a specific project.

Well, you know what? we already have this and we’ve had this for a few releases, let me show you proof:

Direct Link

And as an extra:

Direct Link

So as you can see we’re only lacking a few GUI pieces to complete the puzzle, any takers? would be awesome to have this for 4.8 don’t you think?

Cheers!

So, the easteregg was a small Network icon showing up in Dolphin at 03:02 which in BlueDevil 1.2 will allow you to launch the DUN or PANU configuration.

While I’m writing this post, only DUN support is implemented since I don’t have a device that support PANU, but don’t worry as I say in the following video support for PANU will be implemented in a few days, it is just a couple string replaces.

Mandatory video:

Direct Link

Hope you like it, and see you in the next blog post!

The feature I’m going to introduce may sound kinda useless for some people, but in all KDE software we offer different ways of doing things, so you can find which way integates better with your workflow.

In BlueDevil 1.0 and 1.1 when you use the kio_bluetooth (bluetooh:// in your browser), what it did was start a bluetooth discovery, meaning that the only devices going to appear into the file browser were those who had the visible mode activated. This behavior is totally counterproductive since you have to: wait 10 seconds until the scan ends and/or turn on the visibility in your device. Well you won’t have to do this anymore.

Now the first thing that is shown in kio_bluetooth are the configured devices allowing you to quickly select one device, at the same time a discovery is perform in the background so new devices will appear when found (and not when the 10seconds scan ends).

A picture say more than thousand words:

And now the mandatory video, watch it careful! I’ve put an Easter egg on it which shows about what I’m going to talk tomorrow.

Direct Link

Cya and remember, this feature is going to be available in BlueDevil 1.2, to be released in 4/6 weeks.

BlueDevil 1.0.5:

• Fixed bug: 277451
• Fixed some bahaviors in kio_obexftp while copying files
• Show the file size and the speed in the file transfer (in kio)
• Start/Quit bluedevil-monolithic in online/offline mode
• Improved layout to look good in all Qt Styles
• Huge i18n improvements (fix’s and more translations)

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=stable/bluedevil/1.1.1/src/bluedevil-1.1.1.tar.bz2

Enjoy!

After a few days of working, I’m pleased to announce that for KDE-Workspace 4.7.1 the “Screen/Display/Whatever configuration” has been hugely improve, all bug fix though but now it even seems to work!

The bugs I’ve fixed are hard to explain with words but I’m going to try anyway:

KRandRTray:

• Won’t react on external changes (won’t force its configuration)
• Will update the menu (If you remove the VGA cable, VGA won’t appear)
• Will show disconnected outputs as disconnected in the popup)

• “Unify Output” option has been added (aka you will get always the expected behavior)
• Preview/Options will update on external changes

Direct Link

Though the reasons why I was unmotivated (or how I like to call it, kde-depressed) are still there, last Friday after finishing 3 important projects at work I felt again the adrenalin boost that makes me hack like crazy, no matter on what, but I have to hack on something. This is how one of my most productive weekends begun :p

The very same Friday at night I started hacking on some work stuff, nothing I can say here (because it doesn’t matter at all) but I can assure you that my partners will be happy once they know :p

Saturday, I started to hack on KDE stuff and decided that instead of developing BlueDevil or Solid I was going to fix these small details that annoy me every day, and so far I fixed everything I wanted to fix:

Plasma:

Panel auto-expand on XRandR events (probably will go into 4.7)

KWin:

Not let any window off screen on XRandR events (This will have to wait until 4.7.1)

After fixing these two bugs was time to give some love to the old BlueDevil :p

BlueDevil:

• Bug triage, quite a trivial task but time consuming
• Fixed bug 277878
• Fixed bug 277451
• Partial rewrite of kio_bluetooth (I will explain further in another post)
• Fixed bug 245538
• Fixed bug 253810
• Fixed bug 277665
• Show only “connection title” in systray if there are more than one service to connect to

That’s for Saturday :p

Then today, Sunday I started the journey with some XRandR hacking, the plan to’em all is almost done and it will include a coulpe of fixes for 4.7.1 (though I’m not sure of it).

Aaand finally another bug fix of these small annoying things:

Fix notification behavior

Now time to rest, who knows if tomorrow I will continue with this adrenaline boost.

Cheers!

Once again it is time for me to organize my priorities within KDE for the next 6 months, I have had to drop a few things from the list since I’m not sure how much time Solid community and KDE-España are going to take from me since the work I will be doing there is rather not technical.

So, this is my list of priorities:

Downstream:

Downstream people are those who use our stuff to produce something else, for example: distributions, developers using our libraries, designers using our icons…
A few months ago, motivated with the need of giving a better support of how BlueDevil should be packaged I started to interact a lot with people working on different distributions. Because of that I was sponsored to go to the UDS and there I finally could understand more or less how a distribution works, how Kubuntu team works/thinks etc.

So, in the next 6 months I will continue working with “downstream” focusing my efforts in organize a meeting with people from all distributions so at least we can be synchronized in the lowest common denominator.

Solid:

Solid is now the sub-community within KDE that cares about hardware. We work in quite a few areas right now like Network/Power Management, irda …
I have to say that since last November we’ve pretty much catch up with other workspaces for example now people assume that KDE NetworkManager interface should work, and you know what? it does! Also our UDisk/UPower/UDev support is in my humble opinion excelkenet.

So, in the next 6 months, I want to see the Solid community growing and getting more projects into it, for example Printing or Input would be perfect candidates.

Kamoso:

Kamoso is a webcam application to take pictures and videos from cameras, this is what I call my “Pet Project”. The status of Kamoso is quite good right now, we’ve reach the 2.0 version which is demonstrating to be a really rock solid release.

Now that he project is providing the basics (it is stable and you can take pictures/videos) is time for us to move to the next step. which can be summarize in one word: effects. To get there we’ve defined this abstracted roadmap:

• Kamoso 2.5: Kamoso ported to use camerabin2 (technicall stuff)
• Kamoso 3.0: Effects and maybe some QML magic

BlueDevil:

BlueDevil is the codename of the KDE’s Bluetooth integration on which we’ve been working for a year now. Though the project may seem complete since it is fulfilling all the Bluetooth needs a normal user could have it is not perfect, or putting it in another word it is not excellent. So the target for the next 6 month will be reaching excellence.

• 1.0.5: i18n will be improved and a few bugs fixed.
• 1.1.1: i18n will be hugely improve, and bug fixing.
• 1.2: Most changes will be on the KIO’s, also the wizard will be further improved.
• 1.3: Port the project totally to obexd, deprecating the support for obex-data-server.

Finally, between this versions we may work on plasma-active support, which basically means write QML interfaces around.

Project Silk:

From my humble point of view, the laptop/pc is becoming a complement of two things: Our gadgets (cell phones, tablets..) and the so called “Cloud”. It is quite obvious that a computer without internet is only useful for those whom want to do some work on it, but for the rest of the users it would be useless. Because of that we’ve to accept our new role as a complement of something else and stop thinking that we’re the central piece of software or that even the user care about us.

KDE’s projects are doing quite a fine job integrating with the cloud, for example:

• Akonadi supports exchange servers and of course Google
• KDE-Telepathy is near the corner bringing to the table IM integration
• Kipi-Plugins supporting facebook/picasa/…
• Kamoso supporting youtube
• Choqok and Plasma on microblogging…

Despite all that, we’re still failing on truly integrating these services into the desktop. To start fixing it here comes my proposal:

We need  a central place (maybe a KCM) where the user can configure her/his online accounts and we will do the rest, for example:

When I add my Google account, the KCM should offer me to auto-configure my account in: Telepathy (Chat), Akonadi (synchronize calendar, contact, rss, todo’s…), Choqok (microblogging)… Also some applications like Kamoso should be able to access to that account and use it for example to upload videos to Youtube.

Also, some good integration with Rekonq would be awesome.

I don’t have concrete plans of when or how I will do this but almost sure it will start just as a proof of concept (I don’t have time to do more).

XRandR:

Last but not least here comes my new obsession: fix the overall kde-workspace XRandR support. Right now our workspace supports XRandR more or less well but it is far from being good enough for me. I will publish an entire blogspot about my plans here but bottom line: I will try to fix everything for 4.8.

Well this is it, let’s see how much I can finally accomplish and see you by the end of the year.

Hardware:

• Bluetooth: We’ve been working hard in the last release of BlueDevil (1.1), now we can say that more or less KDE has a good Bluetooth support !
  
• Webcam: Kamoso 2.0 has been released, and with it rock solid support to do the basics such Take a picture, or Record a video.
• XRandR: The job has been started, I’ve in a private repository a fork of xrandrtray libraries, and the “configuration” has been decoupled from the actual XRandR code. More important I have a plan for it now.
• LibSolid Async: Nothing on this area, -10 for me
• Kevin Ottens former maintainer and overlord of Solid is transferring to me the responsibility, challenge accepted!

Zeroconf and Friends:

• Samba has been fixed by rbelem (Rodrigo Belem), there is no place for me there :p
• NFS support has been removed (by rbelem too), it has no place between modern user-land protocols.
• UPnP: The work on UPnP is about to be merged, I haven’t touch a line though I’ve read a lot about it.
• Avahi: KDE Already has a good support for Avahi, though we’ve to improve how we present it to the user. No plans here and I won’t be working on it anytime soon.

Documentation:

• Almost nothing… Though I’m still willing to work on it starting by analyzing the current situation.

I have to say that I’m quite proud of myself though I haven’t accomplish everything I wanted since right now my priority is my “real life” job.

Anyway, next post is going to be about what I’m going to do for the next 6 months… stay tuned!

I’m going to talk about how important these events are beyond the technical expects and what I’m going to say applies to my experience in this sprint.

• You can “Put faces” to people, you’re no longer talking to “dfaure” or “apachelloger” or… you’re talking to a person, you know how they’re and more or less how they think, and that makes the communication much more efficient.
• Brotherhood is enhanced, after don’t let anyone sleep because there are 3 people in a “snoring championship” you get some confidence with the group :p this improve the way we work.
• Knowledge is transfered: Do you know the reason why KToolInvocation is using KLaunch to execute apps and at the same time KLaunch is using kdeinit ? I didn’t know before a dinosaur told me the reason :p
• Unify positions: During this sprint I’ve seen people saying NO! to something end up by saying yes, the amount of things that can be discussed in person are way bigger than via email or irc.
• Fast integration feel for newcomers: People that have been contributing into KDE for month’s or even years started the sprint saying: You have to… When you… and end up saying: We have to… When we…

So, to sump up:

Sprints are NOT only about core, are also about People and because of that, they’re extremely important for the health of KDE.

Thanks you all that make possible to organize such events, and particularly thanks for Joining the game!

Yesterday I started to look for myself again since I like to keep this things but seems that nobody has it :/ maybe somebody throw me to the trash? xD is impressive how small things like this can become incredibly funny when you’re in this kind of events.

This is clearly not me :p

In this release we’ve focused all the effort on getting the most stable release possible, and so far we think that we’ve reached that goal until it’s matching our expectatives. This version is more important than what it seems, with this release we’re making a new technology switch towards QtGstreamer, a technology that we hope will allow us to offer a stable, consistent and scalable application.

These are the main features of Kamoso 2.0:

• Take pictures from your webcam
• Record videos from your webcam
• Per device video settings
• Support for multiple cameras
• Upload the pictures  directly to facebook (need kipi-plugins)
• Upload the videos to youtube

The source tarball can be downloaded from:

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=stable/kamoso/2.0.2/src/kamoso-2.0.2.tar.bz2

md5: c2125e3cbe10ddc397ec4308891a9f4c
sha1: 3eb081446cb1a4ced6602f01cc3209fb188d0b96

Cheers!