And well, this is the result, a freezeeless interface for KBluetooth-wizard.

PS: As a sneak-peak, notice that the wizard is not longer called “inputwizard ”

Saluts!

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Before continuing reading, be aware that I’m not an usability guy, I lack any kind of design or usability sense/knowledgement, In fact, I have been I’m using KDE for years and I never succeed to configure my desktop in a beautiful way (only by copying the others configs), so please keep that in your mind when you read this post.

A few days ago, Celeste wrote an excellent paper about "Tabs in the Taskbar". After reading it I decided to move my panel to the top of my main screen. The result has exceeded my expectations. What I got is more than a better relationship between the panel and the applications, what I got is something I’ve named a "Natural flow", let me try to explain what I mean.

The first thing I noticed after placing the panel at the top of the screen was that I forced less my eyes. Because of my work, I need to be aware of the notifications (kmail), but at the same time I’m usually writing code so I’m never watching the bottom of the screen, in fact if there is a part of the screen that I totally ignore it is the bottom, so move my eyes to that part of the screen every time I got a notification was painful.

The second thing I realize a few hours after, was a harder connection between applications and the taskbar. For example I have always ignored the "request attention" thing of the taskbar items, now I guess that because my eyes are "half watching" the taskbar all the time I’m able to notice the blinking quickly. Also the taskbar is acting now as a "Tab bar", it also works for applications that are in a different screen or not are maximized thanks of KWIN maximize/minimize effects,

The third and final thing, is something that may sound stupid to you (It did to me!), it is that menus/notifications/plasmoids etc show up from the top to the bottom. In earth thanks of gravity objects fall down, and I think that it’s because of this that I feel this behavior more natural than the other one.

That’s all! keep the panel at the top a day and decide where you like it more.

Ps: Please, do not flame in the comments, the objective of this entry is to share my experience with other people not to start an usability flame or something like that. Usability is a complex subject, and I ignore all of it.

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A few days ago, I was in the office with ereslibre showing something to him (I don’t remember what), when he noticed something in my desktop that he didn’t liked, my fonts. I laughed quite a lot because I thought that it was a "Yet Another Small Detail That Ereslibre Cares Of". I let him modify my settings so I could say later to him: you see? this thing has not improved my user experience in any way. But as you probably guessed by now, I was terribly wrong.

What’s more, now I’m pushing everybody I know which uses KDE to setup the same configuration I have. I don’t really know what the hell the parameters I modify means, but what I know is that now I’m happier with my desktop.

The famous settings are:

• Font: Dejavu Sans
• Use anti-aliasing: Enabled
• (Click on configure)
• Use sub-pixel rendering: RGB
• Hinting style: Slight

In screenshots (so you can extrapolate it to your language):

Set the font and enable the anti-aliasing:

Click on configure and set the subpixel rendering:

Set the hinting styke:

The last KDE user I "moved" to these settings has needed 1 day to notice the changes, so just do it and wait

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Happens that month’s ago Apol lent me his Apple Wireless Keyboard so I can give support to it in KBluetooth. After small research I concluded that the keyboard wasn’t standard, so I just pull it over. Then, a few days ago, Ereslibre was playing with a Gnome and I decided to try to pair the Apple keyboard using the Gnome Bluetooth System, and guess what… it worked !

So, today, I decided do not go to sleep until I got it working, and here I am, 03:12 and writting this entry with that keyboard

This feature, should fix the keyboard pairing completely, not matter if your keyboard is the Apple one or not.

This feature will be available in the next version (0.5) together with a new Wizard and maybe a new (or at least improved) device manager.

If you can test your “non-working” keyboard with the trunk version and give me some feedback, I’ll be very appreciated

Cya and Happy Hacking!

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Here comes the (hopefully) last version of KBluetooth stable branch. The change list is not very huge (only fixes) but if there is something I’m glad to have fixed is the speed calculation of the file transfers, it was so annoying for me to see the text blinking ;(

Changelog:

• Fix speed calculation when receiving and sending filesI
• Pairing request are accepted also when clicking on Trust button
• Important dialogs are modal, so they’re not hidden by other applications
• Fix a crash that happens when the sender device disconnects before the file transfer is accepted

A small note, the Modals will be removed in the next version, this is a bug fix release so the less code I change, the better.

Today I’ll start to work on 0.5 more intensively, starting by adding a2dp support.

See you!

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Friday 05/02/2010:

Wake up at 3:00 AM to take a cab to go to Barajas airport, I have to say that Gate 2 is uglier than the Gate 2 of El prat airport (and smaller), but one point in favor is that it was full of power sources :p

Once in Brussels, Kiko, Victor and Oscar were waiting for me, I got some stress because of the airport distribution, is like labyrinth! Then usual route in that kind of travels, Breakfast->Hotel->Launch->FOSDEM beer event. A well, between Launch and FOSDEM we went to Brussels MIDI to met Aleix pol (apol).

About the FOSDEM beer event, I’m not going to say anything new, lot of good beer, a lot of hackers around and good chat. Maybe I was expecting more free beer

Saturday 06/02/2010:

Mueheh perhaps because I was excited for my first FOSDEM, everything look wonderful to me, and one small detail I’m still enjoining was the way the donations were done: they gave us a receipt so it looked more like more official/serious.

Aleix pol has already blogged about kamoso appearing in the opensuse stand, it was a good surprise! (I can not image what the people of opensuse were thinking when apol and I started to laughing and taking pictures xD).

Something I found weird (and disappointed me) was that the Mandriva ppl didn’t have any computer with KDE :/

About the talks, we were in KDE room almost all the day, so there’s not much to say about.

Sunday 07/02/2010:

This day had a proper noun, Andrew_S._Tanenbaum, this is a short summary but it made my day. Another interesting thing was my chat with Will Stephenson about Bluetooth+KDE, I’m sure that what we discussed will have good effects in the KDE Bluetooth world.

Small note for future FOSDEM newbies: wearing a t-shirt of a project in which you are not involved IS NOT A GOOD IDEA! the people will think that you’re a developer of it and will start to ask you a lot of questions xD!

Mental note: Next year bring KDE t-shirts.

Cya!

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With the last release I added a crash when receiving files, I gare say it was not my fault, the KBluetooth code is a mess and I can’t fix it without rewrite it from scratch (thing that I’ll explain hopefully in 2 days).

Small roadmap for 0.4 version:

• Fix file transfer jobs (speed calculation and notifications)
• Check (and re-check again) input

I’ll try to get the above points covered in a couple of days too.

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I have not defined my roadmap (yet), but at least I’ll have a couple of meeting regarding the future of KBluetooth, and sooner than you think I’ll come back with great news about Bluetooth+KDE.

If you’re in the FOSDEM and you have doubts or ideas about Bluetooth+KDE ping to me I’ll be around *KDE* stuff in there.

cya!

These are the highlights:

• The official name is now "KBluetooth".
• A lot of crashes have been fixed, KBluetooth should not crash now.
• File transfer (send/receive) reported to work for everybody with any kind of device.
• Improved the input pairing (Almost all devices working).
• Huge improvements in the UI.

Known problems:

• The speed in notifications is not accurate nor working right

Notes for packagers:

• Since the first RC, I only had fixed BUGS, and almost every commit since then contains an atomic fix, so please upgrade to the 0.4 final or apply the patches yourself, but do not get stuck in the previous RC’s, doing that you’ll waste the time of your bugtracker people, as well of kde bugtracker crew and mine.
• A tag has been created in tags/kbluetooth/0.4

Note for users:

• Ask to your distribution for the final 0.4 version of KBluetooth, the only and original one !

In the next days, I’ll write a series of entries about KBluetooth, the list is not final tough:

• Review of KBluetooth 0.4
• Collaborate with KBluetooth (Developers and users)
• Short term future, KBluetooth 0.5
• KDE+Bluetooth future

Finally:

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/kbluetooth?content=112110

Is time to resume my adventure in the lands of KDE, I had to stop it because of work, I’m creating a new business together with ereslibre and edulix and we are kind of busy.

Returning to the topic, in this second part of the adventure I’m not going to change my focus, so I’ll continue hacking on kbluetooth, kamoso and ktuberling.

Here comes a small todo list I’ll try to accomplish:

• Finish 0.4 release of KBluetooth (2 crashes to be fixed)
• Release KBluetooth 0.5 (I’ll talk about it in a other blog post).
• Post at least once a week.
• Start to develop the new Bluetooth solution for KDE.
• Finish KTuberling easy switch.
• Kamoso++
• KTuberling++

Something I’d like to hack on is the xrandr support, but I don’t want to open more fronts not until at least I have kio_bluetooth working.

And well, this is all! I hope to blog in a few days announcing KBluetooth 0.4

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So well, as you know, I created a patch some month/weeks ago which adds a small feature to KTuberling (will be available in kde 4.5). Since I like the code, and I’m a “friend? :p” of tsdgeos I proposed myself to Albert to continue with KTuberling at least until he can go back to his *games* duties :p

So, this is my roadmap for KTuberling in KDE SC (KSC?, I don’t like the new branding sorry ._.) 4.5:

1. Support to switch between playgrounds using easier way
2. Possibility to export the playground in some simple web 2.0 service
3. Add Get Hot New Stuff  (in discussion)

If you have any ideas please, drop a bug to bugs.kde.org so we can evaluate it.

Cya!

After my “small” holidays in Paris, I’m back home. Despite my intentions of finishing some ktuberling/kamoso/kbluetooth work on this holidays

as you may have noticed I didn’t, sorry for that I only had time to keep myself up to date with kde planet/mailist/commits, leaving only the last 3 days of kde activities as homework to when I’ll come back.

So now, I’ve read everything I had to, as well as answering dozens of emails and I’m ready to hack on KDE again and to finish my kde homework’s.

The first thing I’m going to do is to prepare the release of kbluetooth 0.4, as well as to write the property announcement of the project, which will be splited in 3/4 post.

Then some more work on Kamoso will follow (add webcam basic controls), and finally I have to finish the ktuberling patch.

That’s all at the moment!.

Picture from Effiel top // Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

See you soon Paris

Well, this is it at the moment,  tomorrow I’ll announce something in this blog, something that lot of people has been waiting for :p

Effiel picture against the sun // Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Click on the picture to download it in his original size, if somebody wants the raw just ask for it.

Seems that was yesterday when I wrote my last post, but the truth is that almost 1 month has passed sorry for that Despite not being posting with regularity I have been working hard on KDE, mainly focused on Kamoso/KBluetooth and researching something that might become my third KDE contribution/project.

Well, the next week I’ll take a break of all my duties (work/kde/free software) and I’ll travel to Paris at my brother’s home, I hope that will be there where I’ll find more time to post on the blog.

Focusing on the Title’s topic, today I have been working on a small contribution I have been promising to Albert Astals (aacid) for something like… 2 years? If I remember correctly was in Akademy-es 2007 when I said to him that I would implement it. The feature is really small but it has allowed me to investigate deeper the model/view framework which I have to say is really hot!

Well that’s all at the moment! screencast and bye!




Download the video here

**The design is not final and is not committed yet.

Two days ago at morning, I was very bored I don’t remember exactly why, so I decided to hack a bit on Kopete, which is imho the KDE application which needs more love. I was wondering what I can add to it and after a few ideas I decided to implement the idea apol gave to me some days ago, be able to take pictures from the webcam, and set it as an avatar.

Well, this is the result after 1 hour of work (It was only 1h mainly because of kdevelop, it rocks!):

You can download the video from here

The first patch to implement it is waiting for review at: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/1532/ Once it has been accepted I’ll submit the big one. I’m open for more ideas like that,I’ve no time to implement big features in software that I’m not completely involved with, but I can do things like this.

I hope you like it and please, drop a comment or send me an email if you have more small ideas!

Reach kamoso 1.0 version (I hope in 1week max):
Kamoso is the codename for a project I’m doing with Aleix pol (apol) and in theory with ereslibre (he’s kinda offline), is a Photobooth/Cheese clone, written in Qt/C++. The project is developed on gitorious and within a few days we hope reach the first stable version, which mainly will have this features:

1. Take picutres.
2. Choose which webcam to use.
3. Record video.
4. Record video with voice.
5. Some web 2.0 exports (facebook, youtube etc).
6. Maybe some effects too.

Finally we’re going to use libvlc for the video work, yes! vlc has an exported library which provide a quite straight forward api to deal with video stuff.
Currently we’re working on cleaning the plugin structure and to port our current video code to libVlc. If anybody wants join us more developers are welcomed, so just drop an email to alex (at) eyeos (d0t) org or to aleixpol (at)kde (d0t) org or maybe even better, just clone the repository on gitorious !

Research kbluetooth4 (in 1 or 2 days)
I’m not only talking about a code research here, the main point is to know why kbluetooth4 is not part of kde trunk (or at least part of extragear), and try to fix this situation, with this I mean write wherever kbluetooth4 needs to become an application ready to be part of those “sections”.
In the meanwhile I contact with the maintainers, I’ll try to add some configuration menus to be able to specify where the received files are saved.

Phonon Audio/Video input
This is in my list, the most low priority point, and it is the most low priority point because it makes me feel small ._. I’ll try to push some effort here, and with that aim other ppl to write input stuff in other backends, but from my most humble opinion, phonon needs more developers, and needs Krezt back :p. By the way, my TODO for phonon input is:

1. Learn how gstreamer works (api level).
2. Fill the current interface for avdevice (list devices etc, all using gstreamer).
3. Start to expand the gstreamer backend to be able to output input content.

I’ve chosen gstreamer because it already have input support, but maybe I’ll switch to the VLC, since I’ll use libvlc in kamoso.

Well, this is more or less all! I’ll try to keep the blog up to date with the progresses I made in those points.

The last, but not less important, this is the drink I’m taking to celebrate my “come back” !

Duff beer

Kde 1 million commits:

You can download the video from here

Two long years have passed since Akademy-es Zaragoza, which was my first attended KDE event and something like 3 years since I left everything to start, what at this moment is my most important contribution to the free software ecosystem, eyeOS.

The eyeOS project, and the company behind  it, are like children for me, they’re something stuck inside me and it won’t never change. Despite it, a chain of incident put me in the situation of think about stop my collaboration with the eyeOS project, at least for a while, but this is something I haven’t decided yet.
My biggest challenge inside the project was (is?) build a community around it, and right now,  this objective have a low priority inside eyeOS, so I’m not sure if I want spend my time there. Technically, not even eyeOS 2.0 bring to me enough motivation.

So, in this situation, I need a source of motivation, a source I have found it in KDE. This project is amazing, the people inside are just fantastic (at the moment everybody inside the project has been cool with me helping me a lot, until the point that, Aleix Pol is reviewing this entry and is because of him that this entry won’t have 900 errors/sentence.
And  now, I’m trying to become one of them.

My road to become a KDE developer will be written in this blog along as other free software related stuff, and I hope, this can be useful for other people for not to have fear of anything related with floss, KDE is a project made of people, and almost in all cases, the people that works in a free software project, are good people

That’s all, the next entry will be something more technical, will be one of my first steps in my kde path!