Working on KDE-Telepathy full-time now (and I still need a room in Berlin)

This Monday I started a dream job at KDE e.V.'s office in Berlin. Yes, I'm now a full time KDE developer \o/

Our college offered us sponsored internship abroad in a country and company of our choosing. Long story short - I chose KDE. I've been working on KDE-Telepathy since this January, working mainly on the contact list part. Not too long ago I also wrote an integration module for KDE, which sits inside kded4 and just watches the system for various events and acts on them. So for example your presence is now set to 'Away' if you're idle for some (configurable) time. Or you can now use 'Now playing..' presence plugin, this currently sets 'Now listening to %SONG by %ARTIST from %ALBUM' as your presence message, reading data from the current playing mpris-enabled media player (tested are Amarok and Clementine). The string is not yet configurable, but will be, don't worry. And the integration module also handles all your connection errors, so it's now a mandatory component for KDE-Telepathy suite (without it you won't see any errors...and they are finally human understandable too ;)

My future work here in e.V.'s office will consist mostly of KDE-Telepathy, but I will also focus a significant amount of my time to continue my GSoC project - integrating PIMO:Person into KDE (PIM for starters). Will blog about that some more when the time comes.

And before I post a full list of the tasks we've agreed with e.V. upon, a very important thing - I'm still looking for a flat/room in Berlin for three months (to 20th Jan 2012), so if you have any spare room for rent or you know your friends do, please do let me know. I'm of course trying as much as possible to respond to online offers as well, just no luck yet (total 71 emails sent to date, got 4 responses). I wasn't expecting it would be easy, but I also didn't expect it would be impossible. Also big shout out to Thomas M. for letting me stay in his appartment and also to all the others who offered it. Thanks! And so I hereby declare, that should anyone from around KDE (but of course others too) happened to be in need of anything in Czech republic, just drop me an email and if I can, I will do whatever I'll be able to do to help out.

So please let me know if you know about some more long-term flat/room (martin.klapetek@gmail.com). Thanks!

And now for the promised "workplan":

KDE-Telepathy

• finish missing features in contact list, currently:
  • handling avatars 
  • handling global presence - DONE!
  • saving/restoring presence messages - SEMI-DONE!
  • porting contact tooltips to QWidget
  • fix as many opened bugs as possible in the process
• finish missing features in other components, namely in kded component
  • make the 'Now listening to...' plugin fully configurable
  • make errors human understandable (error dictionary) - DONE!
• work together with upstream on reviewing groups model and including it back upstream if possible
• help the ongoing effort to port contact list to Nepomuk-based contacts and make sure features are preserved
• help with designing the chat plasmoid, both code-wise and visually
• write/help with contact list plasmoid for better system integration (currently no real plans)

Nepomuk

• finish the libperson library that is supposed to be a corner-stone for all Nepomuk-contacts dealing apps (including KDE-Telepathy)
• review the Akonadi Nepomuk feeders and improve if possible

PIM

• create new address book based on libperson, with IM support etc.
• research the possibility of including IM features into PIM apps
• if there is time, try implementing IM in PIM apps

 

Comments

[Victor Varvariuc]

This is great that there are people who work full time on improving KDE and other free software!

[Kai Uwe B]

That sounds great :)
Is there also some activity integration planned? Such as in "Work activity" I only get my boss, my collegues etc and "At home" I get my friends etc? :)

[Smu]

Very nice. And thank you very much for your work! :)

A integration of activities would be great. I would like the possibility, to set an account to a specific activity. For example, using the "work" activity, the prescence-applet and contact-list only would show the jabber-account from my company. And on the "home" acitivity only my icq-account. Or even more specific with single contacts, as Kai already mentioned.

[Robert Besser]

One question.
Is skype as account supported? Or is it planned? (Doesn't have to be native. Through dbus to the original skype client would be fine - like it's done in kopete)

Ahh and congratulation for your job. It's a benefit for the community

[Marty]

@Kai & @Smu - currently there's nothing planned, but we're getting more and more request for activity integration so we'll probably check out what we can do. Unfortunately that won't be any sooner than say February, we already have lots of stuff to take care of and this is just not a priority at the moment. But we always welcome new developers ;)

@Robert - we do not provide any special support. Skype should work somehow (I think with telepathy-haze), but I've never tried it myself as it's crappy anyway (and you still have to have the original skype, so...).

And thanks all for congratulations :)

[The User]

Hi! Any plans for OTR support? That is a mandatory feature for many people, unfortunately the Gnome-GSoC project seems to have been suddenly abandoned.

Did not even know that KDE e.V. has an office. Good luck. :)

[ChALkeR]

Avatars? Presense messages? "Now listening to"?

I, personally, can live without that features. The only thing i really miss is history.
Once there will be history support, i will switch from kopete to telepathy-kde.

Thanks for your great work!

[Marty]

@The User - no, not right now, we're still getting the basics working. After that's done, we'll look into stuff like OTR :) Oh yes and e.V. has an office...you have to have some mail delivered from time to time ;)

@ChALkeR - Well, others can't :) (at least those who keep bugging me about them). History is planned and willl be here soon. In facet, it might even work already, but you need some special libraries, not sure which exactly. But feel free to stop by #kde-telepathy and ask :)

[Jaroslav Reznik]

Wow, awesome! Congrats!

[Tom Meixner]

Hey, welcome to Berlin, I just arrived myself, it's been three weeks and crashing at a friend as well. What's your budget and do you have any preference as for the location in Berlin? Will definitely keep my ears open. Btw, do you speak German or would you prefer something more international a la Auberge Espagnol?