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The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part IV - KIO

This part looks at an advanced and one of the major KDE technology - KIO. If you're a KDE Workspace user, you're using it pretty much every day.

So what is KIO? It is a technology that makes arbitrary resources available in form of files (if it makes sense to be files) which any KDE application can seamlessly access and use. Let's have FTP server as an example. It's a remote server somewhere on the other side of the country. How would you normally access it? Install some FTP client, create new connection, enter your credentials, connect, browse the server in the client, do some work. With KDE KIO all this is not needed.

KIO makes the remote content available like normal (local) folders, which you can access from any KDE application like Dolphin or Gwenview and just work with the files. All the magic like downloading the file locally, uploading the file back once saved etc. is handled automatically in the background and it is happening in separate process, so it does not block GUI while working. But it's not just remote content.

Thanks to KIO's modular architecture it is very easy to create KIO for pretty much anything one might need. By default, KDE ships over 40 different KIO plugins, among which we can find the already mentioned FTP, FISH, NFS, SFTP, Samba, SVN, but also POP3, IMAP, KIO for installed fonts and programs, settings, audio cd, man pages, searching in your semantic data and others. You can check at least some of your KIOs by opening KDE Help Center (fire up kickoff and type "help" in the search field) and looking for "Kioslaves" in Contents list. There you can also find help for using some of them.

Any application can take advantage of KIO. Among KDE applications, Dolphin is probably the most logical one to make use of KIO, so let's take a look at some of KIOs and Dolphin.

Audio CD

Remember the FTP access example above? Think about the same for ripping audio CDs. How would you most probably proceed? Install a ripping software, install codecs, run the software and let it rip the audio CD. Not anymore. That's how it's done on...well, other systems.

When you insert any audio CD into your computer, one of the actions the Device Notifier offers is "Open with File Manager". You ask "why would I do such thing"? Well, just try it ;) You'll see several folders - CDA, FLAC, Full CD, Information, Ogg Vorbis and whole bunch of wav files. If you have the Lame libs installed, you'll see even MP3 folder. You might think that the CD authors are just awesome for giving you all this right on their CD, but no. That's KIO's authors who's awesome.

So you want to have your CD in mp3 quickly? What's easier than dragging the MP3 folder to wherever you want it? It will start converting on the fly. And for bonus points - it will also fill in id3 tags from cddb (if the CD was identified). The same goes with you wanting a FLAC quality music, or the libre format OGG. Just drag the folder and you're done. No need for CD rippers anymore.

Remote files access

Here belongs KIOs for (S)FTP, NFS, Samba, FISH and all remote file access. You want to copy some files from a computer in other room where you have SSH access? No problem, FISH KIO takes care of that. You need files from your Windows machine? Samba KIO got you covered. KIO for FTP was absolute bless when I was doing web development. For quick fixes, I just fired up Dolphin, entered server address, opened up the file (without the need to download it first), fix stuff, save (it gets uploaded back), close Dolphin and I was done. Just perfect.

To access remote server, all you have to do is type the protocol and its IP address to Dolphin's address bar and hit Enter. In case it needs authorization, you'll be asked for your credentials. After that you can browse and open the remote files just like those on your hard drive, right inside Dolphin. You can even use the breadcrumb navigation to navigate. Of course you can copy & paste files to these remote locations.

Archvies

We've all been there. You download an archive, navigate to your Downloads folder and you want to browse that archive, not opening special application for that, because that's just an unwanted delay for you. That's how great archive KIOs are. They enable you to browse the archives with ease. By default KDE ships KIOs for ZIP (bzip, bzip2, gzip..) and TAR, which covers the most used archives in Unix world. You can open files straight from the archives, you can copy them out, but you can't paste files in. I confess that my archives knowledge is only that limited and I don't know why you can't do that.

Applications, Fonts, Settings and friends

These are great examples of the reusability of KIOs throughout the system. If you put "applications:/" or "settings:/" in your Dolphin's address bar, I'm pretty sure that you'll recognize these things. Yep, it's the same you see in Kickoff menu and in System Settings. This is a great example of technology reuse and applying different visualisations on the same data set.

From these KIOs you can either run the application or the System Settings config module. Fonts ("fonts:/") displays all your Personal or System fonts, which allows you to easily copy them and share or add new ones. Other similar KIOs are "desktop:/", which shows your desktop contents, "trash:/", which shows your trashed files, or "floppy:/", which lets you access your floppy disk (oh the nostalgia..). Also Konqueror and Rekonq are using KIO for http protocol. So basically you're viewing pages through KIO as well.

Timeline

Very interesting and little known KIO is Timeline. This is a KIO based on Nepomuk and it contains all your edited files. Currently there's no "easy" access (depends on how you define easy) and as far as I know the only way to access it right now is by entering "timeline:/" into Dolphin address bar. Hopefully someone will make a great use of this KIO soon.

So what great features does Timeline bring to the table? Instead of trying to remember what file it was that you edited on Wednesday, you can simply browse the Timeline to get all files edited on Wednesday. Yep. Simple as that :) It simply lists all created or edited files separated by days. It is not /that/ useful when you need broader search parameters, but it illustrates nicely the power of KIO connected with KDE's semantic capabilities. For this to work you have to have the Semantic desktop search enabled (aka Nepomuk).

Man pages

Advanced users quite often use "man" in terminal for displaying Unix manual pages. For that we also have a KIO. You can get quick access to man pages by launching KRunner (Alt+F2 by default) and typing what manpage you want - "man:/find". If you want some particular section, you can add it in parenthesis - "man:/find(3)". Or you can also just display index of that section - "man:/(3)".

This should give you some overview what is KIO all about. As I repeated few times in the article, any KDE application can take advantage of KIO. For example the Folder view widget on desktop can display KIO content. The open/save file dialog can browse KIOs. Also DigiKam internally uses several KIOs for working with albums. These however can't be easily used in Dolphin as they have quite complex syntax, but it would be really cool if your DigiKam albums were simply reusable elsewhere.

There are more KIOs. You can find some on the interwebs (though possibly outdated), like a KIO for browsing Flickr or a "TV KIO", both done by David Edmundson. And it's very easy to write your own shiny KIO. If you have ideas and time, there's nothing easier than jumping to #kde-devel at freenode and asking for help. I'm sure someone will point you to the right direction.

If you're using a KIO which wasn't mentioned above and you think it should deserve a mention (my day has only 24 hours ;), you can share it in comments. I may add it to the article later as well.

At the end I'd like to revive one older and a bit related post of my friend Alex Fiestas about Smart Folders (as it is called in OS X). Basically it is about having folders where you have a related content. It can do more, just sit down and have a play with it ;) Check out the video in his blog, it's definitely worth it! As an update to that - the UI for what Alex is describing still wasn't done yet :/ So if you'd like to improve KDE Software, this could be your great starting point!

And as usual - if you like the KDE Software, please consider support by joining the game (you'll get a gift! ;).

KDE Telepathy now depends on Telepathy-Qt4 >= 0.9 (also - how to report bugs)

(Can someone make Planet KDE not show my old now-edited articles on top? Thanks)

Today our whole KDE Telepathy project was ported to Telepathy-Qt4 0.9, which is not backwards compatible. That means that for all KDE Telepathy code cloned from master today onwards, you need to update your Telepathy-Qt4 library to version 0.9 or newer first, otherwise it won't compile.

The released version 0.2 on the other hand needs Telepathy-Qt4 < 0.9, it won't work with version 0.9 and newer. So before posting bugs about not being able to compile our software set, please check if you're using the correct version of Telepathy-Qt4 library.

Some more about bugs and how to properly report them for KDE Telepathy. Our small project is still to be considered somewhere around alpha quality. There are bugs. Quite often we receive bug reports like "I can't connect". This really does not help us to see where the problem is. When you have connectivity issues, we need to know _exactly_ what's going on inside your Telepathy installation. And it's very easy to provide us with such info.

Here are the needed steps:

1. Disconnect all accounts
2. Disable all accounts in System Settings and leave only the one failing
3. Make sure no process named telepathy-* is running, if it is, kill it
4. The following step is different for different accounts:
   • If you're using Jabber, GTalk or Facebook chat, put this line in terminal:

   GABBLE_PERSIST=1 GABBLE_DEBUG=all /usr/lib/telepathy-gabble 2>&1 > ~/gabble.log

   • If you're using MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! account or others, use this:

   HAZE_PERSIST=1 HAZE_DEBUG=all /usr/lib/telepathy-haze 2>&1 > ~/haze.log

   
   If it says that the file does not exist, please find your telepathy-gabble/telepathy-haze and replace the path with it. This will create the log file in your home directory, named either gabble.log or haze.log.

5. Now connect.
6. After you have obtained the log, please check it for sensitive data. If there are none, provide it to KDE Telepathy developers (either attach it to bugzilla or use paste.kde.org and post the link to developers in some other way)

So before you go to file a bug saying "I can't connect", be sure to have one (or both) logfiles ready and attach them with as much info as you can provide - which account is failing (the network name is enough, eg. gtalk, icq, yahoo etc), does it fail to connect every time (try connecting 10 times in a row), what are you using to connect (plasmoid, contact list etc) and which error exactly are you getting. Also very helpful is including your telepathy-* packages versions. These things will help us enormously to pinpoint your problem very quickly and possibly fix it.

Very useful is also checking our FAQ and troubleshooting guide if you have any problems.

As for other news from KDE Telepathy land - 0.3 release is quite near, it still won't have Nepomuk integration (but this is closer than ever), quite probably no audio/video call features (but there's still hope) and maybe (just maybe) also chatting right from Plasma!

We could still use some hands, so if you find yourself bored and with nothing to do (like, if you've finished Skyrim), just storm #kde-telepathy on freenode and we'll get you started (and you don't have to know C++/Qt4).

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part III - KSnapshot

In today's part we'll have a look at an application, that I've (again) grown so used to, that I consider it part of the Workspace itself - KSnapshot.

I remember doing screenshots on my old Win XP machine - press the print screen key, open up MS Paint, paste the image there and save. That's so last-century. I don't know how it works these days in Win7, but feel free to let me know below in the comments. OS X went one step further - after you press some magic key combo (which I could never remember), the image is saved on your desktop. But the fearless KDE developers went even further. 

After you press the print screen key, the KSnapshot pops up with little window and your screenshot in it. From here you can either save the image to a format and place of your own liking (clever automatic file numbering included). However if you don't like the screenshot you just took, you can easily trigger a new one, even with different options, without the file being saved (which is useful for not wasting space and for saving some time from the need to delete the incorrect screenshots). Automated/batch saving of screenshots could be handy, though I've never had a need for it yet.

The main KSnapshot window allows you to select what screenshot you actually want to take. "Full Screen" obviously captures the full screen. "Window under cursor" will create a screenshot of only the window you are pointing at. This is awesome with enabled KWin compositing as it will capture the window's shadows on transparent background (provided you save it as png; that's for example how the screenshot above was made). "Rectangular region" and "Freehand region" lets you manually select the area you want captured. The last mode is "Section of window", which captures only the selected portion of window, highlighted on mouse over. This way you can take clean screenshot of just a toolbar, just the inner view of the window or some other part.

Great feature is the possibility to set a timer for the capture. So let's say you want to take a screenshot of something, that you need to prepare first, like opening a menu (which would get closed by running KSnapshot). So you set the timer to 10 seconds, press the big "Take a New Screenshot" button and then simply do your thing while watching the countdown on top of the screen. KSnapshot window itself hides during this countdown so it does not get in the way and reappears after the timeout, with the new screenshot.

Once you have the screenshot ready, you can either open it directly in system associated application for images, copy it to the clipboard or export it to a supported service (through kipi-plugins), which includes Facebook, Picasa, popular Czech site rajce.net, Flickr and tens others. Of course you can email the image or print it as well.

Saving image is pretty straight forward, so I'll rather show you a great example of quick screenshots sharing with your friends. First of all you need the "Pastebin" plasmoid (don't confuse it with "Paste" plasmoid which has the same icon, but does a different thing). Add it to some panel and configure if needed (default imagebin is wstav, but you can choose from several image sharing services - wstav.org, imgur, Simplest Image Hosting and img.susepaste.org; if you have some c++ skills, you can easily create your own backend). Once it sits in your panel, you can share you screenshots just by dragging them from the KSnapshot window directly and dropping it onto teh plasmoid. After few seconds you have a link to your uploaded image ready for pasting in your clipboard, so all you have to do is press ctrl+v and you're done. Simple, fast and powerful.

You can also drag&drop the image to anything that accepts image drops, for example your opened image editor, document you're writing or also Plasma Desktop, in which case it will offer you to create a Picture frame (this works for any images dropped on desktop, not just those from KSnapshot).

So that's how we work with screenshots in KDE Workspace (note, that all that is mentioned here, is the standard part of KDE SC, you don't have to install anything additional for this to work). If you have ideas for KSnapshot or if you'd like to share how you use KSnapshot to make your work easier, be sure to leave a comment.

Before I close this part, I'd like to invite you all to Plasma Bug Days, which will be held this Friday and Saturday (December 2nd and 3rd), more info on Aaron's blog. Come give us a hand if you want the 4.8 release to really rock!

You can also always support KDE by Joining the game!

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part II - Klipper

 

Today I'd like to introduce Klipper, easy, small and very useful tool included in KDE Workspace since...well, always. That's the scissors icon sitting in the systray area. Basically it is a history of your clipboard but it can do much more. Very important thing is that the contents persist between sessions, so if you have something in your clipboard, you log off/reboot/shutdown and then you log back in, you still have your whole clipboard history ready and the most recent entry already in clipboard, so you can paste it immediately.

Clicking the scissors icon will show you your history. Clicking on any item in the history will make it the current clipboard content that you'll paste when you press Ctrl+V or if you use the Linux paste way - paste by pressing the middle mouse button. You can have the clipboards separated for text selection with mouse and for whatever you copy using Ctrl+C, so what you'll copy with Ctrl+C will be pasted only with Ctrl+V and what you select by mouse will be pasted only by the middle mouse button. But you can set Klipper to keep those two synchronised, so when you'll copy a file for example, you can then paste it with your middle mouse button.Klipper allows one to enter custom content into clipboard. Say that you want to paste the same thing to 10 different places. First you'd need to write it down somewhere and copy from there. But Klipper is way smarter - just click the scissors and select "Edit Contents..." and small window for text input will popup. Enter your text and you can start pasting around. Cool thing is that you can set your own key combo for this, so you don't have to click the systray icon everytime.

Another great feature is generating a QR code of your clipboard content. Let's say you need to call a number which is listed on a website or that you need to send a picture from your phone to some long email address you have in your inbox for example. So what to do? Just select that text with your mouse, Klipper automatically catches it and then simply click "Show Barcode..." from Klipper's menu (or, again, set a key combo for quicker access). Fire up a QR reader on your phone (who doesn't have it these days?), scan the QR from the screen and you're done.

With that are related Klipper actions. Depending on the clipboard content, Klipper can automatically run a particular action. For example if you copy a website address, you can have a browser opening that address without you taking any action. You can set your own commands based on regular expressions, but this requires some higher knowledge (ie. it's not a click-through setting). Since automatic actions triggering can sometimes be very annoying or unwanted, Klipper lets you set this to manual trigger only. Simply copy something, from Klipper's menu select "Manually Invoke Action on Current Clipboard" (yep, shortcuts...) and there you go.

Userbase (userbase.kde.org) has a nice example of using Klipper's actions - automatic searching for phone numbers online. Read more at http://userbase.kde.org/Klipper/How_to_search_in_phone_books_using_Klipper

Great use is in repetitive pasting. Be it some texts (like "canned email responses"), some pieces of code etc. You don't have to go back to the original source everytime after you put something else in your clipboard, it's simply still there.

You can also set how big the history should be. By default it's 10, but if you need more or don't need that much, there's nothing easier than firing up the config and setting your own number.

I got used to Klipper so much that I consider it more a part of the Workspace rather than an (standalone) application. Simple, easy to use and so powerful. That's what KDE software is all about.

Oh and by the way - if you like KDE software and if you would like to support our goals and mission, joining us was never easier! You can support our efforts with your own skills (be it programming, app design/UX (highly wanted!), writing documentation etc), or by donating little money to support the development by "joining the game". Feel free to contact me for any details :)

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part I - Dolphin

For the first part of this blogseries I picked Dolphin. A basic application, that lets you do file management. Dolphin is very powerful application, so let's have a look at what all you can do with it.

The panels

Dolphin has four main areas. The panel on the left is your bookmarks/favorite/quickaccess places. Adding your own places is as easy as it can get - simply drag a folder and drop it there. Another way is to create it manually via panel's context menu, where you can even set your own label and icon, that's the 'My narcistic pictures' item for example. Reordering items to your own likening is again just a matter of drag and drop. You can also drag any folder/file to the places in that sidebar and it will be copied to that place. When you have some removable media, they are automatically displayed there as well and you can disconnect/eject them from the very same panel (as well as from other places).

If the drives are mounted, simple mouse hovering over the drive will show you its free space in a little bar, so you can have at least rough idea how much more data you can put on it. This places panel will stay the same throughout the whole KDE Workspace, in every open/save dialog you will have your places right there.

 

On the right side there's a Preview panel. But it's not just an image preview panel, it can show you much more. Selecting a mp3 will for example show you its ID3 tags, rating from Bangarang media player etc. But that's not where the fearless KDE developers stopped - you can also 'preview' the song right from the panel. That is, listen to it without opening any media player. Same goes with videos, it shows various info like dimensions, used codec and you can preview them right in the panel without the need to do pretty much anything but one click. When there's no preview available for certain file types, it will show nice shiny icon, courtesy of the Oxygen team. You can set what do you want to have preview of and also a size limit of the files. That's very useful when you don't want your resources to be busy on generating a preview of a very large image for example. 

Some informations in this Preview panel appears as links. Yep, that's right - you can click it and get list of files with the same parameter. So for example you can list all photos taken by some particular camera, list all photos with some particular ISO setting, focal length, you can list all your songs by a particular author, by its codec, by its tags, you can list arbitrary images by particular resolution and so on and so on, you get the idea. This is all done thanks to Semantic Desktop implementation (which is currently the best out there), known as Nepomuk in KDE community. But more about this in some later post.

Dolphin has other panels for powerusers, they are hidden by default. There's a Terminal panel for when you need to quickly do some command-line work right at your fingertips (press F4), then we have a Folders panel, which is the classic tree-view of your folder structure and lastly there's a Search panel for doing semantic search. The position and size of the panels is fully configurable, so your Dolphin can look like this for example:

 

Dolphin's statusbar displays various useful informations. The leftmost text tells you how many folders and files you have in the current folder and how much space they take. Further to the right there's a slider which lets you control the size of icons in the main view. This is especially cool for when you're using Preview mode (more on that later). And then the right side features the most useful thing of the statusbar in my humble opinion - the remaining free space on the device you're currently browsing. Navigate to your flash drive and you'll immediately see how much space you have left on it.

The statusbar is also place for displaying error messages, which you can very easily copy by right clicking on them and selecting "Copy message".

 The main view

And now let's take a look on what makes Dolphin so great in file management - the main view itself. The default is just what you'd expect - sorted folders and files, browsing folders and opening files is nothing special. But clicking with right mouse button on folder/file reveals some interesting features. Let's skip the obvious things like opening folder in new window or tab or adding it to places. Right from the menu you can compress whatever files/folders you have selected and you can choose either zip, rar, or tar.gz. Of course you can open the full blown dialog which lets you select different compression formats and options, where to place the archive and so on.

 

Dolphin also allows one to copy or move file to a desired location right from the context menu. This is very nice when you need to quickly copy/move something to your home folder or few levels deep (untill the menu fills your whole screen). It also features several last used locations, so it becomes way quicker after first time.

 

But for moving files around Dolphin has something better. With the "Split" button in the main toolbar you can split the main view and have {midnight|total|norton}-commander-like interface. The side that is not currently active (you are not working in) is slightly greyed out so you can tell by quick look which side you're currently controlling. There's another quite useful feature regarding file management - you can select files with the ordinary key shortcuts (holding ctrl or shift), but you can also select multiple files using just your mouse - every folder/file will show you a little plus icon in the top left corner after you move your mouse over it. Once you made your selection of files, just grab them and move, folders will automatically open if you hold your files over them (might need enabling in settings) and once you drop them, a little menu pops up letting you select the appropriate action - Copy, Move, Link or Cancel the whole action. Holding down a key while you drop your files might prevent this menu from popping up, so hold Ctrl for copy, Shift for move and Ctrl+Shift to automatically create a link upon dropping.

Besides splitting the main view, Dolphin can also have tabs, just like your browser. Simply press Ctrl+T or click on some folder with mouse wheel and there you have a new tab, right inside Dolphin.

Another great Dolphin feature is filtering. Imagine you're in a folder with thousands of files and you want to quickly filter certain files by filename. For this Dolphin has a special Filter bar, which you can turn on from the main menu or by pressing Ctrl+I. Then just type into the filter bar and files are immediately filtered as you type. Of course Dolphin includes also full searching by filename or content.

Navigation 

Navigation in Dolphin is very easy and intuitive. On top of the main view there's a Location bar, which displays breadcrumb navigation. You can not only click the folder in the breadcrumb navigation, but you can also click the little arrows after each folder and that gives you quick access to subfolders of that particular folder, so you can quickly navigate to some other folder without even having to go back in you history. You can also very easily switch the Location bar into edit line by clicking on the empty space after the breadcrumb navigation, and type your own location with autocompletition, press Enter and you're there. This is especially great for accessing hidden folders on your filesystem, which on Linux have "." before their name, so for example your workspace config folder is ".kde4".

You can also navigate by using the arrow buttons in toolbar. Like in almost every KDE Application, you can very easily configure the toolbar yourself (both its position and its buttons). So you can for example add button for going one directory up or to go directly to your Home folder. All is very easy to do and very intuitive. Your Dolphin can look like this for example:

View modes

Dolphin has several view modes. The Icons view you've already seen in the previous screenshots. Another one is Details view, which shows list of files and their details next to them. Third view is Columns view. This will be very well known for OS X users - every folder openes new column. You might say that what's the point of having more than 2 columns when you won't be able to see the first one anyway. This works very similar to the breadcrumb Location bar, except it's more extended. You can move in the columns "history" with a scrollbar and see all the folders' contents at hand. Obviously you can also copy/move files between these columns.

In every view you can still select folders/files with the little plus icon which appears when you hover your mouse above the item. And in addition, you can switch on Preview mode in all three mentioned view types. Preview will simply show you preview of your files (text files, html, images etc). And by using the slider in the statusbar, you can make them larger or smaller. This setting will stay for the Preview mode, so when you exit the Preview mode, you'll have the original icon size setting (which you can change in the very same way). Also every folder (reliably) remembers it's view mode, used throughout the system. Isn't it cool?

Plugins

Dolphin is extendable by plugins. So for example you can have SVN or Git intergration right in Dolphin. This enables you to pull newest version from remote server or to push your changes to the server. Files also uses emblems to visualize changes in files. So if you have some uncommitted changes, you'll see little green arrow over the file and it's name will be in green.

You can also extend Dolphin's functionality with your own actions (not too hard to do, but requires some knowledge). We're using this in KDE-Telepathy where we add an action to the context menu that enables you to send files to your IM contact.

Last words...

So you see, Dolphin is simple yet very powerful and fully customizable file management application with "Simply have it your way" idea. And there's much more. We'll get back to Dolphin in other parts of this series, when we'll take a look at features like KIO or Nepomuk browsing.

In the near future we'll all see Dolphin 2.0, which will be included in the 4.8 release in January. I've been using the development version for quite some time and I must say - this is really something to look forward to! More details are in Peter Penz's blogpost. And we'll probably look at the new view system after the 4.8 release.

And what's your favorite feature in Dolphin? How do you use Dolphin and how it helps you get through everyday's work with KDE Workspace? Share your thoughts below...

Quick KDE-Telepathy update - we bumped some dependencies versions

Hey all,

just a quick update about KDE-Telepathy - we've bumped the needed versions of some libraries that you need to compile & run the KDE-Telepathy suite.

The most important one is Telepathy-Qt4 - you need at least version 0.7.3.  We also strongly suggest to use Telepathy-Gabble version 0.13.7 as there were some hard crashes in the previous versions, which results in silent infinite connecting-connected-disconnected loop of Jabber accounts. This is not really needed, but should you experience this behaviour, please update your Gabble package before posting bugs.

Some of our components, like telepathy-send-file, now requires kdelibs 4.7.0. In the next KDE-Telepathy release, 0.3, kdelibs 4.7 will be mandatory (sorry Debian testing users).

By this we'd like to encourage all packagers to package at least Telepathy-Qt4 and Telepathy-Gabble (Telepathy-Haze won't hurt too) from the latest released versions.

Thanks.

The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications - The prelude

Quite often I hear from people things like "how could you downgrade you MacBook by installing Linux on it?!" or "is KDE4 finally better than the crap it used to be?" or, the better ones, "what's that nice Windows theme you're using?".

I'd like to answer to all of these questions in a series of blogposts about what's so great on the software produced by the KDE (for those out of loop - 'KDE' designates the community while the software produced by this community is called 'KDE Workspaces and Applications (and Development Frameworks)', also known as 'KDE Software Compilation').

In this series I'd like to give people an idea what you can do with KDE Workspaces and Applications, what features it offers, how it can make your everyday computer work easy and comfortable.

I'll take a look at some KDE Applications like Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, Kate and others and I'll show you their Great Features. Next to Applications, I'll show you Plasma itself, it's possibilities, offerings etc, the system integration, KWin, Nepomuk, general workflow and so on. I'm also considering side-by-side comparisons with other systems, especially OS X, which is often praised as the UX holy grail and if I'll get a 20 GB partition and enought time, I may compare Win7 as well.

I'd like to encourage readers to add their own findings of greatness, their own usage patterns and scenarios under every blogpost, so we can show together what's so great about KDE Workspaces and Applications. The only downside is that TypePad requires signing-in (OpenID works just fine) to post comments, so I'm thinking about moving this series to some better suited blog service (advices?).

So far I'm not sure how often these posts will be published, most probably it will be rather random. All these posts will be also available on the Planet KDE, where you can read interesting stuff from other KDE people as well.

So...stay tuned :)

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

 

Urgent - looking for place to stay in Berlin

Hey all,

I'll be doing an internship with KDE e.V. (more about that later) and I'm supposed to be in Berlin (on that later too). However the flat I had booked was just rented to someone else (pretty big wtf moment), no idea how this is possible, but nevertheless, I now need a place to stay at least one or two nights from tomorrow, until I find another flat. I've already responded to some offers and awaiting the replies now, hopefully they'll arrive soon.

In the meantime, are there any KDE devs in Berlin with spare bed for few nights? Not looking for anything fancy, simple bed and shower will do :) I'll be arriving tomorrow (Saturday) around 17:30 to Hauptbahnhof. If so, please do let me know asap - the best would be if you email me directly to martin.klapetek@gmail.com.

Thanks a lot for any help or advice.

Marty

Notifications from your Android phone on your KDE desktop

Recently I came across Android Notifier, an open-source application that enables your Android phone to forward any notifications right to your desktop, so you'll never miss a call or sms even if you left your phone in the bathroom. The desktop part is written in Java and thus it's multi-platform and it works pretty well with KDE (trunk). So let's have a closer look at what it does and how to make it work.

The Android part runs as a service and simply listens to any new events in the system. Once this event occures, the phone forwards that event to your computer via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (TCP or UDP) or USB cable, using its own protocol. You can configure which events you want your phone to forward and you can also encrypt them. Simple as that.

The desktop counter-part then sits in systray from where you can control the service and change its settings. It allows you to set the reception method, notification method and notification actions. You can choose from three notification methods - System default, Growl notifications and Libnotify. Libnotify works just fine with Plasma's notification system (and as a bonus you'll get a history of notifications, go buy a beer for Plasma devs). You can set custom actions for a particular event (phone ringing, sms received, battery status etc). Well custom actions is just 'Copy to clipboard' and 'Execute command', but the last one gives you pretty much all the power you need. And lastly, you can have the service handle either all devices sending these notifications or you can limit it to show only some devices. Oh and you can view a log of received events by right-clicking on the tray icon, though that does not work for me.

How-to set up

Let's start with the desktop service. Head over to downloads section and choose package matching your system (there are both 32bit and 64bit rpm, deb, zip and even exe and dmg) and then just install it as any other downloaded package. After you're done, you will find 'Android Notifier Desktop' in your kickoff menu (or whatever you use). If you choose to use Wi-Fi as a notification channel, you must open port 10600 in your firewall. If you're on Kubuntu, you can do that from command line by typing 'sudo ufw allow 10600' and then checking it by 'sudo ufw status'. If you're using other distros, you're on your own, sorry. As for 'Notification display methods', I suggest to use Libnotify on KDE (and possibly Gnome too) as that will get you a better 'integrated feel', but feel free to try the others as well. That's basically all you need to do on the desktop (if you're using Wi-Fi).

On Android you have to install the service from Market. For your comfort here's a QR code you can just scan (use Barcode Scanner or Google Goggles):

After you've downloaded and installed it, open Remote Notifier from your apps launcher. In 'Notification Service' you can choose to start the service after phone boot. Under 'Notification Methods' you can choose which method to use. For Wi-Fi you can set plenty of options, including target IP (default is Global broadcast address), used protocol (TCP or UDP), auto-enabling Wi-Fi on the event or using Mobile network in case Wi-Fi is switched off. I suggest setting a fixed IP to send the notifications to, but of course that's up to you (and your situation, fixed IP may not be always applicable). Once you have your method set, you can choose which 'Events to notify' and also set a 'Security', which features password protected encryption. After your preferences are all set, you can test the notifications using 'Send test notification'. If you see the notification pop-up on your desktop, congratulations, you're all set. If not, head over to the Wiki section of the project, it has some nice howtos and additional informations.

Enjoy :)