Carl Schwan

Events in December 2025

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0000

December was quite an eventful month for me, with over 4,000 km travelled by train. This was in part caused by the holidays and visiting family, but also by the KDE PIM sprint in Paris and the 39th Chaos Communication Congress.

KDE PIM sprint in Paris

From the 12th to the 14th of December, I was in Paris. It was actually my first time there for more than a day trip, so I arrived a day earlier to explore the city a bit. I went on a walk across the city with Tobias and Nicolas, and I took some photos.

The weekend was also very productive. We advanced our goal of making KMime a proper KDE Framework; made Message-IDs in emails more privacy-conscious; and discussed various important topics such as the retirement of the Kolab resource and the switch to SQLite as the default backend for Akonadi.

Huge thanks to enioka Haute Couture for having us in their office in Paris.

The sprint being in Paris also allowed me to afterward go visit my grandma, 350 km further south of Paris, so this was particularly convenient.

39th Chaos Communication Congress (39c3)

Another event I went to was 39c3, which is the third year in a row that I attended, and this year again we had an assembly as part of the Bits und Bäume umbrella, thanks to Joseph.

I love the vibe of this event. It’s not very dry or only tech-focused, but also has a big artistic and political aspect to it. And while the number of attendees is very large, at the same time it’s very chill and I don’t feel overwhelmed, unlike at FOSDEM.

At the KDE assembly, we met a lot of interested users, some GNOME friends, and since a bunch of KDE devs were there, we managed to work on a few productive things, like switching the map backend from Itinerary to MapLibre.

And this year, I even managed to go on national TV for a few seconds to speak about Nextcloud. My German grandma called me the day afterward, very happy to have seen me.

Backpacking in the Balkans - Part 2

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 20:10:00 +0000

Better late than never! After quite a few requests, here’s the second part of my backpacking adventure through the Balkans from back in July. If you missed the first part, you can check it out here.

After leaving Croatia, I traveled to the central Balkan countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

Mostar

Since there were no trains from Split to Mostar, I took the bus instead.

Stop on the middle of the road

Landscape from the bus

In Mostar, I stayed at another Hostel called Taso’s House. It was a small hostel but the host made us discover the whole Herzegovina region and explained us a lot of things about his country, the complex political situation there and how it was to grow up in Mostar during the war.

The old bridge of Mostar

View from the old bridge

Bunker for airplanes build during the Yugoslavia time

Town next to Mostar called Blagaj

Another view of Blagaj

Two rivers merging together and creating some waterfalls

The same two rivers

Old Bosnian village

The Kravice Falls

The group of people I spent my time in Mostar

View from Mostar in the evening

Close view from the old bridge

I only stayed there for two nights, and I regret not staying a bit longer or visiting the genocide museum, which I’d heard great things about.

Sarajevo

The next stop on my trip was Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I booked a train ticket online, and this is what I got. It was slightly tricky to import into KDE Itinerary, but the train ride itself was very enjoyable. Interestingly, although the train has both first- and second-class coaches, all tickets are sold as second class, and passengers are free to sit in the first-class coaches — which I did. 😉

Sarajevo itself was beautiful, and I took the cable car up into the mountains to visit the old Winter Olympics park. I even ended up appearing on the city’s television YouTube channel as a sort of side quest, along with three Australians.

River in Sarajevo

Taking the cable car

Old Bobsleigh

Old destroyed building by the war

View from the old destroyed building

View of Sarajevo

A copper shop (there was a lot of them in Bosnia)

Belgrade

Afterward, I went to Serbia — more precisely, to the capital, Belgrade. I took a night bus, which turned out to be a bit stressful. I almost missed it because I didn’t have one euro in cash to pay a surprising platform fee to enter the bus station. Then, at the border around 2 a.m., I was the only one who had to go through a full luggage check.

In Belgrade itself, I didn’t do much. I spent a lot of time at the hostel talking with other travelers and petting the hostel cat. I was a bit shocked by the amount of military propaganda I saw everywhere in the city.

Me before taking the bus

Cool place in Belgrade full of bars

The citadel. There was a massive amount of old war machines next to it.

Ice tea

Matcha <3

A orthodox church

The crypt of orthodox church

Soviet style monument about the second world war

The cutest cat ever <3

Niš

On my way to Bulgaria, I made a short stop in Niš, in southern Serbia. It’s one of the largest cities in the country and has a strong Turkish influence.

Entrance of the old Turkish fortrest in Nis

The other side of the entrance of this fortrest

Selfie of me :)

Sofia

My next stop was Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Since there are no longer any passenger trains running between Niš and Sofia, I took an old bus from Niš across the Serbian and Bulgarian countryside, but the ride was confortable.

I only stayed one day in Sofia and scrolled the city with some people I meet in my hostel.

I visited the ‘Red Flat’, which was a time capsule of how a flat looked during the end of the comunism time. This was quite a retro experience. I also ended up visiting more orthodox churches.

A train

Morning Matcha <3

The living room of the 'Red Flat'

The bedroom room of the 'Red Flat'

Another gigantic orthodox church

Istanbul

The last stop on my trip was Istanbul. I took the night train there, which turned out to be a bad experience — we ended up waiting four hours at the border, and the whole process was quite inefficient.

Istanbul itself was amazing. I had originally planned to stay only three days before heading back to Bucharest, but I found a cheap flight (€50 with luggage) back to Berlin, so I ended up staying a total of six days. I stayed at a hostel called Second Home Hostel, which turned out to be a really fun place. The staff were extremely friendly, I met a lot of amazing people there, and we went out partying almost every night.

I also meet Jon Worth who was working on his #CrossBorderRail project and was at the same time in Istanbul.

The night train I took

Me at 2 in the morning waiting for border check

Me in front the Hagia Sophia

One more hostel cat :)

Small cute street

Lot of olives

Nice food but I can't remember what was inside, just that it was vegetarian and with some rice

More cute street

Interior of a mosque

The spice market

I drank some chai so many times a day

And there was cats everywhere

Famous umbrella street

Beach during a day trip

Istanbul by night

View from a ferry to the other side of Istanbul

The group of people I hanged with during this trip

Prince island

One of the biggest wood structure of the world: Büyükada Greek Orphanage

The Blue Mosque

The Blue Mosque inside

Sunset

Selfie on a ferry

Selfie after going to a hammam/turkish bath

And now back to the reality but I am already looking forward to my next backpacking trip.

Kirigami Addons 1.10.0

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 10:10:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons is a collection of supplementary components for Kirigami applications. Version 1.10.0 is a relatively minor release, introducing KirigamiApp and some improvements on Android regarding the new edge-to-edge support introduced in Android 15.

New Features

Aleix Pol Gonzalez added a KirigamiApp component which removes quite a bit of boilerplate to setup a Kirigami applications.

It now looks like this and will setup theming, crash reporting and more automatically in one place:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
 KirigamiApp::App app(argc, argv);
 KirigamiApp kapp;

 // Set up KAboutData

 // QCommandLineParser creation and processing

 if (!kapp.start("org.kde.myapp", u"Main", new QQmlApplicationEngine)) {
 return -1;
 }
 return app.exec();
}

Bug fixes

Volker Krause added edge-to-edge support to the BottomDrawer and the MaximizedComponents.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Backpacking in the Balkans - Part 1

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 16:10:00 +0000

I’m currently backpacking in the Balkans and, considering that it’s been such a long time since I wrote a blog post on my blog, I figured it was a good idea to write about it.

As I am traveling, I am also field testing KDE Itinerary and sending patches as I buy new my tickets and reserve my hostels.

Ljubiana, Slovenia

My first stop was in the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana. I went there by train from Berlin. I first took the night train to Graz and then an intercity train to Ljubljana. And while the connection was perfect and there was no delay, the whole journey took almost 19 hours.

Night Jet

Sleeping car in the night jet

I stayed only one night in Ljubljana in the party hostel Zzz and I enjoyed my time there quite a bit. Thanks to the Hostelworld app, it was super easy to find a group of fellow solo travelers to enjoy the evening with. We went to a food market and I had some delicious local pasta.

Street in Ljubiana

Castel

Food market

Another view of the food market

The food at the food market

Rijeka, Croatia

My second stop was in Rijeka, the third biggest city in Croatia. I also took the train to get there. The city itself is very beautiful, same for the beaches. But I didn’t really like that the city has a massive sea port splitting the city center from the beaches. The hostel experience was the most disapointing of the whole trip so far.

Small port of Rijeka

Small stairs going to a swimming spot in Rijeka

Sunset from the swimming spot

The sea

Split, Croatia

My next stop was in Split, the second largest city in Croatia. While there was a train connection from Rijeka to Split, I decided to take the bus as the train was significantly slower than the bus. I stayed at the Hostel Old Town.

I really had a blast in Split. The city is very old, with Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Venetian influence. I met a cool group of American/Norwegian travelers in a hostel bar and got dragged to the Ultra festival, which was an amazing experience.

Small allway in the old town of Split

Old fortification

Small town scare

Another old building

Picture of the festival

Group picture of the people I meet at the festival

Chilling out the day after the festival in the shades of a tree

The day after, I went to a boat party which was equally a blast.

Boat party

Boat party with the sunset

Drinking a reasonable amount of Aperol

Dancing with a stick

More dancing

Group photo at the end

Kirigami Addons 1.9.0

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 19:10:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons is a collection of supplementary components for Kirigami applications. Version 1.9.0 is a relatively minor release, introducing two new form delegates along with various quality-of-life enhancements.

New Features

I took over the work from Tomasz Bojczuk and finished the addition of the file and folder form delegate.

These two components wrap a FileDialog and FolderDialog respectively and like KUrlRequester in KIO provide a text field with autocompletion on desktop. Currently the autocompletion is a bit basic and is based on a Controls.TextField with a Controls.Popup, but hopefully with Qt 6.10 we can use Controls.SearchField.

Bug fixes

Outside of these two new components, this release includes minor fixes and improvements from Antonio Rojas, Nicolas Fella Soumyadeep Ghosh, Thiago Sueto, Volker Krause and Yuki Joou.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Kirigami Addons 1.8.0

Mon, 19 May 2025 21:30:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons is a collection of supplementary components for Kirigami applications. Version 1.8.0 is a relatively minor release, introducing two new form delegates along with various quality-of-life enhancements.

New Features

I added two new form delegates: FormLinkDelegate (!343) and FormIconDelegate (!355).

The first one is similar to FormButtonDelegate, but it’s used to display an external link. It’s already used on the About page:

The second one was upstreamed from Marknote and allows the user to pick an icon and display the selected icon.

I also added a password quality checker to FormPasswordFieldDelegate (!345). This is particularly useful when asking users to create an account:

Visual Changes

Kai Uwe Broulik improved avatar rendering. Initials are now always displayed consistently even on small screen (!363).

Kai also fixed an issue on mobile where library information on the About page was being ellipsized (!356).

Balló György fixed several issues when using Kirigami with the QtQuick software rendering backend (!350, !351).

I made the delegates provided by Kirigami Addons now have a slightly larger touch area on mobile (!349). Unfortunately, I also had to remove the small hover animations, as they occasionally caused visual glitches (1d6e84cd).

Convenient New APIs

Joshua Goins added an opened property to ConvergentContextMenu (!352), and I added a close method to allow closing the menu programmatically (!364).

I also added support for trailing items in FormTextFieldDelegate (f996fc6e).

Documentation

Thiago Sueto ported the entire library to QDoc (!354). QDoc provides much better support for QML.

Other Changes

“trapped-in-dreams” significantly improved the performance of the date picker (!360).

Volker Krause updated the project templates to reflect current best practices for Android support (!359).

Packager Section

1.8.0 had an issue with system not having QDoc, but a bug fix release is available as 1.8.1 with the fix for that.

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Kirigami Addons 1.7.0

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:25:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons is a collection of additional components for Kirigami applications. 1.7.0 is a relatively big release bringing a new convergent component for context menus as well as various quality of life APIs to existing components.

ConvergentContextMenu

This release bring a new component which wraps the tradional context menu Controls.Menu provided by Qt and on mobile will instead displays a BottomDrawer with the list of actions.

Using it, is really easy:

import QtQuick.Controls as Controls
import org.kde.kirigami as Kirigami
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.components as Components
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.formcard as FormCard

Components.ConvergentContextMenu {
 id: root

 // Only visible on mobile to show a bit of information about the selected element
 headerContentItem: RowLayout {
 spacing: Kirigami.Units.smallSpacing

 Kirigami.Avatar { ... }

 Kirigami.Heading {
 level: 2
 text: "Room Name"
 }
 }

 Controls.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Simple Action")
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Nested Action")

 Controls.Action { ... }

 Controls.Action { ... }

 Controls.Action { ... }
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Nested Action with Multiple Choices")

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Follow Global Settings")
 checkable: true
 autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Enabled")
 checkable: true
 autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Disabled")
 checkable: true
 autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
 }
 }

 // custom FormCard delegate only supported on mobile
 Kirigami.Action {
 visible: Kirigami.Settings.isMobile
 displayComponent: FormCard.FormButtonDelegate { ... }
 }
}

Icons on Android

Kirigami Addons components are using some breeze icons which needs to be packaged manually on android by calling kirigami_package_breeze_icons with the icons used. Now Kirigami Addons, provides a Cmake variable KIRIGAMI_ADDONS_ICONS listing all the icons used by Kirigami Addons, simplifying the maintainance work of applications to keep the list of icons used up-to-date.

kirigami_package_breeze_icons(ICONS
 ${KIRIGAMI_ADDONS_ICONS}

 // own icons
 ...
)

Shortcut Editor

Kirigami Addons’ shortcut editor can now be embedded in normal ConfigurationView via a new ConfigurationModule: ShortcutsConfigurationModule.

import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.settings as KirigamiSettings

KirigamiSettings.ConfigurationView {
 id: root

 required property TokodonApplication application

 modules: [
 ...
 KirigamiSettings.ShortcutsConfigurationModule {
 application: root.application
 },
 ]
}

FormCard

The FormCardPage now uses a slighly less grey to get more contrasts with the sidebar.

We cleaned up FormComboBoxDelegate to not relly on the applicationWindow() hack from Kirigami anymore. This fixes using FormComboBoxDelegate in Plasma Settings. Unfortunately some areas of Kirigami Addons still implicitely rely on applicationWindow() to set the parent of popups (Kirigami has a similar issue). If you are using dialogs or popup in your code, make sure to explicitely pass a valid Controls.Overlay.overlay as parent to them instead of rellying on applicationWindow() being valid all the time.

The FormCard.AboutPage now show the KDE Frameworks version in use rather than the one we built against. We are also using in the AboutKDEPage component, the same bug address as in the AboutPage component. And we fixed various other small issues with the about pages. Thanks Volker and Joshua!

Other

We now use clang-format automatically and various clang-tidy warnings were fixed. Thanks Alex!

Avatar are now loaded asynchronously which should make NeoChat, Tokodon and Merkuro list views smoother. Thank Kai! Addionally the text fallback is now only rendered as plain text, which should also be sligly faster.

The RadioSelector now uses the style from Marknote.

We updated the templates provided by Kirigami Addons to the latest version of the flatpak runtimes and some other minor improvements like using the new KLocalizedQmlContext.

AlbumMaximizeComponent now expose not only the currentItem from the internal view, but also the currentIndex.

The IndicatorItemDelegate and RoundedItemDelegate components are now easier to use with drag and drop interaction. You can see that in effect in last week update of Merkuro Mail.

MessageDialog now behaves better on mobile.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Kirigami Addons 1.6.0

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons is a collection of additional components for Kirigami applications. This release brings mostly improvements to the FormCard module.

AboutPage

The about page provided by Kirigami Addons received many improvements. Joshua added icons to all the buttons.

I worked on the component section, which now contains more information about the default components as well as the underlying platform and now has a button to copy all this information to the clipboard. This is super helpful, when writing a bug report. There were also some small bug fixes with, for example, the license dialog being correctly sized.

RadioSelector

A new component is the RadioSelector, which is a simple component that allows one to choose an option between two or more choices in a horizontal layout. This is not a new component as it has already been used in Itinerary and Marknote for a long time.

There is also a FormCard version of this, called FormRadioSelectorDelegate.

FormPlaceholderMessageDelegate

Another new component is FormPlaceholderMessageDelegate, which is basically a Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage, but instead of putting it in a ListView, this one is to be put inside a FormCard.

FormPlaceholderMessageDelegate for the health certificate

Other

Volker fixed the Android integration of the date picker. He also added support for static builds (required for iOS and probably hopeful for other platforms).

Claudio fixed various issues with the DatePicker.

Joshua made the caption used in AlbumMaximizeComponent selectable with the mouse. He also fixed the separator for the IndicatorItemDelegate which only appeared after the first item.

I added icon support to FormSwitchDelegate, which is similar to what we already have in FormRadioDelegate and FormCheckDelegate.

Packager Section

Kirigami Addons 1.6.0 was tagged but the tarball are not yet available. I will update this post once it is available.

OptiImage 1.0.0 is out!

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 14:30:00 +0000

The first release of OptiImage is finally out! OptiImage is a useful image compressor that supports PNG, JPEG, WebP and SVG file types. It doesn’t do the compression itself but uses various tools like oxipng to do the compression.

OptiImage compressing screenshots

OptiImage’s settings page

Thanks to Mathis Brüchert for his work on the icon and to Soumyadeep Ghosh for a bunch of bug fixes and pushing me to do the release.

Packager Section

OptiImage 1.0.0 was tagged but the tarball are not yet available. I will update this post once it is available.

Kirigami Addons 1.5

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons is out. This releases contains mostly code cleanup and minor improvements. There is netherless a few relevant changes. Thanks to everyone who contributed some code.

New KAppTemplate’s template

A new KAppTemplate is available as a good starting point for application that manage multimedia libraries. It is based on shared design of Peruse, Arianna and the WIP Calligra Launcher.

Hopefully it helps people who want to develop game launchers and other type of specialized multimedia applications.

More templates are planned (e.g. for chat applications), so stay tunned!

FormCard

FormCard is the part of Kirigami Addons that received the most changes in this release. First of all, FormCard now use more consistent spacing and padding, which slighly less horizontal padding. Descriptions for radio and checkbox delegates are also put underneath the delegate’s main text and checkbox, in an effort to make FormCard a bit more compact.

Before

After

Additionally FormComboBoxDelegate now lets you display an inline status similar to that is available in other FormCard’s delegates.

Finally FormCard.AboutKDE was renamed to FormCard.AboutKDEPage. This improve the naming consistency with other page compoenents. A compatibility wrapper on top of AboutKDEPage named AboutKDE is still available to not break any existing applications.

Deprecations

The Banner component is now deprecated. Kirigami.InlineMessage now has a position parameter which can be set to Header or Footer. Additionally with KDE Frameworks 6.8 Kirigami.InlineMessage will look exactly the same as Banner! So there is no more reasons for this component to exists in Kirigami Addons.

Other

Kirigami Addons supports static builds with a recent enough version of extra-cmake-modules.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Open Source Conferences in September

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 18:00:35 +0000

After having participated to both Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy, I ended up going to a few more conferences in September.

Nextcloud Conference

I went to Nextcloud Conference just after going back from Akademy. Unfortunately I was quite tired from Akademy and Qt Contributor Summit and I only stayed Saturday morning. Still it was great to meet some old colleagues there.

Group photo of the Nextcloud conference

Matrix Conference

The Matrix Conference happened the weekend after the Nextcloud conference. This was the first Matrix Conference and a gathering of all types of actors involved in Matrix. From the grassroots community to companies deploying Matrix based solutions to their customers. The NeoChat team was there and we were super productive into bringing back the Android version, thanks to the help of Volker Krause. This resulted in many patches in NeoChat itself but also one patch in Kirigami.

Special mention to the food and coffee offered at the conference, which was always excellent and either vegan or vegetarian. Outside of the venue, food was also execellent with a lot of middle eastern food choice.

Here some photos of the event and the food:

Donuts

Hacking at the conference venue

Hacking at C-Base

Food outside of the venue

Linux Days Dornbirn

It was my second time going to the Linux Days in Dornbirn and while the weather wasn’t as welcoming as last time, the local Linux community was again super welcoming!

During the event, I did a talk in German about Plasma 6. This was my first time doing a talk in German and I hope I did okay. I also hosted a KDE stand with Simon Österle, who offered his help with the stand. His help has been invaluable to me, so huge thanks to him.

Like last year, after the conference, all helpers, presenters and stand holders went to a local restaurent to enjoy Käsespätzle. It was again delicious.

Here some photos of the event and the food:

Banner at the entrance of the Linux Days

Steam Deck and Plasma Mobile

The new KDE Banner

Linux Days dinner menu

Käsespätzle

Apfelstrudel

Bodensee on the way to Austria

Bodensee from the train on the way back

Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This year I went to Würzburg, which is a nice small German city famous for its wine. But I didn’t only go there for the wine, but also to attend Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy.

Qt Contributor Summit

The travel to Würzburg didn’t go as planned as Deutsch Bahn had some technical issues with their train and couldn’t reboot our train. We still managed to get in Würzburg on time and even had the change to get a small touristic tour from some locals.

Würzburg Residence and the Wine briget

The event itself was great and was the first time I attended fully a Qt Contributor Summit. Last year, I only attended a few session since the event was 20 min away from home.

There was many breakout rooms focused on some spcial topics, for me the most interesting sessions were about Qt for Python, how to hate QML, qt-project.org, Vector Graphics in Qt.

It was great to see how the KDE community still plays a big role in Qt and the Qt developers really appreciated what KDE finally moved to Qt6. They reported that the flow of contributors and bug reports increased.

Qt Chief Maintainer Volker Hilsheimer even stressed out how important it was for some of their customers to see KDE ported to Qt6, as it shows what Qt6 is stable and mature enough. Qt6 is indeed a hugo improvement over Qt5 and I am very happy how good the transition was.

Qt Contributor Summit

I think it was a great idea to have Qt Contributor Summit just before Akademy. This allowed to have many KDE Contributor to the Qt Contributor Summit and many Qt developers to Akademy. It would be great next year to do the same next if possible and encourage more people from the Open Source Qt ecosystem to join too.

Akademy

Once the Qt Contributor Summit ended, we started a few hours later with the Akademy welcome event for some KDE beers. But before that, I had some bubble tea and spent some time with some friends exploring the city.

The weekend was full with a lot of great presentations. I presented a small report about the Accessibility Goal and the Fundraising working group. I also gave a bigger talk about the KDE Application Ecosystem, which I am really passionate about. The whole slides ware made with Calligra.

I was also very happy to see the new elected goals.

Sunday was also my birthday, thanks to everyone for congratulating me. I also received a super fancy special birthday sticker and some amazing cake.

Cake and stickers

Day Trip

We had our yearly day trip too, this time at Rothenburg ob der Tauber. A charming small town in south Germany.

Day trip Rothenburg ob der Tauber

BoFs

The next few days were filled with BoFs and many informal discussions. During the Promo BoF, we decided to create a “This Week in KDE Apps” blog posts. Paul volunteered Tobias, Joshua, and me as the initial team for this.

I also hosted a BoF about a future replacement of KWallet. There were some discussions about the scope of this effort. Should we just focus on storing OAuth2 tokens as a background service what the normal users should never interact with or do a full-blow password manager like macOS Keychain. I presented my work toward the latter around based on KeePassXC and the KeePass format (see my old blogpost) as it would allow to use a standardized file format that also work on other platforms. The KeePassXC developers are working on providing a reusable library, so we don’t need to fork their code. There will likely be more discussion about this in a separate gitlab issue. The lack of a good story around passwords is not unique to KDE but to the whole Linux ecosystem. If you have some opinions about this, feel free to reach out.

I discussed with Ben, Lydia and Aniqua the infrastructure for newsletters for our supporting members. Ben managed to get an instance of Listmonk in a matter of minutes and this seems to be the right way for us to manage a newsletters or at least way better than using a mailing list for this.

Kieryn hosted the best BoF: the Sticker BoF where we shared stickers and had a competition to see who had the best decorated laptop. I won!!! and received another special sticker. Thanks Kieryn for organizing this BoF and generally making Akademy this year such an awesome event!

Stickers

I also ended up finishing a lot of work. I finally ported the last Drupal 7 website to Hugo: dot.kde.org which was a quite massive website with more than 20 years of history. I migrated the Hugo version used by KDE from 0.110.0 (which was more than a year old) to 0.134.0 and I am happy to report that the Hugo folks care a lot about stability and there was only some very small breaking changes. If you are working on some KDE websites, don’t forget to download the latest version of Hugo and to run the following command to update the KDE Hugo theme.

hugo mod get invent.kde.org/websites/hugo-kde@master

With Volker, we finally merged the status bar integration for Android apps so that KDE apps running on Android and now use breeze colors in their status bar, which looks much more integrated and like on Plasma Mobile.

Itinerary on Android with the new statubar

I also got some improvements ideas during Akademy, and I already started implementing some of them: https://invent.kde.org/pim/itinerary/-/merge_requests/324

Finally I started rewritting the Calligra launcher to Kirigami based on the old Gemini UI. Still a bit far away from a being in a mergable state but it already looks quite good.

Calligra text document templates selection

Calligra new document

Conclusion

This was a great Akademy again. Thanks a lot for all the organizers for all their work. I hope to see some KDE contributors again soon at the Nextcloud Conference and Matrix Summit both in Berlin this month. And to the Linux Days in Dornbirn.

Calligra 4.0.1

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:25:00 +0000

Calligra 4.0.1 is out. This small releases mostly contains fixes for distributions issues and updated translations.

I fixed some compatibility issues for Flatpak which is since yesterday available on Flathub.

Flathub website showing Calligra

Yaakov Selkowitz fixed the installation of the Okular generators so now if Calligra is installed, you can read your office document in Okular correctly.

Antonio Rojas dropped the unused KPart dependency and reenabled the user documentations.

I removed the old space navigator plugin which didn’t build anymore and was only used to navigate an office document with some retro controllers.

Finally, I fixed a few issues in Stage, I found while dog footing it for my slides for my Akademy presentation.

The updated slides sidebar of Calligra Stage

Get It

Calligra 4.0 is now available on Flathub. It’s also now available on Arch, KDE Neon and OpenBSD and I am aware there is some work in progress for Fedora and Mageia. Thanks everyone for packaging Calligra!

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Calligra Office 4.0 is Out!

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:05:00 +0000

Calligra is the office and graphics suite developed by KDE and is the successor to KOffice. With some traditional parts like Kexi and Plan having an independent release schedule, this release only contains the four following components:

Calligra Words: Word Processor
Calligra Sheets: Spreadsheet Application
Calligra Stage: Presentation Application
Karbon: Vector Graphics Editor

The most significant updates are that Calligra has been fully transitioned to Qt6 and KF6, along with a major overhaul of its user interface.

General

Words, Sheets, and Stage now feature a new sidebar design. Currently, this is implemented using a proxy style, which will no longer be necessary once the related merge request in Breeze is merged.

Sidebar with the new immutable tab design

I revamped the content of each sidebar tab, addressing various visual glitches and making the spacing much more consistent.

The “Custom Shape” docker has been removed, and custom shapes are now accessible through a popup menu in the toolbar across all Calligra applications.

Custom shapes popup

Regarding the toolbar, I streamlined the default layout by removing basic actions like copy, cut, and paste.

The settings dialogs were also cleaned up and are now using the new FlatList style also used by System Settings and most Kirigami applications.

Settings Dialog

Words

Word now features the new sidebar design, and the main view uses a shadow to define the document borders.

Calligra Words

The Style Manager and Page Layout dialog were also updated.

Style Manager

Page Layout

Stage

Stage didn’t really change aside of the sidebar redesign. But I am using it to work on my slides for Akademy and it is a pretty solid choice.

Calligra Stage

The tooltip for the slides are now compatible with Wayland.

Tooltip showing a slide

Calligra Sheets

As part of the Qt6 port, Sheets lost its scripting system based on the unmaintained Kross framework. In the future, it would be possible to add Python scriping, thanks to the work of Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano on getting Python bindings for the KDE Frameworks.

Visually a noticable change is that the cell editor moved from a docker positioned on the left of the spreadsheet view by default to a normal widget on the top. This takes a lot less space which can be used by the spreadsheet.

Calligra Sheets

Karbon

Karbon didn’t received much change outside of the one affecting the whole platform.

Karbon

Launcher

The intial window when opening one of the Calligra application was redesign and adopted the new “frameless style”.

Custom Document tab of the launcher page

Template tab of the launcher page

Other

Braindump is now able to compile again, but since it lacks an active maintainer, the component is disabled in release builds.
The webshape plugin has been ported from the outdated QtWebkit module to QtWebEngine and is no longer exclusive to Braindump. This means you can now embed websites directly into your word documents, slides, and spreadsheets.

Webshape

The AppStream id of every components is prefixed by org.kde.calligra. This allow Flatpak to expose every Calligra applications to your application launcher.

Get Involved

Calligra needs your support! You can contribute by getting involved in development, providing new or updated templates, or making a donation to KDE e.V.. Join the discussion in our Matrix channel.

Credits

This release would not have been possible without the high quality mockups provided by Manuel Jesús de la Fuente. Also big thanks to everyone who contributed to this Calligra release: Evgeniy Harchenko, Dmitrii Fomchenkov and bob sayshilol.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

FrOScon 2024

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:45:00 +0000

This year, I attended FrOScon for the first time . FrOScon is the biggest conference about free and open-source software in Germany. It takes place every year in Bonn/Siegburg (Germany) at the weekend and is free to attend.

For the first time, I was not at a conference to staff a KDE stand. My employer had a stand there, and it was a great occasion for me to meet some colleagues, fellow KDE, and Matrix contributors.

GnuPG Stand

So I spent the majority of my time at the GnuPG stand and discussing many things with Volker, including KDE PIM and the future of KWallet.

I also meet many Matrix community members and am excited to attend the Matrix Conference next month.

Matrix Stand

All in one, it was a great conference and I hope to see more KDE people there next year and maybe even having out own KDE stand.

Kirigami Addons 1.4

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:20:35 +0000

Kirigami Addons 1.4 is out! This release introduce a new module to manage actions similar to that we can find in the QtWidgets world with KXmlGui. This was not written from scratch but upstream the existing infrastructure from Merkuro (ex-Kalendar) and Marknote. These two applications have already been ported to this new module and more like Tokodon or KDE Keychain will follow soon.

This includes a shortcut editor to assign and modify the shortcuts of an application and a command bar to quickly search and trigger actions

Shortcut editor

Command bar

Similar to KXmlGui, the actions are defined in C++, which allows to make use KStandardActions and get consistent shortcuts accross all your applications.

class MyApplication : public AbstractKirigamiApplication
{
 Q_OBJECT
 QML_ELEMENT

public:
 explicit MyApplication(QObject *parent = nullptr);

 void setupActions() override;

Q_SIGNALS:
 void addNotebook();
};

MyApplication::MyApplication(QObject *parent)
 : AbstractKirigamiApplication(parent)
{
 setupActions();
}

void MyApplication::setupActions()
{
 AbstractKirigamiApplication::setupActions();

 auto actionName = QLatin1String("add_notebook");
 if (KAuthorized::authorizeAction(actionName)) {
 auto action = mainCollection()->addAction(actionName, this, &MyApplication::addNotebook);
 action->setText(i18nc("@action:inmenu", "New Notebook"));
 action->setIcon(QIcon::fromTheme(QStringLiteral("list-add-symbolic")));
 mainCollection()->addAction(action->objectName(), action);
 mainCollection()->setDefaultShortcut(action, QKeySequence(Qt::CTRL | Qt::SHIFT | Qt::Key_N));
 }
}

These new actions can then be used from QML thanks to the new Kirigami.Action::fromQAction property.

import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.statefulapp as StatefulApp
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.settings as Settings

StatefulApp.StatefulWindow {
 id: root

 windowName: 'Main'
 application: MyApplication {
 configurationView: Settings.ConfigurationView { ... }
 }

 Kirigami.Action {
 fromQAction: MyApplication.action('add_notebook')
 }

 Connections {
 target: MyApplication

 function onAddNotebook(): void {
 ...
 }
 }
}

There is a new template available in KAppTemplate, which allows you to kickstart your new Kirigami application with the basic skeleton with this new module and other “Kirigami Addons” modules.

Other Changes

The FormCard design was tweaked a bit more when using a dark theme, thanks to James and Joshua for their feedback.

Speaking of FormCard, with the development of KeyChain, I ended up adding a new component to the FormCard collection: FormTextAreaDelegate. This component is the equivalent of FormTextFieldDelegate but with a TextArea instead. FormComboBoxDelegate and FormTextFieldDelegate also received a bunch of new properties and functions to proxy the underlying QtQuick.Controls component.

Evgeniy Harchenko tweaked a bit the headers of the TableView component.

Finally, a new contributor Andreas Gattringer fixed a crash in the video maximizing component which was affecting NeoChat.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Keychain Development Update: Yubikey Support

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Following my latest post about Keychain, here is a new development update. Yubikey and Key Files are now supported, which allows you to requires a YubiKey to open a password database but also to save it.

Saving and editing groups also now works.

Group editing dialog

And I now started working on the database creation process. The UI is ready but I still need to bind it to the backend.

Thanks to everyone who send me encouragement messages and also to Laurent who did a lot of cleanups in the codebase.

See you in the next development update.

Initial work on Keychain

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A month ago, I started working on a new application to manage your passwords in Plasma. And while still at a PoC status, this weekend, it finally started to look like something almost usable, so it sounded like a good occassion to write a small blog post about it.

The current name is “Keychain” or “Plasma Keychain” but this is subject to change and suggestions are more than welcome.

My end goal is to provide a more future proof replacement to the ageing KWallet application. From a technical point of view, this is a fork of the internal of KeepassXC with a Kirigami GUI completely written from scratch. This means it uses the standardized Keepass format to store the passwords in the database which is implemented by many applications including on other platforms like Android and iOS (see the list of Keepass port). And while not yet exposed in the GUI, basing the work on top of KeepassXC enables a lot of interesting features not available in KWallet, like Yubikey and PassKey support, password sharing, export and import for various other password database formats, TOTP support and browser integration…

While also providing vital features for the desktop integration like the Freedesktop Secret Service protocol what we also have in KWallet.

Here are some screenshots of the current state.

This is the main view where viewing, adding, editing and removing entries already work.

Main View

This is the database generator page which unfortunately doesn’t work yet.

Database generator

And this is the UI to open an existing database.

Database generator

As you can see there is still a lot of work required, so if people are interested to help or to take a look at the current progress, the code is on KDE’s gitlab instance.

Kirigami Addons 1.3.0

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 11:20:35 +0000

Kirigami Addons 1.3.0 is out. Kirigami Addons is a collection of components to enhance your Kirigami/QML application. This release contains many change related to the settings module.

ConfigurationView

The current way to create a settings page in your application is to use CategorizedSettings with some SettingAction for each setting page. This was based on Kirigami.PageRow which was then either pushed on a layer on mobile or to a seperate page on desktop. This turned out to be quite unreliable in practice as Kirigami.PageRow is a visual element.

The new ConfigurationView is based on a plain non-visual QtObject with for the moment two backends:

One for mobile which looks similar to the Plasma Settings application of Plasma Mobile.
One for desktop which looks similar to the System Settings application of Plasma Desktop.

The API is almost the same as the previous CategorizedSettings which made porting quite easy. Here is for example a button that open the settings.

import QtQuick.Controls as Controls
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.settings as KirigamiSettings

Controls.Button {
 id: button

 KirigamiSettings.ConfigurationView {
 id: configuration

 window: button.Controls.ApplicationWindow.window as Kirigami.ApplicationWindow

 modules: [
 KirigamiSettings.ConfigurationModule {
 moduleId: "appearance"
 text: i18nc("@action:button", "Appearance")
 icon.name: "preferences-desktop-theme-global"
 page: () => Qt.createComponent("org.kde.tokodon", "AppearancePage")
 },
 ...
 KirigamiSettings.ConfigurationModule {
 moduleId: "about"
 text: i18nc("@action:button", "About Tokodon")
 icon.name: "help-about"
 page: () => Qt.createComponent("org.kde.kirigamiaddons.formcard", "AboutPage")
 category: i18nc("@title:group", "About")
 }
 ]
 }

 icon.name: 'settings-configure-symbolic'
 text: i18nc("@action:button", "Settings")

 onClicked: configuration.open()
}

With this change, both CategorizedSettings and SettingAction are now deprecated.

ConfigurationView on desktop

ConfigurationView on mobile

SpellcheckingConfigurationModule

With ConfigurationView each page is a ConfigurationModule and Kirigami Addons provides a ConfigurationModule for the spellchecking configuration of your application. This will allow to reduce code duplication between NeoChat, Tokodon, Marknote and more applications which uses Sonnet.

KirigamiSettings.ConfigurationView {
 modules: [
 KirigamiSettings.SpellcheckingConfigurationView {}
 ]
}

FormCard

FormCard design was slighly updated and now uses shadows as you might have already noticed from the previous screenshots.

SearchPopupField

Another component which is getting deprecated in SearchPopupField, there is now a replacement for that in Kirigami with the same behavior and I added an example how to port away to Kirigami.SearchDialog and I also ported all the know usage already.

Maintainance work

Aside from this major changes, there is ongoing maintaince works. This includes:

Removing the accidental QtWidgets on Android caused by QtLabs.ColorDialog (me: Carl Schwan)
Ensure all translated strings are loaded from the correct translation domain (me: Carl Schwan)
The license dialog in the AboutPage is now opened in the correct window (Jack Hill)
Fix the focus in the FormComboBoxDelegate (Joshua Goins)
Fix the capitalization in the AboutPage (Joshua Goins)
Increase the padding in FormCardDialog to match the other FormCard components

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Hash-o-Matic 1.0.1

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 10:10:35 +0000

Hash-o-Matic 1.0.1 is out! Hash-o-Matic is a tool to compare and generate checksum for your files to verify the authenticity of them. It also verify files via their use PGP signatures.

This new release of Hash-o-Matic provides updated translations and some small visual changes. In the background, the application was ported to the new QML type registration, we now support building Hash-o-Matic on Haiku and we now require released version of KDE Frameworks instead of pre-released version.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

KDE PIM Sprint 2024 edition

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 10:10:35 +0000

This year again I participated to the KDE PIM Sprint in Toulouse. As always it was really great to meet other KDE contributors and to work together for one weekend. And as you might have seen on my Mastodon account, a lot of food was also involved.

Day 1 (Friday Afternoon)

We started our sprint on Thursday with a lunch at the legendary cake place, which I missed last year due to my late arrival.

Picture of some delicious cakes: a piece of cheesecake raspberry and basil, a piece of lemon tart with meringue and a piece of carrot cake)

We then went to the coworking space where we would spend the remaining of this sprint and started working on defining tasks to work on and putting them on real kanban board.

A kanban board with tasks to discuss and to implement

To get a good summary of the specific topics we discussed, I invite you to consult the blog of Kevin.

That day, aside from the high level discussion, I proceeded to port away the IMAP authentification mechanism for Outlook accounts away from the KWallet API to use the more generic QtKeychain API. I also removed a large dependency from libkleo (the KDE library to interact with GPG).

Day 2 (Saturday)

On the second day, we were greated by a wonderful breakfast (thanks Kevin).

Picture of croissant, brioche and chocolatine

I worked on moving EventViews (the library that renders the calendar in KOrganizer) and IncidenceEditor (the library that provides the event/todo editor in KOrganizer) to KOrganizer. This will allow to reduce the number of libraries in PIM.

Remove KOrganizer plugins from kdepim-addons and move them instead to KOrganizer
Do not use a complex plugin system for handling calendar invitation and instead provide the incidence editor as a binary and call it instead. (MR 1, MR 2 and MR 3)

For lunch, we ended up eating at the excellent Mexican restaurant next to the location of the previous sprint.

Mexican food

I also worked on removing the “Add note” functionality in KMail. This feature allow to store notes to emails following RFC5257. Unfortunatelty this RFC never left the EXPERIMENTAL state and so these notes were only stored in Akonadi and not synchronized with any services.

This allow to remove the relevant widget from the pimcommon library and the Akonadi attribute.

I also started removing another type of notes: the KNotes app which provided sticky notes. This application was not maintained anymore, didn’t work so well with Wayland. If you were using KNotes, to make sure you don’t loose your notes, I added support in Marknote to import notes from KNotes.

Marknote with the context menu to import notes

Finally I worked on removing visible Akonadi branding from some KDE PIM applications. The branding was usually only visible when an issue occurred, which didn’t help with Akonadi reputation.

We ended up working quite late and ordering Pizzas. I personally got one with a lot of cheese (but no photo this time).

Day 3 (Sunday)

The final day, we didn’t had any breakfast :( but instead a wonderful brunch.

Picture of the brunch

Aside from eating, I started writing a plugin system for the MimeTreeParser which powers the email viewer in Merkuro and in Kleopatra. In the short term, I want to be able to add Itinerary integration in Merkuro but in the longer term the goal is to bring this email viewer to feature parity with the email viewer from KMail and then replace the KMail email viewer with the one from Merkuro. Aside from removing duplicate code, this will improve the security since the individual email parts are isolated from each other and this will makes it easier for the email view to follow KDE styling as this is just normal QML instead of fake HTML components.

I also merged and rebased some WIP merge requests in Marknote in preparation of a new release soon and reviewed merge requests from the others.

Last but not least

If you want to know more or engage with us, please join the KDE PIM and the Merkuro matrix channels! Let’s chat further.

Also, I’d like to thank again Étincelle Coworking and KDE e.V. to make this event possible. This wouldn’t be possible without a venue and without at least partial support in the travel expenses.

Finally, if you like such meetings to happen in the future so that we can push forward your favorite software, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

KDE Apps Initiative

Fri, 31 May 2024 15:10:35 +0000

A bit like Nate’s “5 minutes bugs” initiative, I’m announcing a new initiative to improve our applications ecosystem. The goal is to improve the quality and quantity of KDE applications and the number of application contributors. For anybody who knows me, it is not that surprising. Inside KDE, I have been mainly involved in apps for many years. I worked on all areas, from development (maintaining or co-maintaining many apps like NeoChat, Kontrast, MarkNote, Tokodon, and Arianna, and contributing to numerous other apps, but also design, promotion, websites (e.g., apps.kde.org) and even a bit of packaging (Flatpak and to a lesser extent Windows). Hopefully, making this a bit more public and making this an initiative with a bit more coordination will encourage more people to help :)

The good thing is that we don’t start from zero. In almost 30 years, KDE developers have developed over 200 applications, covering many use cases, from high-quality applications for artists (Krita, Kdenlive, Glaxnimate) to educational and office apps. We also have:

tons of shared libraries that make developing new apps more straightforward and consistent
an increasing amount of technical documentation on develop.kde.org/docs (Thanks to Thiago, Claudio, and everyone else who contributed to it)
a nice auto-generated website that lists all of these apps (apps.kde.org)
a whole CI/CD system that makes it easy to test and deploy our apps to Flatpak, Windows, macOS, Android and FreeBSD
tooling for the user documentation and the translations of apps
an opt-in service to ensure that apps are regularly released (KDE Gear)
tools like Clazy and Heaptrack to improve the code quality and performance of KDE apps
and a lot more

However there are prominent areas where we should improve our story; otherwise, we would already have a desktop and mobile market share of 90% and archived world domination.

More concrete here is a non-exclusive list of high-level tasks to achieve this goal.

Closing the Feature Gap

We need to identify missing apps compared to other app ecosystems (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and GNOME) and see where we could, with little effort, improve our app offering. While creating a KDE 3D editor like Blender is unrealistic, we could already go quite far by creating small apps that wrap up existing CLI tools or KDE libraries. To give some examples, I saw a few days ago that GNOME has a new document converter app called Morphosis. It’s a simple wrapper around Pandoc, and we could either do the same and wrap Pandoc or use Calligra’s rich collection of filters. Another example is a translation application; we already have a library in KTextAddons that does translations with many backends (offline and online), and the library even provides a ready-to-use widget. We could create a simple wrapper around KTextAddons, and boom; we get a new high-quality application with minimal maintenance effort.

Improving our Existing Applications

Aside from creating new applications, improving and reviving some of our applications is also highly valued. A lot of work has already been put into these applications, and by cleaning up their UI and bringing them up to our latest standard, we could go quite far. Some examples: Calligra (a complete office suite including presentation tool, spreadsheet, presentation, and vector editor), KTechLab (an IDE for microcontrollers and electronics), KWave (a sound editor), Parley (a vocabulary trainer).

Usually for every release, I try to have one or two apps, where I focus some time on it. In the past, I worked for example on KWordQuiz, KAlgebra, Koko. I recently ported Calligra to Qt6, so now one of my side quests is to figure out a way to have a modern QtQuick UI while using the current QPainter-based renderer using the new Window embedding in Qt 6.7

Better Marketting for our Applications

We need not only more apps but also better promotion. The apps.kde.org website has already helped a lot by listing all KDE apps, and more recently, we also created a lot of kde.org/for websites that list some KDE apps for some niches that might be interested in some of our apps. Further ideas on improving the marketing effort would be to promote new and lesser-known applications on social media regularly. But also publish a “This week in KDE apps” blog post that would cover all the news relating to first and third-party apps (e.g., new apps, updates, new app relevant APIs), and this would be community maintained with a process similar to this week in Matrix/GNOME/… where people write in a Matrix channel and a bot compile the relevant posts togethers. We need to make the progress on our apps more visible.

In addition to promoting first-party apps, we must figure out how to better promote third-party apps and extensions that use KDE Frameworks and integrate well with Plasma. Here, we could get some inspiration from the GNOME Circle initiative.

Make it More Accessible to Start a New Project

Documentation is essential in making it easy for newcomers to start projects. In the past few years, we have invested a lot of effort into that. I started develop.kde.org/docs, moved and updated a lot of old documentation from techbase.kde.org, and mentored a Season of KDE project to write a Kirigami tutorial. Nowadays, Thiago is fabulously leading the documentation effort. It is going in the right direction.

Aside from pure documentation, I’m impressed by the quality of the GNOME Workbench app and the number of examples it contains. I started a simple prototype of the same idea with Kirigami a while ago, which I need to finish (help is welcome 🤗). In the same vein, KAppTemplate and our default templates need some love.

Aside from documentation, we should create a support channel where people can ask for help with their applications. We could also make it more evident that developers are encouraged to ask on kde-devel and the VDG channel for help with their apps, even if their apps are not first-party KDE applications.

Making it More Attractive to Write KDE Applications

Writing applications using KDE Frameworks is already quite attractive, but we should communicate more on the advantage of starting an application using the KDE Frameworks more.

Firstly, by leveraging an almost 30-year-old ecosystem, app developers can reuse many libraries for their apps and find examples of how to implement the most common workflow in existing code. KDE Frameworks are also extremely cross-platform, and creating a KDE application doesn’t restrict you to only Plasma. Krita and Kleopatra have famously had millions of Windows installations. We also have Craft, which helps develop and deploy Qt applications on Windows, macOS and Android.

For first-party applications, our self-hosted Gitlab allows app developers to have full CI/CD pipelines for many platforms and even automatically publish them to the Windows Store. We also have infrastructure for translations, user documentation, wikis, code search, file sharing (Nextcloud), chat (Matrix), OSM hosting, and more. There is also a human factor; by making an app a first-party KDE app, the app received a lot of help from experimented KDE developers as part of the KDE review process and also during the entire life of the app. And we have a promo team that helps promote your app as much as possible.

For third-party applications, by being LGPL, we give users of KDE Frameworks a lot of freedom in licensing and monetizing their applications as long as they contribute their changes back to the library they use.

Not Limiting Us to C++

In terms of cross-language support, there are also two independent efforts to make KDE Frameworks accessible to more programming languages: one for Python by alcarazzam, which is part of a GSoC project I am mentoring, and another one for Rust by mystchonky. These efforts should make it easier for app developers to write KDE applications even if they are unfamiliar with C++ or prefer not to use it.

Streamline the Publishing of our Apps for Other Platforms

We now reached a state where most of our applications are automatically published on Flathub. This is not the case yet for Windows, Apple and Android. Recently we gained the ability to publish directly from the gitlab CI to the Microsoft Store, but we don’t make use of that yet in most of our apps. So let’s change that!

Getting Involved

I started creating a board of issues on gitlab and filled it with various applications ideas from a discourse thread. Feel free to take one of the open task or suggests a new app.

Additionally I also created a Matrix room to have a room for conversation.

MarkNote 1.2

Fri, 17 May 2024 16:15:35 +0000

The MarkNote team is happy to announce the 1.2 release of MarkNote, KDE’s WYSIWYG note-taking application. Marknote lets you create rich text notes and easily organise them into notebooks. You can personalise your notebooks by choosing an icon and accent color for each one, making it easy to distinguish between them and keep your notes at your fingertips. Your notes are saved as Markdown files in your Documents folder, making it easy to use your notes outside of Marknote as well as inside the app.

Notes management

This releases brings highly wanted features like the ability to choose a custom folder where to store your notes. Mathis Brüchert also added the ability to change the sorting of notes from alphabetically to by date.

Mathis made the sidebar collapsable and added a focus mode where everything but the editing page is displayed.

Finally if you prefer to just use Marknote as a Markdown editor, we made it possible to just open any markdown files directly from the file browser or the console. Additionally Marknote supports markdown files with a so called front matter, which is a common way to inject metadata to markdown in static website generators like Hugo and Jekyll.

Editing

In term of edition support, the subset of markdown supported increased again. Now it is possible to add and edit tables.

Additionally we started transforming inline markdown directly to rich text as you type. Support is limited to a few markdown constructs but is likely to grow over time.

You can now customize the font used by editor.

Aside from being able to edit text, it’s now possible to also create sketches directly from MarkNote.

Mobile Support

Mathis took care of ensuring MarkNote was fully usable when used with Plasma Mobile.

Windows and macOS support

Marknote now provides nightly builds for Windows and macOS. While the Windows builds should be fully usable, the macOS build still has an issue where most icons are not displayed. This should be fixed as soon as we can make use of the new KIconTheme version.

As part of the work to improve the macOS support, Marknote also gained global menu support for Linux.

Others

The command bar will show translated shortcuts. (Laurent Montel)
Unify spelling of MarkNote and fix typos in the README.md (Jonah Brüchert)

Get Involved

Mathis created a Matrix channel for MarkNote: #marknote:kde.org. There is also still a lot of small improvements that can be done everywhere and which don’t require a lot of programming experience. Take a look at these two tasks !31 and !27 for some inspiration on what you could work on.

Kirigami Addons 1.2

Thu, 09 May 2024 20:00:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons 1.2 is out with some accessibility fixes and one new component: FloatingToolBar.

Accessibility

During the accessibility sprint, there was an effort to ensure the date and time pickers were actually accessible. Aside from improving the screen reader support, this also allow to write Selenium integration tests which uses these components in Itinerary. Thanks Volker, David Redundo and others for working on this!

FloatingToolBar

Mathis and I worked on a new addition to Kirigami Addons adding to the existing FloatingButton and DoubleFloatingButton components. This component is perfect to add tool to editing and drawing areas and can either contain a simple RowLayout/ColumnLayout containing ToolButtons or a Kirigami.ActionToolBar.

import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.components
import org.kde.kirigami as Kirigami

FloatingToolBar {
 contentItem: Kirigami.ActionToolBar {
 actions: [
 Kirigami.Action {
 ...
 }
 ]
 }
}

Dialogs

With the style used by FormCardDialog and MessageDialog merged in Kirigami and soon in qqc2-desktop-style too, I did some changes to the FormCardDialog and MessageDialog to use the same padding as Kirigami.Dialog.

MessageDialog now works better on mobile with the layout adapting itself to the dialog size.

messagedialog with a mobile layout

Aditionally similar to KMessageBox, MessageDialog has an optional “don’t show again” option which can be enabled by setting the dontShowAgainName property similar to the KMessageBox api.

I also prepared these two components to work as standalone windows which is likely to come with this Qt 6.8 change request.

Dialog in Qt 6.8

CategorizedSettings

Jonah fixed a bug where it would be impossible to escape the settings on mobile.

Documentation

I added more screenshot to the API documentation and updated the TableView example app to use a ‘frameless’ style.

Qt 6.7 support

This release also brings support for Qt 6.7 on Android as this release introduced an API and ABI change to the Android code. Thanks Joshua for tackling this issue.

Improvements to QTextDocument

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 20:00:35 +0000

Marknote uses QTextDocument for its WYSIWYG text editor. This is surpringly quite powerful and thanks to some code borrowed from KMail rich text editor, it wasn’t hard to implement huge part of the markdown specification.

But while QTextDocument is great, I hit quickly some limits. This is why I started fixing some of them and I already have some patches up for review in Qt.

Default table style

By default the style of the tables looks straight from the 90s, I submitted a patch to use something a bit nicer: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/554132 (merged!)

Old style

New style

This is easy to change in the app itself and this is already the case in Marknote and NeoChat table rendering, but by default I believe Qt should provides a nice style so that apps don’t need to figure out how to overwrite the default style.

While working on this, I also noticed that the border-collapse property was not supported by the layout engine in QtQuick and only in QtWidget. This resulted in the border of the tables to be twice as thick as they should be. This was fortunately fixed by a simple patch: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtdeclarative/+/554151 (merged!)

Responsive images

A width and an height can be assigned to an image in a QTextDocument by using the respectives html attributes <img height="500" width="500" \>.This works correctly when the window size is known and static but less so then the window can be resized as will be the user. A common technique in web design is to add the following styles to the website:

img {
 max-width: 100%;
}

And while QTextDocument support some CSS properties, max-width wasn’t implemented. Adding the support for more properties in the HTML and CSS parser is quite simple as it was just forwarding the value of the max-width attribute to the QTextImageHandler, and a bit complicated was the handling of the % unit as previously only px and em was supported by Qt.

This resulted in two more patches, one for QtTextDocument and QtWidget and one for QtQuick.

Future

Hopefully these patches will be reviewed and merged soon. Afterward I want to add support for a few more CSS properties like: border-radius for images and some other elements, as well the border-{width, style, color} properties for paragraphs to better support <blockquote /> (important when displaying emails).

Marknote 1.1.0

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 15:05:00 +0000

Marknote 1.1.0 is out! Marknote is the new WYSIWYG note-taking application from KDE. Despite the latest release being just a few days ago, we have been hard at work and added a few new features and, more importantly, fixed some bugs.

Marknote now boasts broader Markdown support, and can now display images and task lists in the editor. And once you are done editing your notes, you can export them to various formats, including PDF, HTML and ODT.

Export to PDF, HTML and ODT

Marknote’s interface now seamlessly integrates the colors assigned to your notebooks, enhancing its visual coherence and making it easier to distinguish one notebook from another. Additionally, your notebooks remember the last opened note, automatically reopening it upon selection.

Accent color in list delegate

We’ve also introduced a convenient command bar similar to the one in Merkuro. This provides quick access to essential actions within Marknote. Currently it only creates a new notebook and note, but we plan to make more actions available in the future. Finally we have reworked all the dialogs in Markdown to use the newly introduced FormCardDialog from KirigamiAddons.

Command bar

We have created a small feature roadmap with features we would like to add in the future. Contributions are welcome!

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Note that this release introduce a new recommanded dependencies: md4c and require the latest Kirigami Addons release (published a few hours ago).

Kirigami Addons 1.1.0

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 15:00:00 +0000

It’s again time for a new Kirigami Addons release. Kirigami Addons is a collection of helpful components for your QML and Kirigami applications.

FormCard

I added a new FormCard delegate: FormColorDelegate which allow to select a color and a new delegate container: FormCardDialog which is a new type of dialog.

FormCardDialog containing a FormColorDelegate in Marknote

Aside from these new components, Joshua fixed a newline bug in the AboutKDE component and I updated the code examples in the API documentation.

TableView

This new component is intended to provide a powerful table view on top of the barebone one provided by QtQuick and similar to the one we have in our QtWidgets application.

This was contributed by Evgeny Chesnokov. Thanks!

TableView with resizable and sortable columns

Other components

The default size of MessageDialog was decreased and is now more appropriate.

MessageDialog new default size

James Graham fixed the autoplay of the video delegate for the maximized album component.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Kirigami Addons 1.0

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 10:00:00 +0000

A new version of Kirigami Addons is out! Kirigami Addons is a collection of helpful components for your QML and Kirigami applications. With the 1.0 release, we are now supporting Qt6 and KF6 and added a bunch of new components and fixed various accessibility issues.

FormCard

We added a bunch of new FormCard delegates:

FormPasswordFieldDelegate: A password field
FormDataTimeDelegate: A date and/or time delegate with integrated date and time picker which use the native picker of the platform if available (currently only on Android).

Form card example

The existing delegates also recevied various accessibility issues when used with a screen reader.

Finally we droped the compatibility alias MobileForm.

BottomDrawer

Mathis added a new Drawer component that can be used a context menu or to display some information on mobile.

Bottom Drawer in Itinerary showing the information about a station on the map

FloatingButton and DoubleFloatingButton

These two components received significant sizing and consistency improvements which should improve their touch area on mobile.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Announcing Brise theme

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Brise theme is yet another fork of Breeze. The name comes having both the French and German translations of Breeze, being Brise.

As some people know, I’m contributing quite a lot to the Breeze style for the Plasma 6 release and I don’t intend to stop doing that. Both git repositories share the same git history and I didn’t massively rename all the C++ classes from BreezeStyle to BriseStyle to make it as easy as possible to backport commits from one repository to the other. There are also no plans to make this the new default style for Plasma.

My goal with this Qt style is to have a style that is not a big departure of Breeze like you know it but does contain some cosmetic small changes. This would serve as a place where I can experiment with new ideas and if they tend to be popular to then move them to Breeze.

Here is a breakdown of all the changes I made so far.

I made Brise coinstallable with Breeze, so that users can have both installed simultaneously. I minified the changes to avoid merge conflicts while doing so.
I increased the border radius of all the elements from 3 pixels to 5 pixels. This value is configurable between small (3 pixels), medium (5 pixels) and large (7 pixels). A merge request was opened in Breeze and might make it into Plasma 6.1. The only difference is that in breeze the default will likely keep being 3 pixels for the time being.

Cute buttons and frames with 5 pixels border radius

Add a separator between the search field and the title in the standard KDE config windows which serves as an extension of the separator between the list of the setting’s categories and the setting’s page. This is mostly to be similar to System Settings and other Kirigami applications. There is a pending merge request for this also in Breeze.
A new tab style that removes the blue lines from the active lines and introduce other small changes. Non-editable tabs are also now filling the entire horizontal space available. I’m not completely happy with the look yet, so no merge requests have been submitted to Breeze.

Separator in the toolbar and the new tabs

Remove outlines from menu and combobox items. My goal is to go in the same direction as KirigamiAddons.RoundedItemDelegate.

Menu without outlines

Ensure that all the controls have the same height. Currently a small disparency in height is noticeable when they are in the same row. The patch is still a bit hacky and needs some wider testing on a large range of apps to ensure no regressions, but it is also a improvement I will definitively submit upstream once I feel like it’s ready.

Here, in these two screenshots, every control has 35 pixels as height.

Finally here is Kate and KMail’s settings with Breeze and Brise.

KQuickImageEditor 0.3.0 and Kirigami Adddons 0.12 alpha

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Two new releases are out in preparation of the first alpha release or the February Megarelease.

KQuickImageEditor 0.3.0

This is the new stable version of KQuickImageEditor. Only notable change it the support for Qt6 in addition of Qt5 support.

Kirigami Addons 0.11.75

This is an alpha release and depends on an unreleased KDE Frameworks. Please only package it if you also package the coming alpha megarelease.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org (kirigami addons) and download.kde.org (kquickimageeditor) and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Doxyqml 0.5.3 release

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 08:30:00 +0000

A new release of Doxyqml is out. Doxyqml is the tool which we use to transform our QML code in non working C++ code, but good enough for Doxyqml to understand it. This power the documentation of Kirigami, Kirigami Addons, Plasma Framework and more on api.kde.org.

This release mainly fix various compatibility bugs with more recent QML versions.

Thanks to Frederik Gladhorn, Joshua Goins, Libor Tomsik, Matej Starc and Nikolai R Kristiansen for their contributions to this release.

Here is the full release log:

Add support for single quote strings(Carl Schwan)
Ignore private functions in generated api (Carl Schwan)
Add support for typed functions (Carl Schwan)
qmlclass.py::add_import: dynamically get import qualifier (Matej Starc)
Allow arbitrary default arguments (Frederik Gladhorn)
Fix wasteful newline if there was no meaningful comment (Joshua Goins)
Change expected test data to account for the new comments (Joshua Goins)
Simplify header comments, add version/import at the very last minute (Joshua Goins)
Don’t parse internal module types (Joshua Goins)
Use @version instead of @since command (Joshua Goins)
Add import statements for QML components (Joshua Goins)
Support array literals as function args (Nikolai R Kristiansen)
Fixed parsing curly brackets in JS function (Libor Tomsik)

The release can be found on PyPi.org.

Linux Days Voralberg

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Last weekend I went to the Linux Days in Voralberg (Austria) to host a booth with Tobias and Kai. It was hosted at the Fachhochschule (a sort of university for applied science) in Dornbirn and it was my first time attending this event.

Me and Tobias in front of the LinuxDays poster at the entrance of the event

Our booth was well visited and we had a lot of interesting discussions. As always, we had various pieces of hardware on our booth: 2 laptops, a Steam Deck, a Pinephone, a graphic tablet with Krita and two Konqi amigurumis.

Our stand

Between booth duty, I still managed to watched one talk about open source deployment in public institutions in Baden Wurtenberg (a region/state in German). After the linux days, we all went to a restaurant and mass ordered Käsespätzle. Käsespätzle is a traditional food from this region and is made of cheese, Spätzle (noodles) and onions. It was excellent.

Käsespätzle

On Sunday, Tobias and I went to Golm with a local we met the day before. We took a gondola lift to reach a high-rope park in the mountains and then took an Alpine Coaster to go back in the valley. It was a lot of fun.

The view from the gondola

Picture of the high-rope pakr

After our little adventure, we again went to eat in a traditional restaurant.

Fish in a plate with noodles and pumpkin

Here a few more pictures of the trip:

Dornbirn market place

Castel

Matrix Community Summit and KDE Promo Sprint in Berlin

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000

On Thursday and Friday evenings, I went to the Matrix Community Summit at C-Base in Berlin with Tobias. It was the occasion to meet a few other Matrix developers particularly the Nheko developer, MTRNord and a few other devs whom I only knew by nickname. It was great even though I could only spend a few hours there. Tobias stayed longer and will be able to blog more about the event.

Photo of the C-Base showing a lot of electronical equipements

During the weekend, instead of going to the Matrix summit, I participated to the KDE Promo sprint with Paul, Aniqa, Niccolo, Volker, Joseph. Aron also joined us via video call on Saturday. This event was also in Berlin at the KDAB officem which we are very thankful for hosting us.

This sprint was the perfect occasion to move forward with many of our pending tasks. I mainly worked on web-related projects as I tried to work on a few items on my large todo list.

We now have an updated donation page, which includes the new donnorbox widget. Donnorboy is now our preferred way to make recurring donations and recurring donations are vital to the success of KDE. Check it out!

Screenshot of the website KDE.org/community/donations

With Paul, we also looked at the next KDE For-pages. Two of them are now done and we will publish them in the coming weeks. There are plans for a few more and if you want to get involved there, this is the phabricator task to follow.

I also updated the KDE For Kids with the help of Aniqa. It now features the book Ada & Zangemann from Matthias Kirschner and Sandra Brandstätter that sensibilise kids to Free Software. Let me know if you have other books suggestions for kids around Free Software and KDE that we can include on our websites.

This was only a short version of all the things we did during this sprint, I will let the others blog about what they did. More blog posts will certainly pop up on planet.kde.org soon.

The sprint would have been only possible thanks to the generous donation from our users, so consider making a donation today! Your donation also helps to pay for the cost of hosting conferences, server infrastructure, and maintain KDE software.

Francis 1.0

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Francis logo

Today is my birthday but it’s also the day Francis got its first release. Francis is a pomodoro app, which was originally developed by Felipe Kinoshita. The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.

Francis screnshot

The app is very simple and can be used as inspiration to develop your own Kirigami application.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Plasma Mobile matrix channel (#plasma-mobile:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I also regularly post about my progress on many KDE apps on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)

And in case you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Freedom Not Fear 2023

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Last weekend, I went to Freedom Not Fear 2023 in Brussels. Fnf is an unconference for and by European digital activists. It covers various topics, from the latest terrible European law (Chat Control) to discussing how to get more involved in our democracies.

I usually attend more technical conferences, and it was refreshing to participate in a conference where ethical and political discussions around digital rights were a central topic. It was an occasion to meet people from different backgrounds, from a Dutch politician (and self-proclaimed student for life), to a member of various organizations (e.g. Edri, NlNet, epicenter.works, Chatons, …) and journalists from Netzpolitik.

Encryption is Love, Encryption is democracy, Encryption is Safety

On Friday evening, aside from the welcome talk, we had a presentation from the European Data Protection Supervisor (Wojciech Wiewiórowski) about their work on deploying a Mastodon instance for the EU institutions and how the lack of subscribers makes it hard to justify continuing investing in it.

The presentation is on Peertube if someone wants to watch it.

Picture of Wojciech Wiewiórowski presenting his talk

During the weekend, we had an unconference-style conference where everyone could create a topic of discussion and present their work interactively. This worked very well.

Board with all the discussion topics

Many participants were using Linux (and often with Plasma), but others were unaware of KDE. So I did a small lighting talk about the KDE community and presented a few utilities we create: Plasma, GCompris, Labplot, Krita, Merkuro and Itinerary. Time was limited, so I couldn’t show everything we were doing, but I hope this small list of software shows that we are covering many different types of software.

I prepared my slides the day before, as I saw some slots for lightning talks were still available, and the new KDE For pages were of great help. But it makes sense to have some slides provided by KDE Promo, which can then be reused and modified depending on the audience. I’ll bring up the idea at the next KDE Promo sprint in 2 weeks.

Aside from the weekend, which was packed with discussion, we went on Monday to the European Parlament and had a small presentation about how the European Parlament works. We also had the opportunity to ask Patrick Breyer from the German Pirate Party questions.

Picture of Carl Schwan in front of the European Parlament and a sign “Democraty in Action”

Picture of the European Parlament

I enjoyed this conference and thank the organizers and Digital Courage for organizing this event and the two MEPs for using some of their travel allowance to bring many people to Brussels.

Group photo with most of the participants

Frameless view with QtWidgets

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

One design characteristic of our QtWidgets is that they contain a lot of frames and frames inside other frames. This worked well with Oxygen style and its skeuomorphism shadow, less so with Breeze.

I first thought this was inheriten with QtWidgets and couldn’t be fixed without much effort. But fortunately, after looking a bit into Qt source codes and in particular in the internals of QDockAreaLayout, I discovered that the engine to draw and style the built-in components of QtWidgets: QStyle has a QStyle::PE_IndicatorDockWidgetResizeHandle primitive which allows drawing separators between detachable docks and similarly there is QStyle::CE_Splitter to paint the separator between elements inside a QSplitter. This is huge because this means instead of drawing frames, we can render separator and then get rid of most of our frames in our apps.

This is how Qt Linguist tool looks like with this change.

Linguist with instead of using frames for each dock, use separators

Unfortunately, there are still some places where we do want to draw frames, so we can’t remove them all. I added a heuristic that tries to determine when to draw one based on the spacing and margins of the parent layout. A heuristic is never perfect, but an app can additionally force the style to display a frame or vice versa force the style not to display it.

For more complex apps (read with more custom components), this change require a bit of tweaking but with a handful of one-liner in Kate, I got this modern look.

Kate without frames

This is not perfect yet and this will require a bit more tweaking around the tab bar, but is already a big departure from the current style.

Similar, this is how Dolphin and Ark, look with these changes:

Dolphin with a frameless split view

Ark with 3 panes, one on the top left with a the archive content, one on the right with the name of the archive and one on the bottom left with the archive comment

If you like this change, don’t hesitate to put a 👍 on the pending MR, and if you are a developer, please test your app with this change and look at how I adapted a few apps already. I tried the change with some big apps like Krita and Kdevelop and it looks good, but the more testing, the better it is.

Kirigami Addons 0.11.0

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Kirigami Addons 0.11.0 is out! This release brings a bunch of new components. Since I forgot to write an announcement for the 0.10 release, I will mention some of the new features of 0.10 too.

This helpful component is similar to Kirigami.InlineMessage and can be used as the footer or header of a page.

Banner component at the top of page

Delegates (0.10.0)

Kirigami Addons 0.10.0 bring two new list and grid delegates:

RoundedItemDelegate: This delegate provides a nice rounded background for items inside a list or grid. You can see it in action in Arianna where it is used both in the grid and the sidebar.

Grid rounded delegates and list rounded delegate

IndicatorItemDelegate: This component is the perfect list delegate for an inbox where elements can be marked as read or unread (e.g in an email client).

Merkuro Mail folder view where some emails are marked as read and others are still unread

Avatar (0.10.0)

We moved Kirigami.Avatar from Kirigami to Kirigami Addons. We tweaked the API a bit at the same time, and Avatar is no longer based on the AbstractButton component but is just an Item which can be used for decorative purposes.

In 0.11.0, we also introduced AvatarButton that can be used if you need an interactable element.

We also updated the look of the placeholder, when no avatar images is found, to be a bit less visually heavy and use a pale color. Fun fact, this is a design I helped introduce in Nextcloud a year ago.

New avatar look

MobileForm.FormHeader (0.10.0)

FormCardHeader is now deprecated, and we are replacing it with FormHeader. The difference is that FormHeader is placed outside of the cards.

Kirigami Settings (0.11.0)

We moved Kirigami.CategorizedSettings and Kirigami.SettingAction from Kirigami to Kirigami Addons. We used this opportunity to do a visual refresh of the component.

NeoChat settings using both the new Settings and FormHeader component

Currently, the search feature only searches inside the title of the categories, but in the future, we would like it to also search inside the content of the pages.

Floating buttons (0.11.0)

In KF6, for Kirigami we are removing the automatic floating buttons. As a replacement, we are adding two new components: FloatingButton and DoubleFloatingButton. We extracted these components from Powerplant, Audiotube and Marknote.

This is how this looks in Powerplant.

Floating button at the bottom right

MobileForm is now FormCard (0.11.0)

We decided to rename MobileForm to FormCard since this new layout is also used on other form factors. As part of the renaming we used the opportunity to do some small but welcome change to the api. A lot of boilerplate for the layout is not needed anymore.

diff --git a/src/qml/RoomSettings/Permissions.qml b/src/qml/RoomSettings/Permissions.qml
index 07b8a942..674ee4a5 100644
--- a/src/qml/RoomSettings/Permissions.qml
+++ b/src/qml/RoomSettings/Permissions.qml
-import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.mobileform 0.1 as MobileForm
+import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.formcard 1.0 as FormCard

-Kirigami.ScrollablePage {
+FormCard.FormCardPage {
- id: root
-
- title: i18nc("@title:window", "Notifications")
- topPadding: 0
- leftPadding: 0
- rightPadding: 0
- ColumnLayout {
- spacing: 0
- MobileForm.FormCard {
- contentItem: ColumnLayout {
- spacing: 0
-
- MobileForm.FormCardHeader {
- Layout.fillWidth: true
- title: i18n("Room notifications setting")
- }
-
- MobileForm.FormRadioDelegate {
- text: i18n("Follow global setting")
- onToggled: { ... }
- }
- }
- }
- }
+
+ FormCard.FormHeader {
+ title: i18n("Room notifications setting")
+ }
+
+ FormCard.FormCard {
+ FormCard.FormRadioDelegate {
+ text: i18n("Follow global setting")
+ onToggled: { ... }
+ }
+ }

The qml import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.mobileform is still here and will remain for the foreseeable future. Still, please update to the new import name to get all the latest improvements.

New About Pages

The look of the about page and the about kde page was also updated to use the new Avatar and FormCard components.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

We fixed various issues with the translations not loading for some components and added some ci checks to ensure that this doesn’t happen in the future.
In AlbumMaximizeComponent, we are now using icon name compatible with more xdg-icon-themes
The AboutPage now displays more information which were previously not displayed due to some broken checks.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Reuse annotate automation

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

I ~~tooted~~ posted on Mastodon about how it would be great if more open source project would adopt REUSE.

Someone pointed out that it would be great to automate the addition of the metadata inside the files based on the git repository.

So here is a small script that does exactly that. It goes over all your .cpp and .h file and will add the header based on the list of authors as well as the first commit on that particular file.

You will want to adapt it to the license you are using for your project as well as change **/*.cpp to **/*.py if you are doing Python development.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 Carl Schwan <carl@carlschwan.eu>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

for file in **/*.cpp **/*.h;
do
 year=`git log --format="format:%ci" --reverse $file | head -n1 | cut -d "-" -f 1`
 git shortlog -n -e -s -- $file | cut -f 2 | while IFS= read -r author
 do
 reuse annotate --copyright "$author" --year "$year" --license "GPL-2.0-or-later" $file
 done
done

This is not perfect and you want to run git diff before commiting the result, to check if the change made are fine.

Debugging the keyboard navigation in your QML application

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 12:00:00 +0000

A neat trick to debug the keyboard navigation in your QML application is to put the following code snippet in your main.qml:

Kirigami.ApplicationWindow {
 ...

 title: activeFocusItem + " " + (activeFocusItem ? activeFocusItem.Accessible.name : "")

 ...
}

Afterward, then you open your application, you will see the following in your title bar:

Title bar containing the following text: “PrivateActionToolButton Sort - Merkuro Calendar”

“PrivateActionToolButton_QMLTYPE_XX(0x00000000)” is the type and address of the actively focused item and “Sort” is the accessible name of this item.

If you tab around your application, you will be able to identify multiple issues quickly:

Missing Accessible.name

You might notice that some elements only display their type and address but accessible name. It is an issue because this means the screen reader user won’t have any clues about what the button does.

If this is the case, ensure that your control has a text property set even if the control itself overrides the contentItem or is an icon only button. If you can’t use the text property, try to set the Accessible.Name property instead.

HTML code in your text

If you see some HTML code appear in your toolbar, it is an issue. Screen readers will be confused by the random XML tags in your text, so make sure to remove them from the Accessible.Name. A simple fix which works in some simple cases is to do the following to clean up your text:

QQC2.Label {
 text: "Hello <b>World</b>"
 Accessible.name: text.replace(/<\/?b>/g, '')
}

Not clear Accessible.Name

By default, your Accessible.name of your controls is bound to their text, which is a good default but you shouldn’t hesitate to add some mode details in your Accessible.Name.

One example, I had in Merkuro (formally known as Kalendar) was in the month view. There each day had as text the month number. In this case, it’s better to expose the whole date to the accessibility API, because without, context a number is not that useful.

Focused but not visible

Some items are focused but are not visible on the screen. This often happens when using a PathView/ListView with only one item visible at the time, since the previous and next item are still loaded. If this is the case, ensure that activeFocusOnTab is set to false, when the item is not visible.

Focused but no visual indicator

Some items are focused but they don’t have a focus indicator. This is an issue since the user won’t able to know which item is currently focused and then pressing space they might trigger a random action.

There is an helpful property in QQC2.Control named visualFocus which should be true when the user uses keyboard navigation to focus on a specific item. So make sure to add for example, a special border when QQC2.Control.visualFocus is true to your custom controls.

// MyButton.qml
QQC2.Button {
 id: root

 background: Rectangle {
 border {
 width: root.visualFocus ? 1 : 0
 color: Kirigami.Theme.highlightColor
 }
 }
}

The type information can gives you a valuable information to find which item is currently selected and has the broken focus.

Focus loop

In some cases, when pressing tab multiple times, you will end up in a focus loop with no way to escape it. This might be caused by broken usage of the KeyNavigation.tab property, dynamic reparenting of elements and other creative ways to break the tab navigation. In case, please fix it!

Unfocusable elements

Make sure all your interactable elements in your application are focusable by default. You can enable or disable this behavior, with the activeFocusOnTab property of Ìtem.

Mastodon and Matrix link in your AppStream file

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 21:00:00 +0000

Quick reminder, that you can include a Mastodon or Matrix link to your AppStream file and that the link will then be displayed in your application page at apps.kde.org.

<custom>
 <value key="KDE::matrix">#merkuro:kde.org</value>
 <value key="KDE::mastodon">https://kde.social/@merkuro</value>
</custom>

Details on apps.kde.org showing the link to the mastodon account and matrix channel

Akademy 2023

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Last week, I went to Akademy, the yearly KDE conference, in Thessaloniki. This is now my third in-person Akademy and fifth Akademy in total. As always, this is the occasion to meet old and new friends, learn about what others are hacking on and enjoy good food.

Friday

I arrived Friday afternoon, taking my flight from Nuremberg with a few others. Getting out of the airport, we could immediately feel the heat. After leaving our stuff at the hotel, we went to join the rest of the KDE folks at the welcome event in a frindly and cozy bar.

Saturday

On Saturday, I talked about the current state of the Accessibility (a.k.a KDE For All) goal. In short, we are making progress on that and fixing bugs everywhere in the stack, but we desperately need more community involvement as the task is big. Hopefully, the Selemiun AT-SPI bridge can be helpful, as it makes it possible to write integration tests using the accessibility API which require some accessibility support in your application to work. (Slides)

Me in a pannel with Joseph and Nate

I also presented the Fundraising WG report. We had two successful fundraising campaigns this year: Kdenlive and the end of the year campaign. (Slides)

My highlight for the day was the KDE Embedded talk from Andreas. The talk explained the progress in getting the whole KDE software packaged as Yocto layers, which already allows us to build images for RISC-V and ARM devices with Plasma BigScreen. There is definitively a lot of potential there to get KDE technologies in a wide varieties of devices. A recent example is KWin being integrated inside Mercedes cars’ infotainment system, resulting in various upstream improvements. (Slides)

Sunday

On Sunday, I had a talk with Tobias Fella about Matrix and Mastodon and how we can integrate these protocols inside our applications in various ways. First, by providing clients for these protocols: NeoChat (Matrix) and Tokodon (Mastodon), but also with less oblivious ways like using Mastodon as a comment system on your blog or by using Matrix to share your KDE Itinerary live data end-to-end encrypted with your friend without requiring a centralized server. (Slides)

My highlight for Sunday was the Selenium GUI Testing talk from Harald, which is closely related to my Accessibility goal and Automatisation goal from Nate. (Slides)

The lightning talks were also excellent. Kai showed off his integration of AlphaCloud inside Plasma to get his solar pannel stats. (Slides)

Jean-Baptiste Kempf (from VLC) presented his cross-platform remote control software stack in Rust, which promises very low latency.

Fabian Kosmale from the Qt ~~Company~~ Group presented the qmllint tool, which should really helps improve the quality of our software and reduces the risk to accidentally create regressions in our QML applications. I’m looking forward to using it on my applications and to building custom plugins for it. (Slides)

Finally, Nate presented the new Plasma Welcome wizard, which is great! (Slides)

Bofs

The rest of the week, we had “Birds of a Feather” (or BoF) which were particularly productive. I (co-)hosted multiple BoFs this year: Plasma Mobile, NeoChat, KDE PIM and Accessibility, but I also enjoyed a few other BoFs: the fundraising BoF where Victoria gave us a lot of advice on how to do fundraising for non-profit and the KDE e.V. board office hour or the Selemiun BoFs from Harald and a few others.

Myself hacking on my computer during a bof

Day trip

We went to Mount Olympus, Dion, and a beach for our day trip. As a ancient Greece nerd, I enjoyed it! Here are some photos from the trip:

Dion archelogical park

Dion Museum of archelogie

Mount Olympus

Beach beer

Trainings

We also had training at Akademy. I participated to the one from Nuno (thanks, KDAB for offering it) about Qt Design Studio, a very powerful QML visual editor and with a bridge to Figma. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attempt this training fully because it conflicted with a BoF I was hosting, but the bit I saw there was very interesting. It would be great if we could integrate Kirigami components inside this tool.

Nuno presenting his training

Kirigami Addons 0.9.0

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 06:00:00 +0000

It’s time for a new Kirigami Addons release. This new release contains the work of Joshua Goins, Laurent Montel, Thiago Sueto, Volker Krause, Shubham Arora, James Graham, Rishi Kumar and myself. Thanks for contributing!

New features

MobileForm.FormGridContainer

FormGridContainer makes it possible to make the information exposed with MobileForm more compact by putting multiple small cards in the same row. The number of columns by default is 3 on desktop unless the total number of cards makes it more sensible only to use 2 columns (e.g when there are only 2 or 4 elements).

On mobile the number of columns is reduced to only 2.

This new component was initially made by Rishi Kumar for the info grid that Tokodon, with some further improvement from myself. Here is how this looks with Tokodon.

Info Grid

And the current API:

import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.mobileform 0.1 as MobileForm

MobileForm.FormGridContainer {
 infoCards: [
 MobileForm.FormGridContainer.InfoCard {
 title: "42"
 subtitle: i18nc("@info:Number of Posts", "Posts")
 },
 MobileForm.FormGridContainer.InfoCard {
 title: "42"
 },
 MobileForm.FormGridContainer.InfoCard {
 // Clickable card
 title: "Details"
 action: Kirigami.Action {
 onClicked: pageStack.push("Details.qml")
 }
 }
 ]
}

MobileForm.AboutPage now can contains extra content

Applications can now extend the AboutPage to add extra content to it. This was driven by the need of Itinerary which need to expose the license information about the open data it uses.

About page of itinerary

Validor support in MobileForm.FormTextFieldDelegate

Application can now add a Validor to their textfield. This was driven by the need of Keysmith rewrite to use MobileForm.

About new 2fa with Keysmith

Important bugfixes

The BasicTreeItem component now uses correct spacing between items. This was caused by a regression when adding right to left support to the KirigamiAddons TreeView.

The native Android date/time pickers now works correctly even if multiple instance of it are loaded at the same time.

Shubham and James fixed various bugs with the maximized image and video component which is displayed in NeoChat and Tokodon when viewing media files.

My generic Open Source Project FAQ

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 08:30:00 +0000

People are often asking the same questions again and again about some of my projects, so it might be a good opportunity to write a small FAQ.

If you get redirected here, don’t take it personally; I am getting asked these questions very often, and I feel people often misunderstand how open-source projects work.

Why does X not have feature Y?

The most likely reason is that it still needs to be implemented. It doesn’t mean that I or other maintainers are against this feature. It is just that X is a purely non-commercial project, and I and others are currently working on it during our free time. Unfortunately, Free time is a very limited and precious resource. Between our day jobs or university projects, sleeping, eating, and other social activities, little time and energy is left.

We definitively might implement the feature in the future, but the best way to ensure this gets implemented promptly is to get involved and implement it yourself. Feel free to join our development channel beforehand and confirm that the feature is something we would like to have in the application.

We are happy to guide you to make the onboarding experience as good as possible and to help you familiarize yourself with the code base. Getting involved with open-source projects is also an excellent opportunity to learn how to program. Check out the Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, or Season of KDE for special mentoring programs, but getting involved outside these programs is also possible. On a personal note, I learned most of my programming skills by contributing to KDE, so I am very thankful for that.

When will you implement feature Y? Is Y on your roadmap?

Similarly to the previous question, X is a non-commercial project implemented during my and others’ free time. We can’t say precisely when we will be done with a particular feature as it depends on many factors: how much energy do we currently have to work on this project after our day job/university projects, are there more pressing issues, are there a technical blocker which needs to be solved first, it is fun to implement…

Again the best way to speed this up is to get involved.

What is your roadmap?

We are a non-commercial project which is purely volunteer based. We are just a bunch of developers and designers; we do not have managers, stakeholders, or clients influencing our work directly by setting deadlines or by asking and paying for specific features. Part of the reason we enjoy working on this project is that we have a lot of freedom in terms of what we want to work on and are also very flexible, allowing us to switch to a different task whenever we want.

Again the best way to influence the direction of this project is to get involved.

Announcing Arianna 1.1

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the 1.1 release of Arianna. Arianna is a small ePub reader application I started with Niccolo some time ago. Like most of my open source applications, it is built on top of Qt and Kirigami.

Arianna is both an ePub viewer and a library management app. Internally, Arianna uses Baloo to find your existing ePub files in your device and categorize them.

New features

Arianna can now display the table of content of a book. This supports complex hierarchies of headings.

A table of content displayed as a right sidebar with a tree structure

Arianna now provides you with the metadata about your books.

Dialog showing the title, author, description, license information about a book

Additionally, you can now disable the reading progress on the library page if it distracts you.

Bug fixes

You can now read books without requiring an internet connection. We also fixed various crashes happening when indexing your books.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Arianna matrix channel (#arianna:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I also regularly post about my progress on Arianna (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;) We also now have an official Mastodon account for Arianna @arianna@kde.social.

And in case you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Health of the KDE community (2023 Update)

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:05:35 +0000

It’s already two years since I last looked at KDE git history. As I decribed in the latest edition, this is inspired by the work of Hans Petter Jansson for GNOME and use the tool he made (fornalder).

fornalder is a formidable tool. It is easy to use and the documentation in the readme is great. I don’t know if this is because it was programmed in Rust but fornalder was also blazingly fast and most of the time spent during this analysis was spent on cloning the repos.

These stats include all the extragear, plasma, frameworks and release service repository as well as most of the KDE websites and a few KDE playground projects I had on my hard drive. For example, it doesn’t includes most of the unmaintained projects (e.g. kdepimlibs, koffice, plasma-mediacenter, …). Also important to note, is that this doesn’t include translations at all, since they are stored in SVN and added in the git repository with a script which remove authorship information.

I also removed manually all the scripted commits and I merged the contributions from “Laurent Montel” with “Montel Laurent” as well as the one from various contributors whose name changed.

Active Contributors

Number of contributors by years

The explaination for the colors is described by Hans Petter Janssson in his blog post by:

The stacked histogram above shows the number of contributors who touched the project on a yearly basis. Each contributor is assigned to a generational cohort based on the year of their first contribution. The cohorts tend to shrink over time as people leave.

There’s a special “drive-by” cohort (in a fetching shade of off-white) for contributors who were only briefly involved, meaning all their activity fits in a three-month window. It’s a big group. In a typical year, it numbers 200-400 persons who were not seen before or since. Most of them contribute a single commit.

In 2022, the number of active decreased slightly compared to 2021 and 2020, which might be due to the fact that the pandemic ended and people spend less time on their PC contributing to open source projects (which provided an huge boost in 2019/2020).

Commits Count

Number of commits by years

In 2022, the number of commits decreased as well, which can be attributed to the smaller number of overall contributors and a bit less activity from some long time contributors.

But I would not worry too much about these numbers as we are still above the 2019 level (pre-gitlab and pandemic) and looking already at the numbers for the first few months of 2023 it’s increasing again.

Conclusion

I would say that KDE is in relatively good health. This is particularly impressive for a project with little corporate backing and with mostly volunteers.

In 2023, we are also finalizing the transition to Qt6 and KF6 with a first release of KF6 and Plasma 6 around the end of this year, begining of next year.

There is no better time to get involved or to consider making a donation!

You can play with raw data in the form of a sqlite dabase (>200Mb)

Arianna 1.0.1

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the first bugfix release of Arianna. This release contains a lot of improvements to the accessibility of Arianna. Thanks a lot to @bgtlover@linuxrocks.online who reported many accessibility issues. Aside from fixing some bugs in Arianna, this also resulted in fixes in Kirigami, Kirigami Addons and Qt, which are on a seperate release schedule so not every bug fixes is already available. I’ll write a seperate blog post which will go into the technical details.

Aside from the accessibility fixes, this release fixes a few crashes when parsing some books. Thanks to those who tried Arianna and reported bugs (with backtrace!).

And finally, this release also improve the translations coverage, with for example Galician being one of the new supported language.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Arianna matrix channel (#arianna:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I also regularly post about my progress on Arianna (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)

And in case, you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Kirigami Addons 0.8.0

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 18:00:00 +0000

My second release of the day: Kirigami Addons 0.8.0. This release contains a few new components.

AbstractMaximizeComponent

This is part of the org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.components module and is a popup that covers the entire window to show some items. This is already used in NeoChat and Tokodon to magnify image and videos.

Thanks James Graham for developing the initial version and upstreaming it to Kirigami-addons.

Maximized image in NeoChat

Convergent SpinBox

Another new component is the convergent SpinBox from the org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.mobileform module.

This is just a normal spinbox on desktop.

Spinbox on desktop with small touch targets

But on Plasma Mobile/Android the touch target becomes bigger.

Spinbox on desktop with larger touch targets

Others

Aside from this two components this release contains some small bugfixes and other minor API improvememts.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Plasma Mobile matrix channel (#plasmamobile:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

And in case, you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Announcing Arianna 1.0

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the initial release of Arianna. Arianna is a small ePub reader application I started with Niccolo a few months ago. Like most of my open source applications, it is built on top of Qt and Kirigami.

Arianna is both an ePub viewer and a library management app. Internally, Arianna uses Baloo to find your existing ePub files in your device and categorize them.

Library view

The library view will keep track of your reading progress and find new books as soon as you download them.

If your book library is particularly big, you can either use the internal search functionality, or look through the various categories and find books grouped by genre, publisher or author.

Library search popup showing a few search results

Library grouped by authors

The actual reader is quite basic as its only function is to show the content of the book. That said, it does have features like a progress bar to keep track of your reading progress and also lets you navigate within the book.

It is also fully navigable with the keyboard.

Ebook reader showing the book content

Another feature allows you to search within a book for a specific word.

Ebook reader showing the book content

Get it

Arianna will soon be available in Flathub (once the submittion is accepted). Please also ask your distribution to package Arianna.

Credits

This application would have not been possible without the previous work carried out by Foliate, from whom I copied and adapted the epub.js integration, and Peruse from whom I copied and adapted the library management code. Finally I would like to thank Šimon Rataj who made numerous contribution and fixed multiple bugs.

Arianna is also translated in multiple languages, thanks to some wonderful translators. Here is the alphabethically sorted list: Basque, British English, Catalan, Czech, Dutsch, Finish, French, German, Georgian, Hungarian, Interlingua, Mandarin, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Valencian.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Arianna matrix channel (#arianna:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I also regularly post about my progress on Arianna (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)

And in case, you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Accessible icon-only buttons in QML

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Buttons are a fundamental element in user interfaces, but it’s easy to make some accessibility mistakes when using icon-only buttons in QML.

First, please avoid icon-only buttons and only use then, when the icon is very well known (e.g. arrows, delete or favorite icons) and the space is limited.

In case you still want to use an icon-only button. Make sure to set the text: property and that it is also translatable. Otherwise, a screen reader won’t know that to say about the button. This is because the text: property is used as default value for the Accessible.name: property, so when it is not set Accessible.name is empty and the screen reader can only say that the currently focused control is a button. The trick to have both the text: property set and an icon-only button is to use the display: property and assign it to the AbstractButton.IconOnly.

This gives us the following code:

import QtQuick 2.15
import QtQuick.Controls 2.15

Button {
 text: i18n("Favorite")
 icon.name: 'favorite'
 display: AbstractButton.IconOnly
}

Finally, another essential part is that an icon-only button requires a tooltip. We need the tooltip in case the user is unsure about the meaning of the icon and we need more details.

import QtQuick 2.15
import QtQuick.Controls 2.15

Button {
 text: i18n("Favorite")
 icon.name: 'favorite'
 display: AbstractButton.IconOnly

 ToolTip.text: text
 ToolTip.delay: Kirigami.Units.toolTipDelay
 ToolTip.visible: hovered
}

Note that this used the ToolTip attached property instead of a separate item ToolTip {} as it is more memory efficient. With the attached property, we share the tooltip instance across the entire application instead of instanciating a ToolTip popup for each button.

Digital Market Act workshop in Brussels

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0000

This Monday, I was in Brussels to attend a stakeholder workshop for the Digital Market Act (DMA) organized by the European Commission. For those who don’t know that is the DMA, it’s a new law that the European Parliament voted on recently and one of its goals of it is to force some interoperability between messaging services by allowing small players to able to communicate with users from the so-called Gatekeepers (e.g., WhatsApp).

I attended this meeting as a representative of KDE and NeoChat. NeoChat is a client for the Matrix protocol (a decentralized and end-to-end encrypted chat protocol). I started developing it with Tobias Fella a few years ago during the covid lockdown.

I learned about this workshop thanks to NLNet, who funded previous work on NeoChat (end-to-end encryption). They put Tobias Fella and me in contact with Jean-Luc Dorel, the program officer for NGI0 for the European Commission. I would never have imagined sitting in a conference room in Brussels, thanks to my contribution to open-source projects,

Visitor pass

Regarding the workshop itself, this was quite enlighting for me, who is just a minor player there and only work on NeoChat and many other KDE application in my free time as a volunteer. I expected a room full of lawyers and lobbyists, which was partially true. A considerable part of the room was people who were silent during the entire workshop, representing big companies and mostly taking notes.

Fortunately, a few good folks with more technical knowledge were also in the room. With, for example, people from Element/Matrix.org, XMPP, OpenMLS, Open Source Initiative (OSI), NlNet, European Digital Rights (EDRi), and consumer protection associations.

Photo of the room

The workshop consisted of three panels. The first was more general, and the latter two more technical.

In the first panel, the topic was the scope, the trade-offs, and the potential challenges of the Article 7 of the DMA. This panel was particularly well represented by a consumer protection organization, European Digital Rights, and a university professor, who were all in favor of the DMA and the interoperability part of it. Regarding the scope, one topic of discussion started by Simon Phipps was if gatekeepers like Meta should be forced to also interop with small self-hosted XMPP or Matrix instances or if this would only be about relatively big players. Unfortunately, I also learned that, while it was once part of the draft of the DMA, social networks are not required to interop. If Elon had bought Twitter earlier, this would have probably been part of the final text too. From this panel, I particularly appreciated the remarks of Jan Penfrat from the EDRi, who mentionned that this is not a technical or standardization problem and pointed out that some possible solutions like XMPP or Matrix already exist for a long time. There were also some questions left unanswered, like how to force gatekeepers to cooperate, as some people in the audience fear that they would make it needlessly difficult to interoperate.

After this panel, we had a short lunch, and this was the occasion for me to connect a bit with the Matrix, XMPP and NlNet folks in the room.

The second panel was more technical and was about end-to-end encryption. This panel had people from both sides of the debate. Paul Rösler, a cryptography researcher, tried to explain how end-to-end encryption works for the non-technical people in the audience, which I think was done quite well. Next, we had Eric Rescorla, the CTO of Mozilla, who also gave some additional insight into end-to-end encryption.

Cisco was also there, and they presented their relative success integrating other platforms with Webex (e.g. Teams and Slack) with for example, the possibility of creating Webex calls from Slack. This ‘interoperability’ between big players is definitively different from the direction of interoperability I want to see. But this is also a good example showing that when two big corporations want to integrate togethers, there are suddenly no technical difficulties anymore. They are also working on a new messaging standard (with reminds me a bit of xkcd 927) as part of the MIMI working group of the IETF and they already deployed that in production.

Afterward, it was the turn of Matrix, and Matthew Hodgson, the CEO/CTO at Element. Matthew showed a live demo of client-side bridging. This is their proposed solution to bridging end-to-end-encrypted messages across protocols without having to unencrypt the content inside a third-party server. This solution would be a temporary solution; ideally, services would converge to an open standard protocol like Matrix, XMPP, or something new. He pointed out that Apple was already doing that with iMessage and SMS. I found this particularly clever.

Last, Meta sent a lawyer to represent them. The lawyer was reading a piece of paper in a very blank tone. He spent the entirety of his allocated time, telling the commission that interoperability represents a very clear risk for their users who trust Meta to keep their data safe and end-to-end encrypted. He ignored Matthew’s previous demo and told us that bridging would break their encryption. He also envisioned a clear opt-in policy to interoperability so that the users are aware that this will weaken their security and express a clear need for consent popups when interacting with users of other networks. It is quite ironic coming from Meta who in the context of the GDPR and data protection, was arguing against an opt-in policy and against consent. And as someone pointed out in the audience, while Whatsapp is end-to-end-encrypted, this isn’t the case for Messengers and Instagram conversations, which are both also products of Meta. The lawyer quickly dismissed that and explained that he only represented Whatsapp here and couldn’t answer this question for other Meta products. As you might have guessed, the audience wasn’t convinced by these arguments. Still, something to note is that Meta had at least the courage to have something in front of the audience, unless other big gatekeepers like Microsoft, Apple and Google who were also in the room but didn’t participate at all in the debate.

Finally, after another small coffee break, the last panel was about abuse prevention, identity management, and discovery. With Meta in the panel again, consent was again a hot subject of discussion. Some argued that each time someone from another server joins a room, each user should consent to this new server can read their messages. This sounds very impractical to me, but I guess this goal is to make interoperability impractical. It also reminds me very much of the GDPR popup, which privacy-invading services try to optimize using dark patterns so that the users click on the “Allow” button, just that in this case, this will try to convince the user to click on the “Don’t connect with this user coming from this untrusted and scary third party server” button.

Slides about efficient design for effective interoperability

There was also some discussion about whether this was the server’s role in deciding if they allow connection from a third-party server or the user’s role. The former would mean that big providers would only allow access to their service for other big providers and block access to small self-hosted instances, and the latter would give users a choice. Another topic was the identifier, which, as someone from the audience pointed out, phone numbers used by Whatsapp, Signal and Telegram are currently not perfect as they are not unique across services and might require some standardization.

In the end, the European Commission tried to summarize all the information they got today and sounded quite happy that so many technical folks were in the room and active in the conversation.

And finally, after the last panels, I went to a bar next to the conference building with a few people from XMPP, EDRi, NlNet and OpenMLS to get beers and Belgium fries.

Me outside of the building

Tokodon 23.02.0 release

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

I am happy to announce Tokodon 23.02. This release contains around one month’s worth of improvements, and while it is only one month, this release is feature packed! This was an exciting month for me in general, I started working at KDAB, went to FOSDEM in Brusels where I meet a bunch of other KDE folks, and spend time enjoying my new life in Berlin.

Me at the FOSDEM booth

Fortunately I still found some time to contribute to Tokodon, and Joshua Goins has also been a very active contributor. The number of contributors is also growing with a bunch of new faces: Aakarsh MJ, Harshil Jani, Mohit Marathe, Raphael Gaschiganrd, Rishi Kumar who also contributed some code in this release.

So what is Tokodon? Is is basically a client for the federated social network Mastodon. It is built with Kirigami with the goal to have a great integration with Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile, but it also works on other desktop environments, and even Windows and macOS.

Get it!

You can download Tokodon 23.02.0 from Flathub and from F-Droid using the KDE repo. Currently we don’t offer binaries for Windows and macOS but if you want to help with that, please get in touch on Matrix.

Post composer rewamp

As part of this release, we reworked the post composer considerably. This is the central area of your interaction with Mastodon and we wanted it to be more reliable.

It is now possible to add an alternative description to images and videos sent via Tokodon. This is very important for accessibility as images without alternative description are invisible for screen readers. (Carl Schwan, Link)

Alternative text

It is also now possible to see the upload progress when uploading an attachment, giving you some visual feedback that something is happening. (Carl Schwan, Link)

An error message will be displayed when sending a message didn’t work. The post composer will only be closed once the message is sent, so if there is an network error the post you wrote is not lost and you can try posting it again. This should make Tokodon much more reliable for interacting with Mastodon. (Joshua Goins, Link).

Error displayed when an error occurred when sending a post

Another big thing is that we are now supporting editing posts, so in case you made a typo you don’t need to delete your post and post it again. (Joshua Goins, Link)

And finally Tokodon respects your default sensibility and visibility preferences when posting, and when replying to a message, the visibility of the message will be inherited in your reply. So if you are replying to a private message, the reply will automatically be set to be also private. (Carl Schwan, Link)

Timeline and notification view

Aside from the improvements to the post editor, we continued to polish the timeline.

The models for timelines has been completely refactored. Aside from making the code nicer to work with and a bit faster, it also made it possible to show the avatar of who boosted or liked a post. (Carl Schwan, Link)

Avatar of the user who boosted a post is now displayed

Tokodon now doesn’t only support image as attachments, but we now also have a prelimary support for videos and gifs. (Joshua Goins, Link).

Additionally the previews for attachements should be better displayed with correct aspect ratio. (Joshua Goins, Link 1, Link 2)

New attachment layout

Other ways to interact with a post are now available in an overflow menu for posts adding actions like a “Copy link to post” feature (Joshua Goins, Link), a bookmark feature (Joshua Goins, Link) and the previously mentioned edit feature (Joshua Goins, Link)

Overflow menu showing additional actions

There are now some new special pages available in the sidebar to display your bookmarks as well as your favorite posts. (Joshua Goins, Link)

Favorite timelines

We now handle notifications for poll updates (Riya Bisht, Link), and when a post you interacted with gets updated (Harshil Jani, Link)

There are now placeholders for when you currently don’t have any notifications or conversations instead of showing you an empty view (Mohit Marathe, Link)

Search

The search field introduced during the last released got a nice visual refresh…

Search popup

… And it now supports searching for hashtags. (Joshua Goins, Link)

Other Improvements

It is now possible to configure the color scheme used by Tokodon independently from the Plasma color scheme. (Joshua Goins, Link but most of the code was copied in good tradition from NeoChat)

Color Scheme

We added the missing separators in the settings pages (Rishi Kumar, Link)

It is now possible to directly edit your account from your profile page (Joshua Goins, Link)

The user’s avatar in the profile page now uses the standard Kirigami.Avatar component (Joshua Goins, Link)

The behavior of selectable text fields is now consistent (Aakarsh MJ, Link)

Important Bugfixes

A bug that broke loading the timeline in some conditions has been fixed (Carl Schwan, Link)

We fixed rendering of some attachments caused by a bug in the blurhash decoding. (Joshua Goins, Link)

Storing the account settings is now using the account username and instance hostname as a unique identifier. This fixes situations where someone had multiple accounts with the same username on a different instance. (Raphael Gaschiganrd, Link)

Technical Details

Aside from the many new features, there were several large re-factorings of the code base to cleanup some code that younger-me wrote. The C++ code base now has a coverage of 36%, this is a small increase compared to the previous release. Rishi Kumar is also working on integration tests as part of his Season of KDE project.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Tokodon matrix channel (#tokodon:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I’m also regularly posting about my progress on Tokodon (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)

And in case, you missed it, as a member of the fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Tokodon 23.01.0 release

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Happy new year! To get a good start in this new new year, I’m happy to announce that Tokodon 23.01.0 is out! This is a new major release for Tokodon and while it’s been only 2 weeks since the last major release, this release is packed with new features and improvements.

Tokodon is a Mastodon/Pleroma/Nextcloud Social client built with Kirigami that I started back in spring 2021. Tokodon has a great integration with KDE Plasma and Plasma Mobile, but it also work on other desktop environments and even Windows and macOS.

Get it!

You can download Tokodon 23.01.0 from Flathub and from the F-Droid using the KDE repo. Currently we don’t offer binaries for Windows and macOS but if you want to help with that, please get in touch. build

New timeline design

The first thing you will notice, when trying out this new version, is the new layout of the timelines.

I updated it to follow more closely the design of Mastodon web-UI and I also spent some time adjusting the spacing and typographie to be more consistent.

Tokodon main view

Search

It is now possible to search for posts, accounts and tags directly from within Tokodon.

Search field inside tokodon

Hashtag Handling

Tokodon now handles hashtags better. Previously, when clicking on a hashtag, Tokodon would redirect you to the website where you could see the posts that included the selected hashtag. Now you don’t need to leave Tokodon anymore, and the posts are displayed inside the app like any other timeline.

Conversation View

Tokodon now includes a basic conversation view. This shows the list of your last direct conversations. This makes it possible to see your conversation in a much nicer way than with the latest mentions view.

Conversation in Tokodon

I plan to improve this feature further in the future, as I will be adding support for conversation markers and maybe offer a real chat-like view for conversations (which I will shamelessly steal from NeoChat).

Poll Support

It’s now possible to view and interact with polls. This supports both multiple choice and single choice polls, but creating new polls is still not possible.

Poll in Tokodon

Account Editor

I also added an account editor. The merge request was actually 10 months old and I started it during a stream at the last FOSDEM. As you might imagine, it was not that fun to rebase. But it is finally possible to edit your account metadata and preferences directly from Tokodon.

Account editor

I also submitted a pull request in Mastodon itself to expose more settings in the API.

Real-Time Timeline Update

Tokodon was already handling some real-time events coming from the server, but until now this only included notifications. Now Tokodon will also handle new incoming messages and add them to the timeline. It will also delete messages as soon as the server asks for them to be deleted.

Technical Details

Aside from the many new features, there was several large re-factorings of the code base to cleanup some code that younger-me wrote. The C++ code base now has a coverage of 35%, and I am pretty happy with this increase from 12% of the previous release.

Coming next, I want to focus more on the post editor. The back-end also needs to be cleaned up and several important features are still missing (choosing the language, posting polls and adding alternative textual descriptions to images). I already created a branch for that and you can follow the work on this merge request.

And for those who prefer a full changelog, here it is:

Update year
Update to 23.01
Cleanup notification model
Cleanup loading handling
Fix timezone handling
Remove dead code
Remove refreshing button now that refreshing happens automatically
implemented update notifications
Tweak appstream summary
timelinemodel fix crash if json array is empty
Fix unit tests
Fix loading timelines
Correctly handle streaming event about new and deleted posts
Remove debug output
Release new version 22.12.0
Cleanup and fix account model
Fix search on mobile
Reduce number of warning in logs
TootComposer.qml fix qmlscene issue "missing ":""
Run clang format
Fix rendering of poll when no vote has been submitted
Handle pressing back button with image preview open
Remove dead code
AuthorizationPage.qml authorize token URL should wrap
Add more tests
Cleanup backend code for profile edition
Port to mobileform
Account editor (second try)
fix: No Preview for Hashtag links
Dont't show account switcher when no account is loaded
Fix clazy issues
Fix some compile warning
More testing
Add tests for threading
Improve thread UI
Fix opening thread
Clang format
Add more tests and fix canFetchMore behavior
Fix marking post as pinned
More refactoring
Remove fetching and fully replace by loading
Tag handling
Ship our own icon
Update icon name
Fix checkable state
Add unit test
Use breeze icons
Add conversation view
Remove dead code
Handle case where no spelled is installed
Fix crash in notification view when interacting with post
Propagate visibility in replies
Don't reset timeline when switching account
Fix accountModel returned by follow activity
Display blurhash when loading image
Don't show link preview on mobile
Fix replies count
Improve default debug output
Optimize tooltip in PostDelegate
Fix fetching the global timeline
Fix replying to someone add yourself as mention
Improve spacing of text field
Improve overall spacing
Add more unit tests
Implement searching for accounts and posts
Add a NetworkProxy page to settings
Port AuthorizationPage to MobileForm
Improve layout of already voted polls
Add more tests
Implement polls in the frontend
Add poll implementation in backend
Fix test
Reduce spacing between action and author
Update post layout
Remove duplicate headers between cpp/h files
Workaround kirigami regression
Don't show drawer handle when showing full screen image
Fix crash when loading own account
Fix appdata version

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Tokodon matrix channel (#tokodon:kde.org) and I would be happy to guide you.

I’m also regularly posting about my progress on Tokodon (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me ;)

And in case, you missed it, as a member of the fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE is currently running an end of the year campaign. Don’t hesitate to donate!

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Tokodon 22.11.2 release

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 19:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the release of Tokodon 22.11.2 (and 22.11.1 who I released earlier this month and forgot to properly announce). These releases contain mostly bug fixes but also some welcome interface improvements.

First this adds an account switcher (similar to the one Tobias Fella implemented in NeoChat). Very usefully when you need to manage multiple accounts and want to quickly switch between them.

Tokodon

This also change the image preview from appearing in a separate full screen window to be contained inside the window. This follow the similar change from from James Graham in NeoChat.

Preview full window mode

Joshua Goins improved the loading of media attachment and made it possible to now hide sensitive image by default using the blurhash effect. This is also using the already existing implementation of blurhash from Tobias in NeoChat and you might start to see a pattern in this release. ;)

Blurhash post

Finally I added support for custom emojis in many places inside the UI. Perfect if you want to show you true verified checkmark in your profile :)

Aside from the nice new improvements, I improved the spacing in the app and while not perfect yet, I hope this makes Tokodon more enjoyable to use. Joshua Goins has also made various improvements to our internal networking code and this should offer better reliability and less prone to crash code. And I fixed an important crash on start-up that was affecting a lot of users

Finally I started adding unit tests in Tokodon and added the infrastructure to mock a Mastodon server. We now have reached 12% unit tests coverage and I hope this number will grow after each release.

And for those who prefer a full changelog, here it is:

Remember selected account
Update metadata
Fix rebasing issue
Attempt to fix Qt complaining about incomplete Post type
Add parents to replies made by Account::get and similar requests
More fixes
Move away from shared_ptr for Post
Fix double-free bug when viewing certain timeline pages
Add qtkeychain to .kde-ci.yml
Fix hide image icon missing on Android
View your own profile via account switcher
Add emoji support to page headings and profile bios
Fix translation extraction
Fix replying from the notification timeline
Fix notification list
Fix fetching the timeline twice
Release 22.11.2
Fix showing view-sensitive button too often
Don't have text autocomplete on login form
Add missing release info
Release 21.11.1
Remove usage of anchors in layout
Use blur hash for loading images and sensitive media
Improve hover effect on the card
Fix qt6 build
Fix dependency in the ci
Put accessible description at the bottom
Improve the look of cards
Use Kirigami.ActionToolBar
Allow download images
Full screen image like neochat
Add m_original_post_id for use in timeline fetch
Propertly reset pageStack when switching account
Polish NotificationPage
Improve layout of follow notification
Fix crash when switching account in the notification view
Fix translation catalog loading
Post: Fix memory leak
Fix off by one error in notification model
Posibly fix crash (second try)
Remove debug leftover
Posibly fix crash at startup
Improve account switcher
Make tap and text selection work together in PostDelegate
Fix wrong header url
Fix handling of empty displayName
Improve layout of PostDelegate
Add InteractionButton component for likes, boosts and replies
Add Qt 6 CI for FreeBSD and Android
Fix custom emoji in account lists
Port LoginPage to mobile form
Add runtime dependency for org.kde.sonnet
More cleanup and add autotests
Properly use getter and use displayNameHtml in more places
Implement custom emojis
Fix coverage badge
Add a refresh button for desktop devices
Reset message handler properly to prevent threads overwriting each other
Fix setInstanceUri early exit, preventing client id from being fetched
Add coverage badge
Fix reuse
Add a qDebug filter to remove confidential data
Add model tests
Add basic test
Split account in an abstract class without networking
Remot stray qDebug leaking token

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Kirigami Addons 0.5 release

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 11:40:35 +0000

Just a small note that Kirigami Addons 0.5 was released yesterday. This update only contains some small cleanups here and there (e.g. moving some implementation details from the public api to the private one).

The package is available on download.kde.org and was signed with my new GPG key

Promo sprint in Saumur

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Last month, I was in Saumur (France) to attempt a KDE Promo sprint. This was my first sprint since the pandemic, actually this might even be my first ever official KDE sprint as before the pandemic I primarely attended conferences (Akademy, Fosdem, Libre Graphics Meeting, Linux App Summit, …) but no official sprint.

The sprint took place during the weekend and was a great occassion to meet Allon, Aron and Neophytos for the first time. Aside from them I also meet Claudio, Paul, Joseph and Aniqua would I had already had the chance to meet before.

While the sprint was only 2 days long, I think we had some really productive discussions about the general strategie we should take and also how to move forward with some stuck tasks.

Personally I was quite happy to unblock one of my previous idea of creating “KDE for”-webpages. I already created a KDE for Kids page a long time ago but never managed to find the time and motivation to create more of them. So during the sprint, we started to brainstorm a bit for a “KDE for Creators” page, you can already take a look at the wip prototype here and if you have suggestions and want to help we have a phab task.

Aside from all the productive discussions, Allon made us discover Saumur. It’s a really nice city near the Loire. But I need to say that I was quite depressed at the level of water in the Loire, it looked almost empty. Good reminder that climate change is real and human made.

Aside from the sad state of the Loire, we also tasted a lot of good food. We had some gallete bretones on Sunday evening and it was delicious. Allon also invited us Saturday night at his place and he made fouée for us.

bread oven with fouée

It’s a local speciallity and it was really good and I was so full at the end of the day. Thank you Allon and your family for being such wonderful hosts!

Sprint photo

Daily driving the steam deck

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Tuesday night, I managed to break the screen of my laptop. This is particular annoying when you don’t have any external screen at home and need to work. Fortunately the scren wasn’t completely broken, and I managed to survice Wednesday, with half of the screen working.

From half of the screen working on Wednesday, the situation got worse on Tursday and I was forced to find another solution. My only other Linux powered devices at home were a PinePhone and my SteamDeck. Performance wise, the choice was easy and I choose to try to use my SteamDeck. And so my workstation on Tursday and Friday ended up like this:

Steam deck workstation

I connected the dev environment of my laptop with SSH and it kinda worked. I did some commit. I even managed to do call and share my screen for a demo/presentation at work. But still the experience on the small screen wasn’t that great.

Fortunately, I ordered a new laptop (Thinkpad E14 gen 4) and it arrived on Friday afternoon. The new laptop has a working screen but no mainline wifi drivers. So took me a bit more time than expected to build and sign the out-of-tree drivers with secure boot enabled.

I love hardware.

KDE PIM in May and June

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 12:00:35 +0000

KDE PIM is the set of applications that helps you manage your email, contacts, appointments, tasks and more.

In the months since the KDE PIM March-April report there have been two patch releases for Kontact, and over 1300 changes made by more than 30 contributors have been integrated. Here are some of the highlights.

General Improvements

Laurent continued working on the Qt6 support. The KDE PIM packages are now compiling with Qt6.

KAdressBook with Qt6

AKregator with Qt6

Kleopatra with Qt6

Sieve Editor with Qt6

Kleopatra

Ingo worked mainly on improving the usability and accessibility of the certificate manager Kleopatra over the last two months:

Generating a new OpenPGP certificate is now possible on a Full HD display with 400 % magnification. (T5969)
Generating a new OpenPGP certificate has been made more accessible by replacing the QWizard-based dialog with a few separate dialogs. (T5832)

Certificate Creation - Step 1

Certificate Creation - Step 2

Certificate Creation - Step 3

The tool bar in the main window is now accessible with the keyboard. (T6026)
Links embedded in text labels now behave like normal links you would find on the web. This means that accessibility tools (such as screen readers) will read them as such, instead of like selected text. (T6034)
Labels that receive the keyboard focus are now marked with a focus frame. (T6036)
The accessibility of the Certificate Details dialog has been improved. (T5843)

Moreover, new features were added:

The Certificate Details dialog now allows refreshing an individual certificate from the configured keyserver and via Web Key Directory. (T5903)

Certificate Details dialog with an accessible focus indicator

Administrators can now specify the minimum and maximum validity of newly generated keys. (T5864)

And a few smaller things were added or fixed:

A few operations that are not possible for keys stored on smart cards, e.g. creating a backup of the secret key or changing the passphrase used to protect the secret key, are now disabled if a smart card key is selected to avoid weird error messages. (T5956, T5958)
Felix Tiede added a feature to publish a GPG key at a WKS-enabled mail provider.

As this requires Kleopatra to operate with Akonadi to evaluate a mail- transport for a GPG key user id and then send a MIME mail message, this feature is only available on systems where Akonadi is installed prior to building Kleopatra. On all other systems it is unavailable.

Kontact

Glen fixed a few issues in the settings for the Summary View of Kontact:

The Special Dates section obeys the check boxes for showing birthdays and wedding anniversaries of contacts, and for showing anniversaries in other calendars.
The check box for hiding open-ended to-dos in the Pending To-dos section is checked correctly.

KOrganizer

Glen also worked on the task view of KOrganizer.

Right-clicking on a task’s start date now displays a date editor widget which you can use to change the start date. Right-clicking the due date still edits the due date. If a change to either date would cause the start date to be later than the due date, the other date is adjusted. Additionally marking a task as complete in the Summary View of Kontact, will no longer cause a crash.
KOrganizer now uses the “stand-alone” form of month names in appropriate places (“June”, as opposed to “June 1”). In some languages the two forms are different.
In the Incidence Editor, unchecking the “Due” check box of a recurring to-do now accomplishes something.
If a yearly-recurring item has exceptions, the Item Viewer lists the exceptional years.

KMail

Laurent fixed a few memory leaks in KMail and he started working on integrating Message Disposition Notification (MDN) directly into the viewer instead of in a separate dialog. This will allow sending read receipts more easily.
He also fixed marking more than 1000 emails as read at the same time (BUG 453969).
Sandro Knauß worked on refactoring the key expiry checker in preparation for showing it in a non-blocking dialog in the future.
They also made it possible to overwrite the encoding of the PGP inline messages.

Pim-data-exporter

The data importer and exporter received a lot of bug fixes that will improve the import of maildir resource and the collectio attribute.

Calendaring

There are now Akonadi and Android plugins for KCalendarCore’s platform calendar access API. This isn’t aimed at calendaring applications like Kalendar or KOrganizer, but at apps for which just basic calendaring access is required. See the separate blog post for details: Android Platform Calendar Access.

KDE Itinerary

Please see the dedicated summary blog post: KDE Itinerary April May

KAlarm

David Jarvie fixed a crash in the font chooser after deselecting a default font (BUG 453193)
The fade controls won’t be displayed if the current phonon backend doesn’t support fade. And sound files are now correctly played when played previously with fade.

Kalendar

Carl worked on an address book integration for Kalendar. This now includes a contact viewer that more or less displays all the contact information, a basic contact editor and also handling for contact groups.
Also included is a Plasma applet and QR code for sharing contacts. More on this can be read on my previous blog post.

Contact Viewer

Plasma Applet searching for a contact

Plasma Applet

Editor

Claudio made it possible to show the parent and sub-tasks in the incidence drawer. This allows you to navigate between related tasks in the normal calendar views, and not only the task view.

Kalendar task

Claudio also put a lot of effort into reducing the technical debt in Kalendar. He simplified the model for the month view, reorganized our QML files into subfolders. This should help us when adding more features in the future.

Help us make Kontact even better!

Check out some of our open junior jobs! They are simple, mostly programming-focused tasks, but they don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of Kontact, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list, then get in touch with us! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…

Kalendar Contact Book - Current Progress

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 07:00:35 +0000

During my long train trip to the Linux App Summit 2022, I started working on a contact book feature in Kalendar. There was already a small contact integration in the event editor to select attendees for an event and I wanted to extend it with a simple contact info viewer and editor.

When I started it, I was full of hope that this would be a simple task and would be easy to finish. Unfortunately more than one month later, it’s not finished but there is a lot of progress that I can already show off.

The Contact View

The contact view is the most immediate visual change that users will notice when starting Kalendar. It’s a new view available in the sidebar and it will display all your contacts synchornized with Kalendar. It’s also feature a search field, to easily find a contact very helpful when you have many hundreds contats.

The contact view showing a few contacts

Currently not all the properties that an vcard can contains are displayed, but it is easy to add more of them later on.

Internally, the contact view uses an Akonadi::ItemMonitor so that the changes to the contact are immediately reflected in the view, even if the changes happened in KAddressBook or were synced in the background from an online service.

Contact Book Settings

Kalendar has access to the same sources as KAddressBook with for example WebDav (e.g. Nextcloud), Etesync, Microsoft Exchange Server and local vCard files.

The Google contact provider is still broken due to a massive API change in Google API. It’s a good reminder that open standards are better for the users and the developers sanity.

Contact book source settings

From the contact view, it is also possible generate a QR code. This makes it easy to share one contact to your phone. If you want to shares and synchronize multiples contacts, it’s better to use a CardDav-based solution like Nextcloud.

QR code sharing

Plasma Applet

After implementing the contact view, with Claudio we decided to try to keep the codebase for the calendar and contact support mostly seperated from each others. To to so we created a QML plugin that contains all the contact utility and that can simply be imported with import org.kde.kalendar.contact 1.0.

This code seperation helped us develop a Plasma applet integrated inside the system try for the contact book.

The applet provides an easy way to search for a contact and send them an email or start a call using KDE Connect.

Searching in the Plasma applet

An contact book Plasma applet

It’s also possible to share with a QR code directly from the Plasma applet.

Contact Editor

The contact editor turned out more complicated than planned and is still missing a lot of features.

The contact editor

Currently, it only allows to edit the name, the phone numbers and emails of a contact. When editing the name you also have the choice to set each components of the name separately.

Advanced name options

There is also handling for the case there the contact was edited in another Akonadi-powered editor (like KAddressBook), asking the user what to do when detecting multiple concurrent editing of the same contact.

Change detection

Contact Group

Kalendar also has support for contact groups. This allows to create a group of contacts with an associated email address. It’s quite helpful when you want to often send mails to a group of contact.

Contact Group

You can also edit them, add more contacts and concurrent editing detection is also built-in the contact group editor.

Contact Group editing

Future

There is still a lot of features missings left to implement. For example, contact deletion, moving/copying a contact to another contact book but also a lot of contact properties need to be implemented in the contact book.

These features are relatively straigh forward to implement now that the base is here and if you want to help with the implementation, join our Matrix room. We would be happy to guide you.

Hopefully this will all be ready before the 22.08 release.

The Kalendar team is also working on another big component for Kalendar, stay tunned.

More KDE apps

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 10:00:35 +0000

KDE is all about the Apps is one of the current goals of the KDE community. Since this goal was choosen and announced in 2019 (remember it’s last year that was ‘normal’), I got a new hobby and it’s improving our apps infrastructure (e.g. apps.kde.org) and developing new KDE apps.

I already talked previously about NeoChat (a Matrix client), Kontrast (a contrast checker), Koko (an image viewer) and Pikasso (a simple Rust-powered drawing app for the Plasma Mobile).

Since then, I have developed a few new applications.

Tokodon

I’ve been using Mastodon since years and very much like the idea behind it and the fediverse in general. It’s a social network that is not controlled by a single big organization with dubious ethics but instead is controlled by many and everyone can decide to host their own instance.

Tokodon is a simple client, I developed for this protocol. This app is still in progress and currently it allows to browser the different timelines (home, federated, global), to look at user profiles, send posts with images and multiple accounts support.

The current most prominent missing features are the notification view, account settings and support for some types of post (e.g. videos, polls, …).

If someone is interested to contribute, I will try to mentor a season of KDE project with the goal to implement a notification view to Tokodon (or any of the other big missing features).

Tokodon

Tokodon mobile view

Tokodon desktop view

Link to the code

Hash-o-matic

Hash-o-matic is a straightforward GUI that allows the user to calculate checksums of files without using a terminal utility. It’s a simple application that I mainly developed in two evenings. It allows comparing two files, checking if a file matches a checksum and generating checksums for files.

Aside from that, special care was made to integrate it neatly with KDE. A global menu is exposed to global menu users, in Dolphin you can use a right click action to open a file with Hash-o-matic, the app remembers it’s size and position like most KDE apps and finally, drag-and-dropping files from other apps also works!

I would say that the app is now mostly done, and the only remaining feature that might be added is to allow customizing the hashing algorithms used. Currently, only md5, sha1 and sha512 are available.

Hash-o-matic

Link to the code

Whale

Whale is actually a very simple file explorer using Kirigami, that I have been building for fun. It’s pretty rudimentary. Currently it allows browsing directories and I forked the plasma folder view to implement a right-click menu and file selections. It still needs a lot of work, but immediate plan is too at some point reuse the code I’m writing for Whale and reuse it for Koko (the Plasma Mobile image viewer) folder view.

If someone wants to help or just look at the code, you can find it on my invent profile.

Whale, selection

Kalendar

This summer, I mentored for GSoC for extending a prototype I built earlier this year of a Kirigami-based calendar app using Akonadi as backend. You can read more about it on Claudio Cambra’s blog, who is now maintaining the app.

Pelikan

In a similar fashion as Kalendar, I also started working on a small mail client using Kirigami and Akonadi. It currentl kinda works for viewing emails, but unfortunately many aspects of KDE PIM libraries related to emails depend too much on QtWidgets and are as such difficult to integrate in a QML application. I started separating the UI code from the buisness logic, but this is an hardeous task and I’m missing time and motivation.

Here is the current state.

Pelikan

Link to code

Nextcloud talk

I have been using Nextcloud Talk a lot in recent months, so I started writing yet another chat client in Kirigami for it. It’s currently a soft-fork of the sailfishOS client written by a colleague.

The current feature set is very basic and most of the QML frontend code has been based on the code we wrote with Tobias for NeoChat.

Nextcloud Talk

There is still a lot of work required to fix all the issues and get it to a state where it’s usable for daily usage.

Link to the code

Supporting

If you want to support the development of these applications, I strongly encourage you to donate to the KDE community. These donations help us keep our infrastructure running, including our GitLab instance, our websites, and more. You can donate at https://kde.org/community/donations/.

KDE PIM in September and October

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 10:00:35 +0000

In the months since the KDE PIM July-August report there have been two patch releases for Kontact, and over 1400 changes made by more than 40 contributors have been integrated. Here are some of the highlights.

KOrganizer

A lot has happened over the last two months in KOrganizer development. First of all, Friedrich has been working on reviving the calendar decoration feature. This feature was introduced in 2007, but has since suffered from a lack of maintenance and multiple regressions.

Decorations allow you to display additional information inside the week view. Here is what it looked like back in 2007 when it was introduced.

As part of this effort, the plugin that allowed KOrganizer to display the current “Picture of the day” from the English Wikipedia, was ported to Wikipedia’s new API, and now works again. (KDE Gear 21.12)

Picture of the day

Friedrich is also working on a new plugin that shows the moon phase inside the week view. Pretty neat if you like astronomy. This feature should hopefully also land in KDE Gear 21.12.

Moon Phase

The work on the Moon Phase plugin prompted Friedrich to add this feature to KOrganizer’s month view too. This feature is still under review but should hopefully land in KDE Gear 21.12 as well.

Month View Decoration

There are also ongoing discussions about making this plugin more generic, and, in the future, adding support for these calendar decorations to Kalendar and the Plasma Calendar applet.

Glen Ditchfield has also been busy fixing many issues inside KOrganizer.

The event editor no longer creates duplicate tags (Bug 441846), and the list used in the Event View and the Find dialog do not automatically re-sort themselves by starting date when the event editor alters an event (441530). The user’s sorting preferences for these lists are preserved, just like other preferences.

The Find dialog also got better labels and tooltips. When an event displayed in it gets modified, this gets immediately updated in the UI.

Glen also made several improvements to the Month View. In general, the layout is now more compact (Bug 435667). Multiple-day holidays are now correctly displayed as one multiple-day event instead of several single-day events. A more visible change is that the current day is now highlighted with your system theme’s highlight color instead of grey (420515).

Lastly, the sidebar item viewer displays the completion date and time of completed to-dos, rather than just the date (Bug 374774).

Volker Krause removed the procedure and email alarms that allowed events to execute commands and send emails due to the security risk they pose in combination with shared calendars.

In term of documentation, David Bryant started cleaning up KOrganizer’s docs, like he previously did with KMail.

KHolidays

Glen also updated the Canadian holidays inside KHolidays, and Ghalib Ahmed added holiday information for Pakistan.

KMail

Laurent Montel improved the emoji support in KMail. It is now easier to find emojis thanks to a new emoji search feature, as well as a new recently-used emojis tab.

Emoji search

Search is generally easier since multiple search fields now perform a case-insensitive search.

In the email editor, warnings about too many recipients are now indicated by an inline message (instead of a popup dialog), conforming to KDE’s HIG.

Warning

Additionally, a few bugs related to the formatting in the email editor were fixed by Laurent Montel (Bug 419978, 442416 and 443108).

Volker Krause made sure that KMail connects to an SMTP servers with TLS enabled even when no login is required (bug 423423). He also fixed an infinite SSL warning dialog loop that appeared when a connection to an IMAP server was rejected with an invalid certificate (bug 423424).

Sandro Knauß also helped solve the above security vulnerabilities and started working on supporting the Autocrypt-Draft-State header. This header is needed when you want to store a draft and need to indicate whether it should be sent as an encrypted mail or not.

Ingo added filtering by paths to folder selection. This is useful when you need to copy or move a message to a folder, or when you need to jump to a folderas you just type, say, “foo/bar” and you will narrow down the list of folders to those containing the string “bar” that are subfolders of folders. This change was funded by Intevation GmbH. (Bug 443791).

Finally, David Bryant is working on updating the credits sections in both the KMail documentation and the About dialog, since most of the people who started contributing to KMail after 2010 aren’t yet mentioned in the credits.

Kleopatra

Kleopatra is KDE’s certificate manager and makes it possible to manage X.509 and OpenPGP certificats and smartcards. In the last two months, Ingo Klöcker worked on improving the accessibility of the decryption and encryption of files. He also created an AppImage for Kleopatra.

KAlarm

David Jarvie fixed a few issues KAlarm was having when handling application themes. The time edit spinbox now works correctly when using the Breeze theme (bug 443062) and, similarly, the sub-daily recurrence editor should now be usable with the Fusion theme.

He also worked on using the translated forms of AM/PM when displaying times This will make it more appropriate for certain locales.

Kalendar

Kalendar is also making tons of progress. Clau aded a new week view and enabled filtering by tags, Carl (me) worked on a QtQuick version of KCommandBar, Devin Lin ported the mobile version to Kirigami.NavigationTabBar and Felipe Kinoshita made the sidebar collapsible. This is just the tip of the iceberg, you can find a more comprehensive list of all the changes in Clau Cambra’s blog.

Kalendar also passed the KDE Review process and you can expect a first release soon!

KDE Itinerary

KDE Itinerary, the ultimate companion app for all your trips, also received many new features. Itinerary now provides navigation guides for walking and for transfer sections of public transport elements, a new barcode scan mode, and rental vehicle information.

You can find more information about all of Itinerary’s changes in Volker Krause’s latest blog post.

Deprecation work

A large focus remains on preparing for the upcoming migration to Qt6 and KF6. This mainly consists of porting away from deprecated functionality in Qt and KDE Frameworks, as well as moving to more modern build systems or C++ constructs. While this does not have any visible impact yet, this will allow for a smoother transition down the line. This work was largely done by Laurent Montel, Alexander Lohnau, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau, Nicolas Fella and a few others.

Help us make Kontact even better!

Thanks to Claudio Cambra and Paul Brown for the proofreading.

Spellchecking with QML

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 10:00:35 +0000

QML is a nice technology but it sometimes feels that some parts of KDE Frameworks aren’t neatly integrated with it. For example, until recently KNotification didn’t have QML bindings, which was the same for KSyntaxHighlighting. Thankfully Volker Krause took care of both.

Another part of the often-used KDE Frameworks but had missing QML bindings was Sonnet. Sonnet is a very nice KDE framework powering KDE text areas with spell checking.

The good news, Sonnet will, in the next KF5 release, supports QML apps too!

Spell checking in NeoChat

There are two ways to add Sonnet supports in your application.

The easy way: Kirigami and qqc2-desktop-theme integration

If you use Kirigami and are fine with the default behavior, this only needs one single line in your QtQuick.Controls.TextArea.

import org.kde.kirigami 2.18 as Kirigami

import QtQuick.Controls 2.15 as QQC2

QQC2.TextArea {
 Kirigami.SpellChecking.enabled: true
}

This line is just a hint for the QtQuick Controls 2 theme to enable spell checking for this TextArea. Currently, only the qqc2-desktop-theme uses this hint. For other themes, like qqc2-breeze-style or custom themes, this will unfortunately do nothing.

This hint is required since we decided to disable spell checking by default. This is because of multiple reasons: this might cause some breakage for apps that are already doing its own TextArea modification.

The hard but powerful way

The second way to add spellchecking with Sonnet is to use the bindings directly. This makes it possible to configure the exact behavior of the spellchecking in your app. This is the API that qqc2-desktop-theme is using internally.

For that, you will then need to add the SpellcheckHighlighter directly to your TextArea.

import org.kde.kirigami 2.18 as Kirigami
import QtQuick.Controls.Template 2.15 as T

T.TextArea {
 id: controlRoot
 Sonnet.SpellcheckHighlighter {
 id: spellcheckhighlighter
 document: controlRoot.textDocument
 cursorPosition: controlRoot.cursorPosition
 selectionStart: controlRoot.selectionStart
 selectionEnd: controlRoot.selectionEnd
 misspelledColor: Kirigami.Theme.negativeTextColor

 onChangeCursorPosition: {
 controlRoot.cursorPosition = start;
 controlRoot.moveCursorSelection(end, TextEdit.SelectCharacters);
 }
 }
}

Sonnet.SpellcheckHighlighter exposes a few interesting methods that make it possible to get the spellchecker’s suggestions, add words to the dictionary, ignore some words and more. For those interested, I would recommend looking inside qqc2-desktop-theme and see how Sonnet is used. Settings

Sonnet now also exports the spell-checking options to QML. You can find an example of how to use the exposed config object in NeoChat. I hope to move this code at some point in Kirigami Addons, so that not every app will need to implement its own setting config page.

NeoChat Spellchecking options

This change opens the way to also port the global spell-checking options in Plasma System Settings to QML in the future. Next plans

My next plan to make QML powerful in KDE is to figure out a way to upstream the nice KXMLGui/KConfigWidgets that I build for Kalendar into a separate component/library. This would make it possible to use a command bar, global menu bar, normal menu bar, configurable shortcuts and possibly more in a QML/Kirigami app.

This one is a bit tricky since dependency wise. Since all these features depends on QAction that depends directly on QtWidgets in Qt5. In Qt6 this now only depends on QtGUI but is is sill annoying that QAction can’t be used in QML but instead we have a QQuickAction that is part of the private QtQuick Controls 2 API.

This week in NeoChat

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 10:00:35 +0000

Last Saturday we had an improvised NeoChat mini development sprint in a small hotel room in Berlin in the occasion of the 25th anniversary of KDE. In a good KDE tradition, Carl spent this time on improving NeoChat settings. He ported both the NeoChat general settings and the specific room settings to the new Kirigami.CategorizedSetting component.

Tobias fixed a lot of papercuts and now the power level should be fetched correctly, we show the number of joined users instead of joined+invited users in the room information pane, the user search is now case insensitive.

Nicolas focused on fixing our Android build by making the spellchecking feature compile on Android.

General settings

Roon settings

Picture of the hotel room where we did the improved spring

Aside from the mini-sprint, we also made a few more improvements during the week. Tobias fixed the flicking of the timeline on mobile and Carl made it possible for the user to resize the room information drawer.

KQuickImageEditor 0.2 released

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 10:00:35 +0000

I’m happy to announce the 0.2 release of KQuickImageEditor. KQuickImageEditor is a QML library providing basic image editing functionality. It is currently used by Koko, NeoChat and Maui Pix.

In this release, Noah Davis worked on improving the usability and design of the the existing croping feature. It now features more touch friendly handles that are consistently looking with the one from Spectacle.

The old ReziseRectangle component is now deprecated and will be removed in the next version of KQuickImageEditor.

KQuickImageEditor 0.2 also brings a new functionality also contributed by Noah: image resizing.

Image rezising component

Packager section

A tarball of this release is available at download.kde.org/stable/kquickimageeditor/kquickimageeditor-0.2.0.tar.xz. The package is signed with my gpg key 14B0ED91B5783415D0AA1E0A06B35D38387B67BE.

NeoChat 1.2

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 10:00:35 +0000

The NeoChat is happy to announce the 3 major version of NeoChat. This release is the product of more than 3 months worth of work.

Bubbles everywhere 🗨️

The first thing you will see then opening NeoChat 1.2 is that we are now using message bubbles.

Bubbles 🗨️ everywhere 🗨️

We also replaced the not so great green line used as read marker with a better looking separator.

Advanced Chatbar

The text input component was completely redesigned.

Editing a message

Replying to someone

Adding an attachment

It’s also now possible to get autocompletion of commands:

Use commands the easy way!

Speaking of commands, it’s now possible to send customized reactions when replying to a message with /react I love NeoChat.

Custom reactions

There was also improvements in the keyboard shortcuts. It’s now possible to use ⬆️ to jump in edit mode for the last message.

Quick Edit

Another way to edit the last message is to use the s/text/replacement syntax inspired by sed. It’s not enabled by default but you can find it in the settings.

Matrix URI support

NeoChat now support matrix uris and when opening matrix: link in your browser you will then be proposed to open it with NeoChat. As a side effect, supporting Matrix URIs helped us unify how we handle opening and joining rooms accross our codebase.

Inline reply

We added inline replies support in our notification. So it’s now possible to reply to messages directly from the notification.

Inline reply

Fancy effects

Miss the fancy fireworks or snow effects from Element? We too. So Alexey Andreyev added them in NeoChat.

Fireworks

Snow

Confetti

Mobile Improvements

On mobile the context menu are implemented as bottom drawer.

User Information Dialog on Mobile

Account switcher

NeoChat supports multiple accounts since day one but it was not really practical to switch between accounts. We now implemented an account switcher, available at the bottom of the room list.

Account Switcher

Other

Aside from the many new big features this release brings, NeoChat 1.2 contains a lot of bugfixes and small usability improvements. We closed aproximately 100 issues (bugs and feature request) and this doesn’t count the huge number of bugs fixed without an corresponding issues. Some hightlight are:

Scrolling on mobile now is smoother. It still not perfect but we are working on making it better.
Joining a room now makes it appears in the room list without having to restart NeoChat and the room will be automatically opened
Show the location of hyperlinked text on hover.
Add an indicator for lack of internet connectivity
NeoChat doesn’t hang anymore when loading a room
Disable the chatbox if we’re not allowed to send messages

Tech report of fund.krita.org

Tue, 25 May 2021 09:35:35 +0000

A few weeks ago, the Krita project announced the Krita Dev Fund. This project scope was the same as the Blender Dev Fund. Provide a stable way to fund the development of Krita via recurring donations.

Since I was the one who helped with the technical bits on the website and I heard that were are interested FOSS communities that want to deploy something similar, I decided to write a small tech report about how we did it in Krita.

Luckily for us, when we started researching how to create something similar, we rapidly discovered that the Blender Fund website itself is open source and licensed under the same license as Blender: GPL. It made it easy to reuse the code.

The system is written with Django for the backend and uses Braintree as a payment provider. The code was built with Blender need in mind and not as a reusable project that I could use without any change, so a fork was inevitable. To make the maintenance more manageable, I decided to try to stay as near as possible to upstream in our Python code so that it’s easy to rebase the Krita fork when needed.

The code is hosted on invent.

Blender Fund is using its own authentification system (Blender ID) using OAuth2. To connect to Blender Id, a separate Django module for authentification exists (blender-id-oauth-client). This could be replaced by a custom implementation using default Django auth module or one of the many third-party Django ready-to-use authentification modules. In the case of Krita I just used blender-id-oauth-client with a few oauth2 parameters changed.

The most significant modifications I made were mainly around the HTML templates and CSS files. Most of these modifications were about replacing Blender with Krita, and updating the look of the homepage. We couldn’t just use Blender’s branding!

There was also quite a bit of work with the layouts of the page since Krita main CSS theme is using Bootstrap 3 and the Blender Fund website is using Bootstrap 4 and were was many subtle differences between both versions.

Updating only the templates made it possible to customize the website’s look and edit the content of the emails sends by the system to use Krita billing information instead of Blender one.

In terms of Python code changed, there was also a few instances of ‘Blender’ that got replaced by ‘Krita’. But all the other changes than were minors. For example, I added back the progress bar on the landing page since Blender removed it from fund.blender.org since it wasn’t needed anymore. Another small change was adding to the homepage the amount of the current donation from the old system.

A few weeks before launching fund.krita.org, I got a pleasant surprise as I wanted to rebase my prototype on top of upstream before moving Krita Fund to production. I discovered that the Blender team moved their internal library that handles all the payments to a separate library. It instantly made the amount of critical code in Krita’s fork smaller and my life much simpler.

That’s it! So if you want to support Krita and help them build the best painting application in the world and available for everyone, make sure to check out the Krita Fund.

And if you are enjoying my work all around KDE (Plasma Mobile, NeoChat, websites, …), feel free to check out my Liberapay account.

LAS 2021 and improvements in the applications infrastructure

Tue, 18 May 2021 13:05:35 +0000

Last week I attended and even gave a small talk to the Linux App Submit (LAS). LAS is a cross-distro and cross-desktop event around Linux applications. It’s a good place to learn about all the new cool thing making it easier to build and distribute Linux applications. This motivated me to improve a bit more the presence of Plasma Mobile applications in Flathub, but also make various improvements to apps.kde.org.

Plasma Mobile and Flathub

Jonah, Devin and myself started packaging more Plasma Mobile applications to Flathub. Currently we added Koko, Index, Vvave, Alligator and Pix to Flathub and more pull request are already open and hopefully soon merged.

Apps.kde.org

Apps.kde.org also got a few updates. Volker fixed a regression caused by my latest rewrite of the website that was preventing the application page to show links to F-Droid and the Play Store when available. This prompted me to also add additional links to Flathub, but also to the nightly Windows build.

GCompris is really everywhere

Another small improvements and not yet visible in the UI is that it’s now possible to list all applications available on specific platforms. For example to see all the applications available on Android, you can use apps.kde.org/platforms/android/. Similarly to see all the applications available on the Microsoft Store, you can use apps.kde.org/platforms/windows/.

On the Android page, some applications have been removed from the store and we should probably update the metadata accordingly or bring them back. Hint: It’s a good oportunity to get involved!

The next step is to expose these links in the homepage of the website.

Release tooling

A while ago, I added support for release information in apps.kde.org. Unfortunately the <release> tag isn’t often added in KDE applications for new release. Currently only a handful of applications like Krita, KDevelop, NeoChat or Calindori are using them. It’s a bit sad because it allows to link to the release announcements, but also link to the tarball and other artifacts (.exe, .dmg, .AppImage, …). Additionally this information are also displayed on Flathub and Discover.

To improve a bit the situation, for at least the package released by the release service, I started a merge request for the release-tools that adds more information to the AppStream file. This includes bugs fixed in the last version, a link to the tarball and the link to the announcement. A solution for other types of artifacts still need to be figured out, but since not all applications in the release service provide AppImages or Windows/macOS package, it’s more complicated.

Discover

Another application related improvement I have been working is a revamp of Discover homepage. This is still work in progress and the final visual result might change, but here is how it currently looks:

Discover new applications with Discover

Health of the KDE community

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 18:05:35 +0000

Today, I decided to look at KDE git history and look at the project’s health as a whole. It’s inspired by the work of Hans Petter Jansson for GNOME and use the tool he made (fornalder).

fornalder is easy to use and the documentation in the readme was beneficial. I don’t know if this is because it was programmed in Rust but fornalder was blazingly fast and most of the time spent during this analysis was spent on cloning the repos.

These stats include all the extragear, plasma, frameworks and release service repository as well as most of the KDE websites and a few KDE playground projects I had on my hard drive. For example, it doesn’t includes most of the unmaintained projects (e.g. kdepimlibs, kdelibs, koffice, plasma-mediacenter, …). Also important to note, is that this doesn’t include translations at all, since they are stored in SVN and added in the tarballs during the releasing process.

Active Contributors

Number of contributors by years

The explaination for the colors is described by Hans Petter Janssson in his blog post by:

The stacked histogram above shows the number of contributors who touched the project on a yearly basis. Each contributor is assigned to a generational cohort based on the year of their first contribution. The cohorts tend to shrink over time as people leave.

There’s a special “drive-by” cohort (in a fetching shade of off-white) for contributors who were only briefly involved, meaning all their activity fits in a three-month window. It’s a big group. In a typical year, it numbers 200-400 persons who were not seen before or since. Most of them contribute a single commit.

This first plot is interesting. There is clear sharp increase in contributors from 1997 to 2009, but from 2010 to 2019, the number of active contributors was mostly stable with the exception of 2012 probably due to the fall of Nokia.

On the other side, 2020 attracted a great number of new contributors. I think this is mostly due to the adoption of gitlab, making it way easier to submit small patches, but the pandemic probably also played a role here.

Commits Count

Number of commits by years

In this plot, the fall of Nokia is even more visible with a huge drop in commits around that time. Fortunately, it seems in 2020 we were able to recover and in terms of commits, we are at a new all-time high. The amount of commits per year is particularly impressive. I first thought it was due to a bug in the analyzer but just looking at the commits count in a few projects, this makes perfect sense. There are 100 000 commits in Calligra, 55 000 commits in Krita, 14 000 commits in Kdenlive, 22 000 commits in kde.org, 25 000 commits in KMail, and a lot of other projects having other 5 000 commits probably explains the numbers.

If you are wondering who in the 1999 cohort made most of the contributions, it’s Laurent Montel and who in the 2010 disappeared in 2018 it’s “Montel Laurent”. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a nice way to merge both. In term of commits, Laurent Montel is the biggest contributor with nearly 60 000 commits and the second one is “Montel Laurent” with nearly 45 000 commits.

Conclusion

I would say that KDE is in relatively good health. This is good news considering all the work ahead of us with the Qt6 and KF6 transition. I hope these good trends continue in the future.

You can play with the sqlite dabase (>200Mb)

Plasma Calendar Redesign

Sat, 24 Apr 2021 11:35:35 +0000

Over the last few weeks, I redesigned the default Plasma Calendar bringing it more in line with the design we want for Breeze Evolution. The new design removes the lines between the days, uses the default Plasma highlighting element and uses the Plasma Header component to provide a consistent look for the headers.

The new calendar design

There were also improvements in term of usability. Most notably, it is now easier to switch between the month, year and decade overview. Before, you needed to discover that the month name was clickable but now just clicking on the day, month or year button works. Additionally, on a touch screen, you can also swipe the calendar left or right.

Swiping with the finger or the mouse works now

These improvements will be available with Plasma 5.22, but some will land a bit earlier with KDE Framework 5.82.

What is coming next?

The next step in improving the calendar support in Plasma is improving the event representation in the month view. I already have a merge request ready for that, replacing the triangle with colored dots. Don’t worry if you have a very busy shedules, it won’t display more than five at the same time.

Calendar with dots for events, much more pleasing for my eyes :D

You can take a look at it in frameworks/plasma-framework!243.

Before the Plasma 5.22 feature freeze, I want to land a few more features.

Add a button to add events (by opening Korganizer in case it is installed)
Enable the event display by default when Korganizer and kdepim-addons are installed. This would improve the visibility of the features and make the calendar applet much more useful.

Update

Since some people asked me about how it looks with a dark theme.

Dark theme

Also the MR for opening Korganizer is ready!

Translating Hugo based websites with Gettext

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 18:00:35 +0000

In the Linux world, gettext is the gold standard for translating content. It’s powerful; there is a significant amount of tooling around it: there are editors like Lokalize, poedit, weblate and many others, and also libraries and bindings for many languages. But in the web development world, a unified internalization solution isn’t a solved problem yet. Django uses gettext; many js frameworks are using JSON as a key-value store of strings, but other formats exist and sometimes some frameworks provide nothing and everything needs to be done from scratch.

Unlike Jekyll, Hugo provides some built-in internalization support. This includes the i18n function for translating templates, translatable menus and a way to translate markdown files by adding a translated copies next to the original English file. Unfortunately, this is not enough. There is no way to automatically notify the translators when and how a markdown file changed since a page sent to the translators is the raw markdown file. The second problem is that the translations need to be extracted and injected in three different places and various formats. Hugo uses markdown files for the content, a YAML file for the strings in the HTML templates and a YAML config file for the menu and site metadata translations (e.g. site title). A third problem is that none of these formats are directly usable for the KDE translation system and KDE translators that expect po files to work with their usual tools and workflow.

Bridging everything

The solution was to build a bridge between these two worlds. So I created a python script especially for kde.org using polib for manipulating the translation files. The python script can extract the translations from the English content and automatically create the required markdown and YAML files to generate the translated Hugo website. The easy part was to handle the YAML files. It’s just extracting specific values inside of them. The markdown handling was a bit more tricky. We obliviously don’t want to send one big string with the entire content of the markdown file to the translators. Instead, we want to split it as best as possible. Each paragraph is extracted as a separate string, same with each list item and the script even tries to extract Hugo shortcodes correctly. For example, this is how the following text is extracted:

Hello
* List item 1
{{/*< img src="..." alt="Accessibily description" title="My image title" >*/}}
{{/*< empty >*/}}

becomes

#. type: Plain Text
#: content/myfile.md:1
msgid "Hello"
msgstr ""
#. type: List item
#: content/myfile.md:3
msgid "List item 1"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain Text
#: content/myfile.md:5
msgid "Accessibily description"
msgstr ""
#. type: Plain Text
#: content/myfile.md:5
msgid "My image title"
msgstr ""

This is probably the best result that can be reasonably archived. It doesn’t support every markdown feature and especially not inline HTML, but we don’t need them in KDE yet and usually, I prefer to separate the content in markdown from the HTML layout. This makes it easier to update the theme or other aspects of the website in the future.

The script is runing on kde.org for almost a year. Maturing along the way to serve the needs of around 400 pages available for translations in KDE.org. But KDE.org is not the only KDE website and the next step was to make it possible to translate more websites. At first, this was archived by copy-pasting the scripts across a few repository, but this is obliviously not something that scales and generally not a good practice.

So Phu Nguyen and I (but mostly Phu Nguyen) worked on making the scripts a proper python package with configuration options and documentation. The primary goal was to make it easier to reuse it for the other KDE websites, but a nice side effect is that this also makes it easier for everyone to use it. You can find the source code and documentation of hugo-i18n in invent.

Phu and I ported a few websites already. This includes planet.kde.org, kate-editor.org, timeline.kde.org, elisa.kde.org, okular.kde.org and apps.kde.org, but help is always welcome to help us porting more of them, and if you are interested, can join our Matrix channel or IRC channel #kde-www.

Why all of the trouble? Isn’t the English version enough?

English isn’t spoken in large parts of the world and translating websites (and our software) help us reach more people that wouldn’t necessarily be able to use our software or learn about it if it was only available in English. In short, this brings KDE a step forward konquering the world. According to our web statistics, more than 10% of the visitors of kde.org are browsing the translated versions and it is slowly growing.

It is also an excellent occasion to remind people that translating KDE software, website and documentation is a great way to get involved inside the KDE community even if you can’t program. So get involved!

Speeding up apps.kde.org

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 18:00:35 +0000

Apps.kde.org is a great website listing all the KDE applications and their addons. Under the hood, it’s using AppStream, a standard for adding metadata to Linux applications. The Linux application managers (Discover, GNOME Softwares, …) are displaying them, so they stay up to date and are translated. There was only one problem, apps.kde.org has always been a bit slow to load. It is a problem since slow websites tend to be less visible on Google search results and for the users there aren’t a good browsing experience.

There were many reasons why it was slow. We designed it earlier in a way that on each page load the backend load the data from json files. On the individual application pages, we only need to read one json file but on the homepage every single JSON files was loaded. The Linux kernel is probably caching every JSON file in the memory so that the IO load wasn’t that bad, but parsing the JSON files still needed to be done on each page load.

Using PHP and a Symfony (a big PHP framework) for doing the rooting, templating and internalization (loading additional mo files) of the website adds an overhead. The final result was that the load time for just one html files, was between 300ms and 500ms.

That doens’t sounds like a big deal, but it is one. Rendering a page takes more than just downloading one HTML file, the browser needs to load the other assets (images, CSS and javascript files); it needs to parse the HTML and CSS files and compute the layout. These operations are done in parallel, but the initial loading of the HTML files blocks every other operation. Also, these 300ms loading times can be a lot longer on bad internet connections.

As often to solve the performance problem, my usual solution is to port the websites to static site generators. This isn’t always a solution that can be used but in this case, a generator was already generating the data as JSON files twice a day, so there was no technical reasons for dynamically generating the pages. I choose Hugo, because it is my preferred static site generator, it supports internalization and we have a shared theme for it in KDE so most of the layouts, CSS files and translations can be shared with the other KDE websites.

Porting to Hugo was not difficult, I was already using a templating engine (TWIG) in the old websites and porting to the Hugo templating engine wasn’t complicated. I also wrote a small python script, converting the json files containing the AppStream metadata to markdown files in a way that Hugo can read it. The side-effect is that this makes the generation slower. Generating apps.kde.org is really pushing Hugo to its limits and even if it is one of the fastest static site generator, it now takes 20s for hugo to generate all the pages. This can be explained by the fact that it generates 240 pages in almost 30 languages.

Fortunately while making it slower to generate in the CI, it made it faster to load for the users. It moved the loading time from ~300-500ms to under 100ms. This is already a nice speedup, but wasn’t enough for me. The second step was to improve the rendering time of homepage. Looking at Google Lighthouse, one of the reasons why the homepage was still slow was the large amount of DOM elements. It was over 2000, so I used some tricks to decrease the amount:

First one was to remove all the addons from the homepage, they aren’t really helpful for the visitors to know about them and 15% of the content was about them. Instead I moved these addons information to the applications they extend. This makes it easier to get a list of addons for each application without adding too much clutter to the homepage.
The second trick was to port the application grid from a CSS flex element to grid. Flex has the disadvantage that it doesn’t allow to specify a gab between the items, so to create spacing, I needed to wrap every element in a div with padding. (Flex support gap but only on Firefox for now). display: grid also has more advantages, for example I don’t need to specify how many elements I want per row on each screen sizes but instead can specify the width of an item and its spacing will be automatically adjusted. Here is the new css rule for …

.application-list {
 display: grid;
 grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(240px, 1fr));
 align-items: top;
 grid-gap: 1em;
}

… and the corresponding changes applied to the HTML. I also merged the two <a> element together.

- <div class="application-list row align-items-stretch">
+ <div class="application-list">
 {{ $category := .Params.categoryName }}
 {{ range where (where site.RegularPages "Section" "applications") ".Params.appType" "!=" "addon" }}
 {{ if and (eq $category .Params.MainCategory) (ne .Params.appType "addon") }}
- <div class="app text-center col-12 col-sm-6 col-md-4 col-lg-3 p-2">
- <div class="p-3 h-100">
- <div aria-hidden="true">
- <a href="{{ .Permalink }}">
- <img width="48" height="48" src="/app-icons/{{ .Params.icon }}"
- loading="lazy"
- alt="{{ .Params.Name }}" title="{{ .Params.name }}"/>
- </a>
- </div>
- <a><h3>{{ .Params.name }}</h3></a>
- <p>{{ .Params.GenericName }}</p>
- </div>
+ <div class="app text-center">
+ <a href="{{ .Permalink }}" class="d-flex flex-column">
+ <img width="48" height="48" aria-hidden=true class="icon" src="/app-icons/{{ .Params.icon }}"
+ loading="lazy"
+ alt="{{ .Params.Name }}" title="{{ .Params.name }}"/>
+ <h3>{{ .Params.name }}</h3>
+ </a>
+ <p>{{ .Params.GenericName }}</p>
 </div>
 {{ end }}
 {{ end }}
 </div>

This change removed 2 DOM elements per item, again reducing the amount of items that the browser need to download, parse and render by another 5%.

I’m actually wondering if using display: grid is also easier for the browser engine to render, since the improvement from my impression seemed faster than just 5%.

The end result is that the homepage get a score of 96/100 on Google Lighthouse, this is a big improvement from 56/100 we were getting a few weeks ago. Hopefully Google PageRank algorithm also like the change.

There is still a few improvements possibilities, mostly slimming down the CSS files. That should be doable thanks to the fact we can use Hugo to ship a customized version of the scss code shared with the other websites with less imported modules and just the one required for apps.kde.org.

Documentation Improvements in KDE

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:00:00 +0000

There was many changes over the last few months in KDE developer documentation tooling. The hope is to make KDE development easier to both newcomers but also long-time KDE contributors to use KDE technologies to build cool stuff.

Api documentation

The tooling for our generated documentation tooling improved. First of all, KApiDox got a new theme with a cleaner appearance and a better dark theme. But the improvement goes beyond just theming.

API.kde.org new look

Doxyqml, our documentation bridge between QML and doxygen, got various improvements, thanks to Olaf Mandel and Lasse Lopperi. Now QML enums are supported and the lexer/parser got various bug fixes.

Speaking of QML documentation, the Kirigami API documentation was improved and now uses more correctly @inherit tags and @property tags. There is still room for improvements, but the current state is already a lot better. Most Components are now showing all their properties correctly and the type of the property is correct. (kirigami!239)

Another improvement is that the generated Kirigami documentation now shows more accurate names: e.g. Kirigami.Page instead of org::kde::kirigami::Page. This makes it easier to read and navigate the documentation.

There was also a bit of background work inside KApiDox, Jannet added support for QDoc, allowing to use QDoc as an alternative to Doxygen. This might be a better solution for generating documentation for projects with a lot of QML.

High level documentation

Since develop.kde.org was announced back in September 2020 just before Akademy, it received a steady stream of updates. In terms of visuals, Jannet replaced the left sidebar with a better-looking one.

A Doxygen integration was also added in the Hugo based website, allowing to link to the API documentation in an easy way (e.g. [Kirigami.Page](docs:kirigami2;Page)).

Link to API documentation

The Plasma documentation was massively improved. Zren moved his excellent tutorial about creating Plasma Widgets to /docs/plasma/widget. I also moved the Plasma Desktop Scripting tutorial and the Plasma Theme Tutorial from techbase to develop. This was a good occasion to update them to a more recent version of Plasma since some parts were from the early days of Plasma 5 and a few bits from KDE4 remained.

Concerning the Framework documentation, most of the tutorials from the Framework book, that was written a few years ago to develop. Same as the Plasma documentation, I used this opportunity to update the documentation and remove any mentions of deprecated APIS. I also did the same for most of the old tutorials from techbase.

List of features oriented tutorials

Tobias Fella imported the old DBus tutorial from techbase and David Redondo wrote a tutorial about how to create sensor faces for the new Plasma Monitor.

Finally, Clau Cambra wrote a tutorial for getting started in Kirigami. The tutorial will guide you into creating a countdown counter using Kirigami and QML. This work is part of its Season of KDE project.

If you enjoy my work, you can sponsor me on Liberapay.

NeoChat 1.1

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 20:00:00 +0000

Exactly 2 months after NeoChat 1.0, the NeoChat team is happy to announce a new release of NeoChat. NeoChat is a native client for the decentralized communication network Matrix.

Aside from the many bug fixes, performance improvements, and subtle appearance improvements, NeoChat 1.1 brings many new features that will make your experience with it more convenient.

Thanks to the work of Hannah, Nicolas, and Tobias, this release also brings NeoChat to many more platforms. Nightly builds of NeoChat are now available on Android, Flatpak, AppImage, macOS and Windows. Not all of them are considered production ready, but we hope to improve the support for them in future release.

New features

First launch experience improvements

Probably the highlight of this release is the completely new login page. It detects the server configuration based on your Matrix Id. This allows you to login to servers requiring Single Sign On (SSO) (like the Mozilla or the incoming Fedora Matrix instance).

Servers that require agreeing to the TOS before usage are correctly detected now and redirect to their TOS webpage, allowing the user to agree to them instead of silently failing to load the account.

Stickers

Everyone loves cute stickers, so now NeoChat supports displaying them too. We don’t yet support sending them.

Viewing a Sticker

Editing messages

Editing messages is another popular feature of every IM client. NeoChat is now able to show edited messages correctly and also make it possible to edit your messages. The behavior is the same as in Element.

Editing messages

Multimodal mode

It is now possible to open a room into a new window. This allows you to view and interact with multiple rooms at the same time.

Multimodal mode

Commands

We added a few commands to NeoChat. Previously you could use /me and /rainbow, and we added a few mores: /shrug, /lenny, /rainbowme, /join, /invite, /part, /ignore, /unignore.

Plasma integration

We improved the Plasma integration a bit. Now the number of unread messages is displayed in the Plasma Taskbar. It is using the com.canonical.Unity.LauncherEntry DBus protocol, so that should be reasonably supported across desktops.

Tarballs

Version 1.1.1 of NeoChat is availabe here. The package is signed with my gpg key 14B0ED91B5783415D0AA1E0A06B35D38387B67BE.

For users, a Flathub version will be updated shortly.

Pikasso, a simple drawing application in QtQuick with Rust

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 14:00:35 +0000

Following my last blog post about using Rust and Lyon to create custom shapes. I’m happy to announce the creation of Pikasso, a very simple drawing program intended to be used on Plasma Mobile.

Pikasso

Pikasso is very basic and only supports drawing with the mouse/finger and adding rectangles and circles to the scene. An undo feature is also available as well as the possibility to export your beautiful artworks to SVGs. As you can see, Pikasso is not intended to be replacements for Krita. If you want a powerful drawing application just use Krita, it’s awesome. The scope of Pikasso is more similar to Kolourpaint or Paint.exe and intended for children to play a bit with it on Plasma Mobile.

Behind the scene

Behind the scene, Pikasso uses Rust and Lyon to do all the drawing. The entire drawing area is just one QQuickItem with many QSGNodes. This makes Pikasso hardware accelerated.

When drawing, Pikasso creates DrawEvents for storing the drawing. The DrawEvent contains a QPainterPath and a few metadata (line width, pen color and if the QPainterPath should be filled or not. This is inspired by the QtWidgets Scribble example and the Digikam sketch widgets. Using a QPainterPath replaces the usage of the std::variant from my last blog post.

Thanks to Milian on IRC for giving me the hint about just using a QPainterPath. This has the advantage of integrating better with the rest of the Qt ecosystem sine QPainterPath is used to store reusable instructions for QPainter but also supports more features like text rendering. Another advantage of using a QPainterPath is that we get an SVG export feature almost for free with a QSvgGenerator. See the MR from Jonah about this feature..

QPainterPath can be natively used with QPainter, but it can also be in a very simple way transformed to a LyonBuilder object.

rust::Box<LyonBuilder> painterPathToBuilder(const QPainterPath &path)
{
 auto lyonBuilder = new_builder();
 for (int i = 0; i < path.elementCount(); i++) {
 const auto element = path.elementAt(i);
 if (element.isLineTo()) {
 lyonBuilder->line_to(LyonPoint { static_cast<float>(element.x), static_cast<float>(element.y) });
 } else if (element.isMoveTo()) {
 lyonBuilder->move_to(LyonPoint { static_cast<float>(element.x), static_cast<float>(element.y) });
 } else if (element.type == QPainterPath::ElementType::CurveToElement) {
 // Cubic is encoded with ctrl1 -> CurveToElement, ctrl2 -> CurveToDataElement and to -> CurveToDataElement
 Q_ASSERT(i + 2 < path.elementCount() && "CurveToElement doesn't have data");
 const auto ctrl1 = path.elementAt(i);
 const auto ctrl2 = path.elementAt(i + 1);
 const auto to = path.elementAt(i + 2);
 lyonBuilder->cubic_bezier_to(
 LyonPoint { static_cast<float>(ctrl1.x), static_cast<float>(ctrl1.y) },
 LyonPoint { static_cast<float>(ctrl2.x), static_cast<float>(ctrl2.y) },
 LyonPoint { static_cast<float>(to.x), static_cast<float>(to.y) }
 );
 i += 2; // we analysed tree elements instead of just one
 }
 }

 return lyonBuilder;
}

And once we have a LyonBuilder object we can render our geometries to the screen. This part didn’t change since the last post.

auto node = new QSGGeometryNode;
auto builder = painterPathToBuilder(drawEvent.path);
LyonGeometry lyonGeometry;
if (!drawEvent.fill) {
 lyonGeometry = build_stroke(std::move(builder), drawEvent.penWidth);
} else {
 lyonGeometry = build_fill(std::move(builder));
}
QSGGeometry *geometry = new QSGGeometry(QSGGeometry::defaultAttributes_Point2D(),
 lyonGeometry.vertices.size(), lyonGeometry.indices.size());

QSGGeometry::Point2D *points = geometry->vertexDataAsPoint2D();
std::size_t i = 0;
for (const auto &vertice: lyonGeometry.vertices) {
 points[i].set(vertice.x, vertice.y);
 i++;
}

quint16* indices = geometry->indexDataAsUShort();
i = 0;
for (const auto indice: lyonGeometry.indices) {
 indices[i] = indice;
 i++;
}

Pikasso, needs to add new nodes for each new DrawEvent but only update the geometry of the last DrawEvent since it’s the only one who could have changed. This makes the painting experience very smooth.

For those interested, this is the code for the updatePaintNodeData method. It’s a bit more complex since Pikasso also handles undo events and needs to cleanup its removed QSGNodes.

Antialiasing

The last problem to solve for Pikasso was antialiasing since the figures on the screen looked pixelized. This was easy to solve by enabling Multisample Antialiasing on my QML DrawingArea. This can be done using the layer.samples property:

DrawingArea {
 anchors.fill: parent
 layer.enabled: true
 layer.samples: 4
}

Future goals

I think Pikasso is already good enough for its intended usage scope. That I might do in the future is to use a similar technique to add annotation supports to KQuickImageEditor, a library I developed for editing images before sending them in NeoChat. This will need a bit of thinking and a lot of refactoring in KQuickImageEditor first.

Efficient custom shapes in QtQuick with Rust

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 10:50:35 +0000

One of the advantages of QWidgets when building a Qt application is the ability to build in a simple way custom widgets with the QPainter API. This gives the Qt developer almost total freedom to implement complex geometries for their widgets.

On the other hands, QML contains by default only rectangles. These rectangles can change the radius to create circles and rounded rectangles, but more complex shapes are more complicated.

The current state of custom geometry in QtQuick

Fortunally, the Qt API provides multiple ways to implement custom shapes, that depending on the needs might be enough.

There is the Canvas API using the same API as the canvas API on the web but in QML. It’s easy to use but very slow and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Instead of the Canvas API, from the QML side, there is the QtQuick Shapes module. This module allows creating more complex shapes directly from the QML with a straightforward declarative API. In many cases, this is good enough for the application developer but this module doesn’t offer a public C++ API.

If you need more controls, using C++ will be required to implement custom QQuickItem. Unfortunately drawing on the GPU using QQuickItem is more complex than the QPainter API. You can’t just use commands like drawRect, but will need to convert all your shapes in triangles first. This involves a lot of maths like it can be seen in the example from the official documentation or from the KDAB tutorial (Efficient custom shapes in Qt Quick).

A QPainter way is also available with QQuickPaintedItem, but it is slow because it renders your shape in a textured rectangle in the Scene Graph.

The Rusty way

What if we could transform arbitrary shapes into triangles? We would get a high level API but still get great performance. This process is called tessellation and there are a few libraries that implement it. For example in C++, we have Skia and CGAL. Unfortunatelly, both aren’t easy to use, so I decided to look at the Rust library ecosystem and in particular at Lyon, which was designed with performance and compliance to the SVG standard in mind since the goal is to use it in Servo in the future.

Lyon doesn’t have any C++ bindings but I got inspired by the recent blog post from Jonah and I need to say the experience of writing bindings was a breeze.

The first step was creating wrapper structs around the Lyon primitives. LyonPoint, LyonGeometry and LyonBuilder will later be directly usable from the C++ side.

#[cxx::bridge]
mod ffi {
 pub struct LyonPoint {
 x: f32,
 y: f32,
 }

 pub struct LyonVector {
 x: f32,
 y: f32,
 }

 pub struct LyonGeometry {
 vertices: Vec<LyonPoint>,
 indices: Vec<u16>,
 }

 extern "Rust" {
 type LyonBuilder;
 fn new_builder() -> Box<LyonBuilder>;
 fn move_to(self: &mut LyonBuilder, point: &LyonPoint);
 fn line_to(self: &mut LyonBuilder, point: &LyonPoint);
 fn relative_move_to(self: &mut LyonBuilder, to: LyonVector);
 fn close(self: &mut LyonBuilder);
 fn quadratic_bezier_to(self: &mut LyonBuilder, ctrl: &LyonPoint, to: &LyonPoint);
 fn cubic_bezier_to(self: &mut LyonBuilder, ctrl1: &LyonPoint, ctrl2: &LyonPoint, to: &LyonPoint);
 fn build_fill(builder: Box<LyonBuilder>) -> LyonGeometry;
 fn build_stroke(builder: Box<LyonBuilder>) -> LyonGeometry;
 }
}

We then need to define the methods we declared above. These are all trivial to implement since they are just wrapping the Lyon API.

use ffi:{LyonPoint, LyonVector, LyonGeometry};

// Create a wrapper arround Lyon svg path. This struct is opaque from
// the C++ side so we won't be able to access the internal object, but
// we still can call the methods on it.
pub struct LyonBuilder {
 builder: WithSvg<Builder>,
}

// Implement wrapping methods
impl LyonBuilder {
 fn close(&mut self) {
 self.builder.close();
 }

 fn move_to(&mut self, to: &LyonPoint) {
 self.builder.move_to(point(to.x, to.y));
 }

 fn line_to(&mut self, to: &LyonPoint) {
 self.builder.line_to(point(to.x, to.y));
 }

 fn quadratic_bezier_to(&mut self, ctrl: &LyonPoint, to: &LyonPoint) {
 self.builder.quadratic_bezier_to(point(ctrl.x, ctrl.y), point(to.x, to.y));
 }

 ...
}

// Lyon Builder constructor
pub fn new_builder() -> Box<LyonBuilder> {
 return Box::new(LyonBuilder{
 builder: Path::builder().with_svg()
 })
}

The next step was to add the build_fill that will transform the SVG path instructions into a set of vertices and indices. These vertices and indices will be directly available from the C++ side. This is extremely handy since this can be directly fed into the QSGGeometry painting method.

pub fn build_fill(builder: Box<LyonBuilder>) -> LyonGeometry {
 let mut buffers: VertexBuffers<Point, u16> = VertexBuffers::new();
 {
 let mut vertex_builder = simple_builder(&mut buffers);

 // Create the tessellator.
 let mut tessellator = FillTessellator::new();

 let path = builder.builder.build();

 // Compute the tessellation.
 let result = tessellator.tessellate_path(
 &path,
 &FillOptions::tolerance(0.01),
 &mut vertex_builder
 );
 assert!(result.is_ok());
 }

 LyonGeometry {
 // convert_points transform lyon::point to our LyonPoint wrapper
 vertices: convert_points(buffers.vertices),
 indices: buffers.indices,
 }
}

And we are almost done with the Rust side, we still need to create the cargo and corrosion configuration, but I won’t go into details in this post. You can look at how it was done in this pet project.

Using the generated bindings

To make it easy to store and manipulate the path, I create a simple abstraction to the various SVG path instructions.

#include <QList>
#include <variant>
#include <tessellation.rs.h>

/// Move to the point without drawing a line.
struct MoveTo
{
 /// The destination.
 LyonPoint to;
};

/// Drawe a line to a specific point.
struct LineTo
{
 /// The destination.
 LyonPoint to;
};

/// Draw a cubic bezier curve to the point.
struct CubicBezierTo
{
 /// First control point.
 LyonPoint ctrl1;
 /// Second control point.
 LyonPoint ctrl2;
 /// The destination.
 LyonPoint to;
};

/// Close a path.
struct Close
{};

/// SVG conform path commands
using PathSection = std::variant<MoveTo, LineTo, CubicBezierTo, Close>;

template<class... Ts> struct overloaded : Ts... { using Ts::operator()...; };
template<class... Ts> overloaded(Ts...) -> overloaded<Ts...>;

/// The SVG path data. It contains a list of instruction (move to, line to, ...).
using PathData = QList<PathSection>;

Now let finally use Lyon to generate the geometry primitives. This will need to be called every time the list of commands is updated. It’s using the command abstraction, I build previously, but this could directly call the LyonBuilder methods.

const auto commands << MoveTo { LyonPoint{0.0, 0.0} }
 << LineTo { LyonPoint{0.0, 40.0} }
 << LineTo { LyonPoint{40.0, 40.0} }
 << CubicBezierTo{ LyonPoint{70.0, 40.0}, LyonPoint{70.0, 0.0}, LyonPoint{ 50.0, 20.0} }
 << LineTo { LyonPoint{40.0, 0.0} }
 << Close {};

auto lyonBuilder = new_builder();
for (const auto &command: commands) {
 std::visit(overloaded {
 [&lyonBuilder](MoveTo moveTo) { lyonBuilder->move_to(moveTo.to); },
 [&lyonBuilder](LineTo lineTo) { lyonBuilder->line_to(lineTo.to); },
 [&lyonBuilder](CubicBezierTo cubicBezierTo) { lyonBuilder->cubic_bezier_to(cubicBezierTo.ctrl1, cubicBezierTo.ctrl2, cubicBezierTo.to); },
 [&lyonBuilder](Close) { lyonBuilder->close(); },
 }, command);
}
auto m_geometry = build_fill(std::move(lyonBuilder));

And finally here is our updatePaintNode method. It’s using the GL_TRIANGLES drawing mode and the vertices and indices are copied directly from the geometry Lyon gave us.

QSGNode *PathItem::updatePaintNode(QSGNode *oldNode, UpdatePaintNodeData *)
{
 QSGGeometryNode *node = nullptr;
 QSGGeometry *geometry = nullptr;

 if (!oldNode) {
 node = new QSGGeometryNode;
 geometry = new QSGGeometry(QSGGeometry::defaultAttributes_Point2D(),
 m_geometry.vertices.size(), m_geometry.indices.size());
 geometry->setIndexDataPattern(QSGGeometry::StaticPattern);
 geometry->setDrawingMode(GL_TRIANGLES);
 node->setGeometry(geometry);
 node->setFlag(QSGNode::OwnsGeometry);

 QSGFlatColorMaterial *material = new QSGFlatColorMaterial;
 material->setColor(QColor(255, 0, 0));
 node->setMaterial(material);
 node->setFlag(QSGNode::OwnsMaterial);
 } else {
 node = static_cast<QSGGeometryNode *>(oldNode);
 geometry = node->geometry();
 geometry->allocate(m_geometry.vertices.size(), m_geometry.indices.size());
 }

 QSGGeometry::Point2D *points = geometry->vertexDataAsPoint2D();
 std::size_t i = 0;
 for (const auto &vertice: m_geometry.vertices) {
 points[i].set(vertice.x, vertice.y);
 i++;
 }

 quint16* indices = geometry->indexDataAsUShort();
 i = 0;
 for (const auto indice: m_geometry.indices) {
 indices[i] = indice;
 i++;
 }

 node->markDirty(QSGNode::DirtyGeometry);
 return node;
}

It is only using Lyon SVG path rendering, but Lyon provides a lot more APIs. For example, there is an abstraction that allows to draw circle, ellipse, rounded rectangle and other basic geometric forms.

There is also the possibility to add custom attributes for texture coordinate or color coordinate. Depending on your need more part of the API could be wrapped and I might create a small library wrapping most of the API.

Custom shape in action

I used this technique in a new toy I’m building. I’m not sure where it is going, but I currently have this:

NeoChat 1.0.1, first bugfix release

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 11:35:35 +0000

This version fixes several bugs.

NeoChat doesn’t require a .well-know configuration in the server to work. (Tobias and Kitsune)
Edited messages won’t show up duplicated anymore. (Carl)
NeoChat now ask for consent to terms and conditions if required instead of displaying nothing. (Tobias)
Users avatar in the room list are now displayed correctly. (Carl)
Fix image saving (Tobias)
Various graphic glitches have been fixed. (Various authors)

Tarball is available in download.kde.org.

Announcing Season of KDE Selected Projects

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the projects selected for Season of KDE. In this post we will look at some of the successful proposals, but there is a full list available here.

Plasma Mobile

Nikunj Goyal will be working under the mentorship of Devin Lin to implement a global weather alert system for KWeather using the CAP protocol. Anjani Kumar will work on a D-Bus deamon for KWeather that will provide weather data. Han Young will mentor this project.

Rohan Asokan will be working on Kalk and will add a few new features, including a binary calculator and a scientific mode with more advanced functions. Han Young will mentor this project.

Yash Walia will be working on producing new default alarm and ringtones for KClock. Devin Lin will mentor this project.

Sai Moukthik Konduru will be working on a basic task management tool for Plasma Mobile. This will also be mentored by Devin Lin.

Plasma

Chirag Goyal will work on the new Plasma Firewall KCM and will make it possible to share your plasma firewall configuration using the KDE Store. This project will be mentored by Lucas Januario.

Mariam Fahmy Sobhy will add a new backend to Discover for the rpm-ostree protocol. This backend is required for the new cool immutables distros like Fedora Kinoite. This project will be mentored by Aleix Pol Gonzalez and Timothée Ravier.

Raveesh Agarwal will work on improving the network applets with better support for multiple network adapters. This project will be mentored by Jan Grulich.

The Promo team will mentor a project allowing us to automate the collection and analysis of the data we get from our social networks. The goal is to be able to identify how well our announcements and activity on social media networks are generating engagements.

Rohan Reddy will work on extracting the aggregated data from the various sources (Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, website stats…) and Sankalp Das will work on a data visualization dashboard.

Manav sethi will work on an application which will allow us to post a message to multiple social networks at the same time.

Calamares

While not a KDE project, Calamares is participating in Season of KDE too.

Adriaan de Groot will mentor three projects: the first one is porting all the codebase to Python 3.6 (Hitesh Kumar). The second one consists of porting the documentation from GitHub Pages to Jekyll. Finally, Anubhav Choudhary will work on various smaller tasks required by Calamares.

Applications

KDenlive

Vivek Yadav will work on a separate widget for the bin folders, this will be helpful for projects with a lot of content, allowing them to be viewed in a separate window. This project will be mentored by Massimo Stella.

SkanPage and SkanLite

Smit Shivcharan Patil will work on a QML version of SkanLite called SkanPage. The goal is to port the old QtQuick Control 1 codebase to Kirigami and QtQuick Controls 2. This will be mentored by myself (Carl Schwan) and should provide a way to have multi-page scanning support.

Peruse

Mahmoud Ahmed Khalil will add support for reading and creating interactive fiction comic books in Peruse. This will be mentored by Leinir.

Okular

Pablo Marcos will work on the Okular website porting it to Hugo and featuring a new design. This will be mentored by me.

Mark

Mark is an annotation tool for machine learning datasets. Pranav Gade will add support for video annotation and Jean Lima Andrade will add support for audio annotation. Both projects will be mentored by Caio Jordão Carvalho.

Documentation

Claudio Cambra will work on improving the developer documentation in develop.kde.org. This project will be mentored by myself.

Suraj Kumar Mahto will be working on improving the docs.kde.org website and will be mentored by Anuj Bansal and me.

Unaccepted Proposals

Unfortunately, not every proposal was accepted. There are various reasons for this. Often proposals are submitted, but are not related to anything we do in KDE and we can’t find mentors for them. In other cases, there are many students who write a proposal for the same project idea and we can only choose one student per task.

However, I would like to remind people that you can still contribute to KDE without having to participate in Season of KDE. Developers will still review your patches and community members will still help you to contribute.

Matrix Live about NeoChat

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:00:00 +0000

I was recently interviewed with Tobias by the Matrix folks about NeoChat as part of Matrix Live. You can read the integrality of the Matrix update for this week here.

Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Update 29.01.2023: Adapted the code to work with Mastodon 4.0 and replaced linuxrocks.online by floss.social

Update 15.03.2023: Thanks to @veronica@mastodon.online, this code now handles replies in a lot nicer way. You might want check out her solution too.

Update 07.07.2023: Thanks to @cassidy@blaede.family, the layout was improved and this now handle emojis

One of the biggest disadvantages of static site generators is that they are static and can’t include comments.

There are multiples solutions to solve this problem. You could add a third party blog engine like Disqus, but this has the drawback of including a third-party tool with a bad privacy record in your website. Another solution would be to host an open-source alternative but this comes at the cost of a higher maintenance burden. Having to host a database was something we wanted to avoid with a static site generator.

In my opinion, a better solution is to leverage the Mastodon and Fediverse platform. Mastodon is a decentralized social network and it allows people to communicate with each other without being on the same server. It is inspired by Twitter, but instead of tweeting, you write toot.

When publishing an article, you now only need to also write a simple toot linking to your article. Then Mastodon has a simple API to fetch the answer to your toot. This is the code I made for my Hugo powered blog, but it is easily adaptable for other static site generators. It will create a button to load comments instead of loading them for every visitor so that it decreases the load on your mastodon server.

{{ with .Params.comments }}
<section id="comments" class="article-content">
 <h2>Comments</h2>
 <p>With an account on the Fediverse or Mastodon, you can respond to this <a href="https://{{ .host }}/@{{ .username }}/{{ .id }}">post</a>. Since Mastodon is decentralized, you can use your existing account hosted by another Mastodon server or compatible platform if you don't have an account on this one. Known non-private replies are displayed below.</p>
 <p>Learn how this is implemented <a class="link" href="/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/">here.</a></p>

 <p id="mastodon-comments-list"><button id="load-comment">Load comments</button></p>
 <div id="comments-wrapper">
 <noscript><p>Loading comments relies on JavaScript. Try enabling JavaScript and reloading, or visit <a href="https://{{ .host }}/@{{ .username }}/{{ .id }}">the original post</a> on Mastodon.</p></noscript>
 </div>
 <noscript>You need JavaScript to view the comments.</noscript>
 <script src="/assets/js/purify.min.js"></script>
 <script type="text/javascript">
 function escapeHtml(unsafe) {
 return unsafe
 .replace(/&/g, "&amp;")
 .replace(/</g, "&lt;")
 .replace(/>/g, "&gt;")
 .replace(/"/g, "&quot;")
 .replace(/'/g, "&#039;");
 }
 function emojify(input, emojis) {
 let output = input;

 emojis.forEach(emoji => {
 let picture = document.createElement("picture");

 let source = document.createElement("source");
 source.setAttribute("srcset", escapeHtml(emoji.url));
 source.setAttribute("media", "(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)");

 let img = document.createElement("img");
 img.className = "emoji";
 img.setAttribute("src", escapeHtml(emoji.static_url));
 img.setAttribute("alt", `:${ emoji.shortcode }:`);
 img.setAttribute("title", `:${ emoji.shortcode }:`);
 img.setAttribute("width", "20");
 img.setAttribute("height", "20");

 picture.appendChild(source);
 picture.appendChild(img);

 output = output.replace(`:${ emoji.shortcode }:`, picture.outerHTML);
 });

 return output;
 }

 function loadComments() {
 let commentsWrapper = document.getElementById("comments-wrapper");
 document.getElementById("load-comment").innerHTML = "Loading";
 fetch('https://{{ .host }}/api/v1/statuses/{{ .id }}/context')
 .then(function(response) {
 return response.json();
 })
 .then(function(data) {
 let descendants = data['descendants'];
 if(
 descendants &&
 Array.isArray(descendants) &&
 descendants.length > 0
 ) {
 commentsWrapper.innerHTML = "";

 descendants.forEach(function(status) {
 console.log(descendants)
 if( status.account.display_name.length > 0 ) {
 status.account.display_name = escapeHtml(status.account.display_name);
 status.account.display_name = emojify(status.account.display_name, status.account.emojis);
 } else {
 status.account.display_name = status.account.username;
 };

 let instance = "";
 if( status.account.acct.includes("@") ) {
 instance = status.account.acct.split("@")[1];
 } else {
 instance = "{{ .host }}";
 }

 const isReply = status.in_reply_to_id !== "{{ .id }}";

 let op = false;
 if( status.account.acct == "{{ .username }}" ) {
 op = true;
 }

 status.content = emojify(status.content, status.emojis);

 let avatarSource = document.createElement("source");
 avatarSource.setAttribute("srcset", escapeHtml(status.account.avatar));
 avatarSource.setAttribute("media", "(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)");

 let avatarImg = document.createElement("img");
 avatarImg.className = "avatar";
 avatarImg.setAttribute("src", escapeHtml(status.account.avatar_static));
 avatarImg.setAttribute("alt", `@${ status.account.username }@${ instance } avatar`);

 let avatarPicture = document.createElement("picture");
 avatarPicture.appendChild(avatarSource);
 avatarPicture.appendChild(avatarImg);

 let avatar = document.createElement("a");
 avatar.className = "avatar-link";
 avatar.setAttribute("href", status.account.url);
 avatar.setAttribute("rel", "external nofollow");
 avatar.setAttribute("title", `View profile at @${ status.account.username }@${ instance }`);
 avatar.appendChild(avatarPicture);

 let instanceBadge = document.createElement("a");
 instanceBadge.className = "instance";
 instanceBadge.setAttribute("href", status.account.url);
 instanceBadge.setAttribute("title", `@${ status.account.username }@${ instance }`);
 instanceBadge.setAttribute("rel", "external nofollow");
 instanceBadge.textContent = instance;

 let display = document.createElement("span");
 display.className = "display";
 display.setAttribute("itemprop", "author");
 display.setAttribute("itemtype", "http://schema.org/Person");
 display.innerHTML = status.account.display_name;

 let header = document.createElement("header");
 header.className = "author";
 header.appendChild(display);
 header.appendChild(instanceBadge);

 let permalink = document.createElement("a");
 permalink.setAttribute("href", status.url);
 permalink.setAttribute("itemprop", "url");
 permalink.setAttribute("title", `View comment at ${ instance }`);
 permalink.setAttribute("rel", "external nofollow");
 permalink.textContent = new Date( status.created_at ).toLocaleString('en-US', {
 dateStyle: "long",
 timeStyle: "short",
 });

 let timestamp = document.createElement("time");
 timestamp.setAttribute("datetime", status.created_at);
 timestamp.appendChild(permalink);

 let main = document.createElement("main");
 main.setAttribute("itemprop", "text");
 main.innerHTML = status.content;

 let interactions = document.createElement("footer");
 if(status.favourites_count > 0) {
 let faves = document.createElement("a");
 faves.className = "faves";
 faves.setAttribute("href", `${ status.url }/favourites`);
 faves.setAttribute("title", `Favorites from ${ instance }`);
 faves.textContent = status.favourites_count;

 interactions.appendChild(faves);
 }

 let comment = document.createElement("article");
 comment.id = `comment-${ status.id }`;
 comment.className = isReply ? "comment comment-reply" : "comment";
 comment.setAttribute("itemprop", "comment");
 comment.setAttribute("itemtype", "http://schema.org/Comment");
 comment.appendChild(avatar);
 comment.appendChild(header);
 comment.appendChild(timestamp);
 comment.appendChild(main);
 comment.appendChild(interactions);

 if(op === true) {
 comment.classList.add("op");

 avatar.classList.add("op");
 avatar.setAttribute(
 "title",
 "Blog post author; " + avatar.getAttribute("title")
 );

 instanceBadge.classList.add("op");
 instanceBadge.setAttribute(
 "title",
 "Blog post author: " + instanceBadge.getAttribute("title")
 );
 }

 commentsWrapper.innerHTML += DOMPurify.sanitize(comment.outerHTML);
 });
 }
 });
 }
 document.getElementById("load-comment").addEventListener("click", loadComments);
 </script>
</section>
{{ end }}

You can also found some SCSS rules on my gitlab. If you blog engine doesn’t support converting SCSS to CSS, you can use an online SCSS converter or sass tool from the cli.

This code is using DOMPurify to sanitize the input, since it is not a great idea to load data from third party sources without sanitizing them first. Also thanks to chrismorgan, the code was optimized and is more secure.

In my blog post, I can now add the following information to my frontmatter, to make comments appears magically.

comments:
 host: floss.social
 username: carlschwan
 id: 109774012599031406

Announcing NeoChat 1.0, the KDE Matrix client

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Matrix is an instant messaging system similar to Whatsapp or Telegram, but uses an open and decentralized network for secure and privacy-protected communications. NeoChat is a visually attractive Matrix client that works on desktop computers and mobile phones.

Convergence

NeoChat provides an elegant and convergent user interface, allowing it to adapt to any screen size automatically and gracefully.

This means you can use it both on desktop computers, where you might want to have a small bar on the side of your screen, but you can also enjoy NeoChat on Plasma Mobile and Android phones.

In fact, NeoChat will be installed by default on the PinePhone KDE edition and we offer a nightly Android version too. The Android version is for the moment experimental and some features, like file uploading, don’t work yet.

Features

NeoChat provides a timeline with support for simple messages and also allows you to upload images and video and audio files. You can reply to messages and add reactions.

NeoChat provides all the basic features chat application needs: apart from sending and responding to messages, you can invite users to a room, start private chats, create new rooms and explore public rooms.

Start a chat dialog

Explore rooms

Some room management features are also available: You can ban or kick users, upload a room avatar and edit a room’s metadata.

Room Setting dialog

Message detail dialog

The room view contains a sidebar that is automatically displayed on wide screens, but also appears as a drawer on smaller screens. This sidebar contains all the information about the room.

Invitation UI

Multiaccount Support

Sidebar

A lot of care has been put into making NeoChat intuitive to use. For example, copying with Ctrl+C and dragging and dropping images just work; and the text field gets autofocused so that you are never writing into the void. NeoChat also integrates an emoji picker, letting you use the greatest invention of the ~~21st century~~. (Note: someone in Mastodon pointed out that Emojis are from the 20th century and appeared in 1997 in Japan.)

Image Editor

NeoChat also includes a basic image editor that lets you crop and rotate images before sending them. The image editor is provided by a small library called KQuickImageEditor.

This library for the moment doesn’t have a stable API and is released together with NeoChat.

Why Matrix and NeoChat

Matrix is an open network for secure and decentralized communication. This is an initiative that is very much aligned with KDE’s goals of creating an open operating system for everybody. This is why we need a Matrix client that integrates into Plasma and thus NeoChat was born.

NeoChat is a fork of Spectral, another QML client, and uses the libQuotient library to interact with the Matrix protocol. We would like to send out a huge thank you to these two projects and their contributors. Without them, NeoChat wouldn’t have been possible.

NeoChat uses the Kirigami framework and QML to provide an elegant and convergent user interface.

Translations

NeoChat is fully translated in English, Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, French, Dutch, Catalan (Valencian), Catalan, British English, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk and Slovenian. Thanks a lot to all the translators and if NeoChat is not available in your native language consider joining KDE localization team.

What is Missing

For the moment, encryption support is missing and NeoChat doesn’t support video calls and editing messages yet either. Both things are in the works.

We are also missing some integration with the rest of the KDE applications,
like with Purpose, which will allow NeoChat to be used to share content from other KDE applications; and with Sonnet, which will provide spellchecking features.

The fastest way to implement these deficiencies is to get involved! The NeoChat team is a friendly group of developers and Matrix enthusiasts. Join us and help us make NeoChat a great Matrix client! You can join us at #neochat:kde.org. We also participate to Season of KDE, so if you want to get mentored on a project and at the end get a cool KDE T-Shirt, feel free to say hi.

Tarballs

Version 1.0 of NeoChat is availabe here, kquickimageeditor 0.1.2 is availabe here. Both packages are signed with my gpg key 14B0ED91B5783415D0AA1E0A06B35D38387B67BE.

~~A Flathub release will hopefully be released in the next few days. We will update this post when it is available.~~

The Flathub version is available.

Doxyqml 0.5.1 release

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 19:30:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the release of Doxyqml 0.5.1. Doxyqml is a python program allowing to document QML APIs with the help of Doxygen. This version includes a single commit contributed by Olaf Mandel adding supports for recent versions of Doxygen (> 1.8.20).

KDE.org migrated to Hugo

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 18:00:00 +0000

KDE.org now uses Hugo. Hugo is a fast and modern static site generator written in Go. It provides a few improvements over the old system that was using plain PHP. A large part of the work was done by Anuj during GSoC 2020. This was a massive work, converting the repository storing more than 20 years of KDE history.

The website is now generated once and no longer uses PHP to generate itself at runtime. This improves the loading speed of the website, but the speed boost is not significant, since the PHP code used before was quite small and KDE’s servers are powerful.

But the biggest improvement is in terms of features. We are now working with markdown files instead of raw HTML files, this makes the life of the promo team much easier.

The internationalization of the website now creates a unique URL per language, this should allow Google to link to the version of the website using the correct language. A French, Ukrainian, Catalan, Dutch, and a few more languages are already available. There is also a proper language selector! We also don’t need to manually tag each string for translations.

There is also now an RSS feed with all the latest announcements. Another big improvement is that the announcements list is autogenerated and no longer modified by hand and with the help of the release scripts.

Another nice change for website developers is that now the SCSS code for the individual pages is located in the kde-org repository itself instead of another repository. Overall the developer experience is much better, there is no need to set up an apache server and to the PHP configs to include the capacity framework, just to get the website running locally. Now you only need to download the Hugo binary from their release page and run it on the repo.

Hugo and Gettext

The internationalization of KDE.org was quite a challenge. When working on a multilingual website with Hugo, Hugo expects a markdown document per language for each translated page.

plasma-desktop.md
plasma-desktop.es.md
plasma-desktop.fr.md
plasma-desktop.uk.md
...

The problem is that traditional translations workflow rely on a string-based approach, where a document is split in paragraphs and translated individually. So I couldn’t just put each file markdown file as big blobs in the po files. To solve this problem, I created a python script splitting the markdown files in paragraphs, simplifying the markdown syntax (removing leading # and + for heading and list item). This script also handles Hugo shortcodes transforming:

{{< img caption="My figure caption" alt="My accessible description" src="..." >}}

in two strings:

My figure caption
My accessible description

The script can obliviously put the individual strings back in place. The scripts also handle the menu translation, and the translations of the strings in the footers. For now, the script is just a file in the kde-org repository, but I would like to transform it to a standalone library so that other gettext and Hugo users can translate their website.

Using Hugo API, the language selector was trivial to write:

<ul class="navbar-nav ml-auto">
{{ if .IsTranslated }}
<li class="nav-item dropdown" aria-describedby="language-picker-description">
<p class="sr-only" id="language-picker-description">{{ i18n "Select-your-language" }}</p>
<a class="nav-link dropdown-toggle" href="#" data-toggle="dropdown" role="button" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false">
<img src="/Language-Icons/icon20x24px-exported-transparent.png" alt="" />
<span>{{ i18n "translations" }}</span>
</a>
<div class="dropdown-menu dropdonw-trans" role="listbox">
<a class="dropdown-item" aria-selected="true" hreflang="{{ .Site.Language.Lang }}" role="option" lang="{{ .Site.Language.Lang }}" href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Site.Language.LanguageName }}</a>
{{ range .Translations }}
<a class="dropdown-item" hreflang="{{ .Language.Lang }}" role="option" lang="{{ .Language.Lang }}" href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Language.LanguageName }}</a>
{{ end }}
</div>
</li>
{{ end }}
</ul>

This is a bit verbose because this selector is also fully accessible for screen readers.

There are a few more tricks employed in kde.org to improve the internationalization, for example when a page doesn’t exist in a language, there is an Apache rule redirecting it to the English version. Another nice trick is that there is a special Hugo shortcode called i18n_var and used to parametrize the strings. For example:

{{< i18n_var "Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned %[1]s" "5.20.2" >}}

And the extractor is clever and only extract the part that needs to be translated.

The script

You can comment this post on r/kde and HN.

Announcing MyKDE

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 12:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce the successful deployment of the new identity system in KDE, codename MyKDE. The new identity system is now available in my.kde.org. You should be able to login into the my.kde.org website with your normal KDE credential.

For the moment, only the wikis are using MyKDE but in the coming months this should change with more and more services switching to MyKDE. I will let you all know of the progress of the migration.

FAQ:

Why the move?

identity.kde.org is using OpenLDAP for user management with a small PHP frontend allowing the account creation. And we had the following problems with it:

Account removal is hard, requiring significant manual intervention and effort (several hours work in some instances)
Account registration takes 30 seconds or more to complete, creating a poor user experience
Groups don’t scale effectively
Anti-spam measures are too crude

Will my data be migrated?

Yes, your data are migrated just by login into MyKDE once. This will migrate all your group membership (KDE developer, Akademy Team, …), personal data and password.

For users who didn’t log into MyKDE during the migration period. If you are a KDE developer or KDE e.V. member, your account will be imported as a disabled account and you will need to ask sysadmins to enabled it. For the rest of the users of identity.kde.org who don’t have a membership to groups, your account will be removed. We think this is the best solution because there is no need to store personal information that we don’t need from users who don’t use the system anymore. If you want to conserve your account (and username), please log at least once. We will send periodic emails reminding you of migrating your account.

How do I register a new account in MyKDE?

For the moment the possibility of registering a new account is disabled in MyKDE and the only possibility is to create an identity.kde.org account and then migrate your account. This is due to the fact we don’t want some accounts existing only in MyKDE. This will naturally change when we migrate fully to MyKDE.

How to I collect a badge?

MyKDE has the possibility to grant badges to users. For the moment there is only one badge enabled: KDE developer. This badge is given to every KDE developer and is displayed on their public profile (if enabled). When the new Season of KDE website will be deployed, it will be also possible to have an SoK mentor and SoK mentee badge.

I’m interested in ideas of new badges (and badge designs), so please let me know if you have a genius idea that doesn’t gamify KDE contribution (e.g no made 100/1000/10 000 commits badge).

Note that you are in control of that badge get displayed.

What is the public profile functionality?

One of the new features of MyKDE is the possibility to have a public profile. This public profile is opt-in, so you need to explicitly enable it to make it work and it can display a small bio, your avatar, name, username, social network account, Liberapay account, and badges earned.

This is for example how it looks for me

Can I contribute to MyKDE?

Yes, the source code is hosted in websites/my-kde-org and all the deployment information can be found in the KDE sysadmin documentation.

SoK 2021: Mentor Wanted!

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 11:40:00 +0000

The Season of KDE is a 3 weeks long program that provides an opportunity for people to do mentored projects for KDE.

We are still looking for more mentors for SoK 2021. So please consider mentoring for this year season and adding ideas related to the project you are working on in the Wiki page. And joining the #kde-soc channel.

Possible ideas includes but not limited to:

Updating your application user documentation
Write technical documentation for a framework
Port your application to non-deprecated Qt and KF5 APIs
Modernize some part of the code of an application
Implement a new feature
And a lot more, SoK is not limited to development :)

What is cooking on KDE websites this month (September)?

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 16:30:35 +0000

This month a few cool things happened to the KDE websites.

The wiki instance we use was migrated to MediaWiki 3.34 (latest LTS version), bringing a few improvements in the translations module and fixing the problem where translated pages couldn’t be moved around. The commenting plugin was sadly discountinued in this version and instead the Echo extension was added which provides a way to ping people.
Another improvement related to the wikis is the creation of a small module allowing user to authenticate with the Identity replacement. The source code can be found here. This brings us a step closer to the replacement of identity.kde.org.
This month, a completely rewritten backend for Season of KDE was merged. This was part of the work Anuj did during GSoc this year. It is not yet deployed into production, but I host a demo so you can try it. The new features allow for a mentor to comment on proposals, and mentees can now use markdown when writing a proposal. The new system now uses Symfony, one of the biggest PHP frameworks, and is integrated in MyKDE too, so mentors and mentees get a badge after completing SoK. The admin interface was also significantly improved. Great work Anuj!

Season homepage

Season admin

And while at it, please consider mentoring for this year’s SoK program. It is a good opportunity to bring new blood to KDE. community.kde.org/SoK/Ideas/2021.
The new developer documentation website also got a few updates and now contains a complete tutorial about how to write a Plasma Widget. Thanks to Zren for this contribution.
Elisa, everyone’s favorite music player, also got a new website developed by Anubhav Choudhary and Nikunj Goyal. You can check it out at elisa.kde.org.
Subtitle Composer, a subtitle editor, also got a new website developed by Thiago Sueto. You can check it out at subtitlecomposer.kde.org/.
The atelier website was also updated by Lays Rodrigues.
KDEMail.net now uses the Aether theme.
I sent a proposal to use a fork of the Blender Fund tool for KDE Fundraising in the community mailing list. You can check out the demo for KDE and Krita.

Presenting Kontrast

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 09:46:00 +0000

Kontrast is a contrast checker available for desktop and mobile devices. You can use Kontrast to choose background and text color combinations for your website or app that your users will find easy to read. Kontrast can help you improve the accessibility for your site or app for people with vision problems.

Kontrast won’t catch all the problems, but it should still be very helpful to catch many issues early on, when designing your interface.

I released the first version of Kontrast earlier this month.

Another big feature of Kontrast is the possibility to generate random color combinations with good contrast. These colors can be saved in the application itself, so that you can keep a particularly good color combination for later use.

Kontrast is available for the Linux desktop, Plasma Mobile and there is also a Beta version for Android.

This application is built using the excellent Kirigami framework.

You can download and install Kontrast from Flathub and a nightly build is also available in binary factory.

The tarball is available here and is signed with my gpg key 14B0ED91B5783415D0AA1E0A06B35D38387B67BE.

Future Improvements

Future plans include improving the Android build, possibly release a stable build of the Android version and also create a QtQuick-based color picker that is better integrated with the application.

Develop.kde.org

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 13:50:00 +0000

The new website for kde developement information was deployed during the Akademy and contains many information about building awesome stuff using KDE tools and large collection of Qt based libraries.

The long term goal of this new website is to increase the first and third parties use of the KDE Frameworks and development tools. To achieve this goal, this website will provide high quality and complete documentation about the usage of the KDE Frameworks and other libraries (a quite ambitious goal I know), but also provide marketting content for the libraries to offer them a bigger visibility in the internet.

The more short term and more realistic goal is to import the existing tutorials available from various places (techbase, the framework book, the plasma mobile docs and other more hidden places. And more importantly while importing the content, also update and improve it and allow other in the community to review the content for correctness. Another big task is to better organize the content in logical sections.

Behind the scene

The website is powered by the Hugo static site generator and by a fork of the docsy theme. The modifications to the theme are the support of gitlab web editor, the integration of KDE branding and support of linking to api.kde.org class and function with macros. In term of design, I’m not entirely satisfied yet but for a first it’s good enough and because I know developers like dark themes, the website also supports a dark via prefers-color-scheme: dark.

All these changes allow us to provide a custom website tailored to our needs (git based code review, web interface to edit the page if needed, custom design, api.kde.org integration and good separation between the content and the layout of the page).

Future planned improvements to the infrastructure are:

Add a .gitlab-ci.yml to test most of the code examples, to make sure the code examples still compiles and there is no regressions.

Get Involved

You can find many tasks in Invent, porting old tutorials and improving them can be a good way to learn them or better understand them.

You can also review open merge requests and look if the information are correct.

Thanks to (in no particular order) Paul Brow, Suraj Kumar Mahto, Tobias Fella, David Barchiesi, Han Young, Jonah Brüchert, Nicolas Fella, Nate Graham, Cyril Rossi, Ahmad Samir and Kevin Ottens for their help contributing new content or/and reviewing open merge requests.

Making Koko Great for Desktop Use

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 13:50:00 +0000

Koko is a great image viewer designed for Plasma Mobile. Unfortunately, up until recently it did not work great on desktop computers. This changed last week with various small patches to Koko’s code and Kirigami, KDE’s framework for developing apps for the desktop and mobile devices which is what Koko is based on.

First the sidebar color was updated to use the view colorset instead of the window colorset. This change was initially only done in Koko but, seeing that various Kirigami apps had this configuration too, I updated the default in Kirigami so that each app doesn’t have to change it again. (Kirigami !15)

I added a proper header to the sidebar describing what the sidebar does and also made a small change to the list header. Now, if all the actions list are expandable, the list header look is applied to them. This makes it more similar to the sidebar on System Settings. That said, more work is needed to achieve a consistent look. (Kirigami !19)

I added “next” and “previous” buttons on the desktop mode to the image viewer itself, as swipe gestures are harder to use on desktop apps. (Koko !3) I also added text to the context buttons to make it clearer what the actions do. (Koko !2)

Another thing I improved was the animation for showing or hiding the thumbnail list: It doesn’t steal the scrollbar input anymore. (Koko !12)

A more exciting feature that hasn’t landed yet is that I am including a simple image editor for upcoming versions. The image editor is developed as an external library that can be embedded into Koko and also into a future version of spectacle for plasma mobile, Pix, or QML messaging apps. It can also be included into messenger apps and possibly more types of apps. The API is not stable yet, so if you are interested in integrating a basic image editor into your qml app, please let me know! The code is available at invent.kde.org/libraries/kquickimageeditor and merge request and features suggestions are welcome.

Is Koko already a full replacement for Gwenview? Probably not or at least not for yet for everyone. But with a bit more love it could become a serious contender.

A new look for KDE.org

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Started a long time ago and only finished now, I have the pleasure to announce the publication of a new homepage for the KDE community. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did creating it.

This is only a small preview. Head over to kde.org to see the complete webpage.

First of all I have removed the carousel. Some studies show that a carousel is a very bad way to convey information. See “should I use a carousel”.

Instead, I’ve created various sections about KDE. Plasma, the applications, hardware that is shipped with Plasma, and, more importantly, the KDE Community. This is just an overview, we have way more projects, but I hope it gives you a good introduction of the work we, as the KDE Community, have been doing for more then 20 years. If you are interested, you can find all the different products we create on the KDE products page.

The new webpage was not only my work, but a collaborative work and I want to thank in no particular order Ilya Bizyaev, Niccolò Venerandi, Paul Brown, manueljlin, David Cahalane, Blumen Herzenschein and others for their help proofreading, suggesting changes and creating the artwork for the hardware section (thanks again manueljlin).

Fun fact

Thanks to David Cahalane, I learned that this is the 8th version of the kde.org homepage. For those interested, I compiled a list of snapshots from archive.org showing the evolution of the homepage.

29 January 1998 It’s older than I am \o/
3 March 2000
2 March 2001
23 June 2003
18 June 2009
28 February 2013
26 Jun 2018
20 April 2020

Get Involved

There is always more work needed in order to spread KDE all over the world. Creating graphics, polishing websites, writing announcements are just some of the tasks you can help with. Join the KDE Web and KDE Promo group and help us let the world know about KDE.

KDE Web:

KDE Promo:

This month in KDE Web: March 2020

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 18:00:00 +0000

This month KDE web developers worked on updating more websites and some progress was made in a new identity provider and a lot of other exiting stuff and a lot of background work was also done.

Updated Websites

Calligra, the KDE office suite, launched a new website. This was done during Season of KDE by Anuj Bansal. This replaces the old Wordpress website. See repository.

Planet KDE is an aggregator of all the individual blogs of KDE contributors. It is the place where you can find technical details about a change, general KDE news, and blog posts about the life of KDE contributors. The website was updated and now contains feeds in more languages. (Me: Carl Schwan, See repository).

Progress to a new identity service

KDE Identity was and still is a source of pain in the KDE infrastructure. It only supports OpenLDAP, doesn’t provide a great onbording experience and isn’t very flexible.

A new account management service is currently in creation and should be based on a fork of the successful Blender ID system. This new system will be based on OAuth2.

This month the homepage of the new identity service was updated to follow KDE branding (Me: Carl Schwan, see commit) and the settings are now using environment variables (Lays Rodrigues, see commit).

But the most significant work was rewriting season.kde.org and making it compatible with the new identity service. This is still in progress and a few features are missing but everything should be finished soon. (Me: Carl Schwan, See repository.).

KDE.org changes

The hardware page created last month was updated to include the Pinebook Pro (Niccolò Venerandi) and now includes hardware specifications (Me: Carl Schwan).

Library updates

An Aether theme was created for the Sphinx documention engine based on the Read the Docs theme. This isn’t used yet for any website but in the future, it will be used for hig.kde.org and maybe others. Stay tuned! (Carson Black, see repository)

How you can help

We always need help with websites, fixing papercuts, upgrading old websites to the new Jekyll/Hugo infrastructure, making sure information on the websites are up-to-date, creating beautiful home page for your favorite project and a lot more.

You can join the web team through our Matrix channel , our IRC channel (#kde-www) or our Telegram channel.

Why are most KDE websites using the same theme?

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 12:50:00 +0000

A unified theme? Why? Why not?

Nearly all KDE websites use a unified theme across the board. This is part of the consistency goal, chosen as a KDE goal at the last Akademy in Milano (Italy).

Using a unified theme has multiple advantages:

It strengthens KDE’s brand, since websites are more visible than applications or projects part of the KDE community. Websites with a unified look help visitors immediately identify an application or subproject as being part of a bigger organization.
It is easier to maintain only one theme and the tooling behind it than a theme for each project. We all wish Free and Open Source projects had unlimited budgets and manpower, but that is not realistic and maintaining a theme is not an easy task.

This doesn’t mean the KDE theme should be used for every KDE project, in fact, there are legitimate reasons not to. Sometimes an application under the KDE umbrella wants to create their own brand and does have the manpower and talent to design their own website. Krita is a good example here. The team has built a beautiful website that does not use the unified theme.

What theme does KDE use?

KDE is using the Aether theme. This is a theme designed and initially developed by Ken Vermette, the talented artist that is also behind most of the Plasma wallpapers and some interesting design concept like DWD.

This theme was originally based on one of the first Bootstrap 4 alpha version and later rebased on a stable Bootstrap 4 version. Using Bootstrap has its advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest advantage is that it has a large community and a lot of bootstrap themes exist for CMS and static site generators. It can be easily adapted to your specific needs without starting from scratch every time.

Another advantage is that Bootstrap is built using SASS and is designed to be extendable with tons of variables a developer can modify to globally change colors, layouts and a lot more. You can also specify the modules you want to use, and add your self-made components. For those interested in extending a Bootstrap theme, the official documentation is a great start. These capabilities were sadly not used when creating the Aether theme, but we are slowly moving to use more of the Bootstrap theming capabilities over time.

The problem with Boostrap is that, because it is so popular, in its default from it looks like a generic website without any personal identity. Changing only the colors won’t help to make your website more unique.

Building the websites

In KDE we use a lot of different web frameworks for our websites. Most of the applications websites are now using Jekyll or Hugo, but some are also using Wordpress, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.

Jekyll has first-class support for creating a shared theme, so we created a Jekyll theme for KDE using the Aether theme that offers a lot of options. Here are two examples:

Should it display a Made By KDE logo? This is useful for application websites but shouldn’t appear on, for example, the KDE e.V. website.
Should it display a KDE logo or the application logo?

This allows for small customizations with only a few changes for each website without having to maintain different versions.

Some websites are using Hugo instead of Jekyll. The reason for this is that Hugo is faster when generating the webpages and has more advanced internationalization features included by default. The internationalization features are used for kate-editor.org and the monthly application release announcements.

For my WIP replacement for the KDE Dot, I needed the performance of Hugo. With Jekyll, I gave up generating the website after 10 minutes, but with Hugo, it only took a few seconds to generate.

In the case of Content Management Systems, creating a theme is also well-supported but it isn’t as pleasant to do. I have a limited experience with Wordpress, but creating a theme was still possible and not too complicated. In the case of Drupal 7, creating a theme from scratch is almost impossible. It requires messing with a lot of PHP arrays and the security responsibility is on the side of the theme developer.

Deployment of the theme

To deploy the theme, I use Symfony Encore. Sympfony Encore is a webpack wrapper. I chose Symfony Encore because I’m very familiar with its PHP framework and I have been working with it since I was in high school (using Webpack alone would have been completely fine too).

Webpack is used to compile and optimize the SCSS and ECMAScript (aka JavaScript). After each commit to the master branch, a CI job compiles and deploys the compiled CSS and ECMAScript to a CDN host and the hosted CDN asset is then used by all the new KDE websites. This means that my changes are immediately propagated to all websites… or so I thought initially. In reality the CSS and JS files are cached for a long time and often visitors get an old version.

I’m solving this problem in two ways:

For dynamic websites: I also generate a versioned version of the assets and resolve the version in the backend. This is what I used in the MediaWiki plugin, for example.
For static websites: In this case, I can’t dynamically resolve the last version in the backend, so instead I add a GET parameter to the URL (e.g. main.css?v=10) and increase the number each time I fix a bug. This doesn’t happen often, so it is still easy to manage.

How you can help

We always need help with the websites, fixing papercuts, upgrading old websites to the new Jekyll/Hugo infrastructure, making sure information on the website is up-to-date, creating new beautiful home pages for your favorite projects and a lot more.

The Elisa maintainers are still looking for someone who wants to create a website and we created a junior job task for this. Maybe that someone could be you?

You can also join the web team through our Matrix channel, our IRC channel (#kde-www) or our Telegram channel.

This month in KDE Web: January-February 2020

Sat, 29 Feb 2020 18:00:00 +0000

This is the first post in a monthly series about improvements to the KDE websites. I plan to publish it every last Saturday of the month. Since a lot happened in January and I didn’t mention it anywhere, I will also mention those things in this post.

New Websites

KDE Connect gained a new website and a promotional video. This was done during the Season of KDE project. (Arjun Thekoot Harisankar, see repository).

Updated Websites

Juk is a music player and music manager. A new website for it was created by Anuj Bansal, (see commit).

{:.img-border}

KDE e.V. is the non-profit organization that represents the KDE community in legal and financial matters. The e.V. website was migrated to Jekyll and now uses the shared Jekyll theme. (Me: Carl Schwan, see commit).

{:.img-border}

KMyMoney is a personal finance manager and the project website was also migrated to Jekyll and now uses the shared Jekyll theme (Me: Carl Schwan, see commit).

{:.img-border}

kde-china.org is now using the Jekyll theme and is hosted in the KDE infrastructure (Yunhe Guo, see repository).

{:.img-border}

Updates to kde.org

A hardware page was created listing all the devices that ship with Plasma preinstalled (Niccolò Venerandi, see commit).
Updated image for the recently launched Plasma 5.18 (Jonathan Riddell and Me: Carl Schwan).
Reduce KDE patron logo size for kde.org (Ilya Bizyaev, see task).

Library updates

Added options to customize footer in the Jekyll theme. This will be helpful for the coming update to jp.kde.org (Jumpei Ogawa, see commit).
Added option to disabled the donation form in the Jekyll theme. (Jumpei Ogawa, see commit).
Various minor fixes to the Aether css theme (Anuj Bansal and Me: Carl Schwan).
A component selector for the Jekyll theme was also added. This will be helpful for making kontact.kde.org use the KDE Jekyll theme and not a custom theme and for others projects who have multiples components (e.g. Calligra). (Anuj Bansal, see merge request).
Improve translations infrastructure for kate-editor.org (Me: Carl Schwan, see commits).

How you can help

We always need help with website, fixing papercuts, upgrading old websites to the new Jekyll/Hugo infrastructure, making sure information on the website is up-to-date, creating beautiful home page for your favorite project and a lot more.

The Elisa maintainers are looking for someone who wants to create a website and a junior job task was created.

You can join the web team through our Matrix channel , our IRC channel (#kde-www) or our Telegram channel.

Bugzilla integration in the KDE wikis

Sat, 23 Nov 2019 18:20:35 +0000

The Bugzilla integration in the KDE wikis is now usable again.

KDE wikis were using a long time ago the Bugzilla integration extension developed by Mozilla. This was used for example by some KDE components to keep track of the feature planned for a new release.

Sadly this extension wasn’t keep up to date and was not compatible with recent MediaWiki extension.

So I developed a new extension. This doesn’t have all the features of the old extension but all the one needed for KDE.

The extension can be see in use at community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/19.12_Feature_Plan.

<bugzilla title="TODO" class="table-bugs-todo">
{
 "product": "umbrello",
 "status" : "CONFIRMED",
 "severity" : "wishlist",
 "f2": "target_milestone",
 "o2": "substring",
 "v2": "19.12",
 "include_fields" : [ "id", "product", "summary", "assigned_to"]
}
</bugzilla>

And this should display a list of all open which list for the milestone 19.12.

Enjoy :)

Happy Halloween - Dark theme for more KDE website

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 16:20:35 +0000

Halloween was the perfect occasion for me to hack together a dark theme for more KDE websites. So now a dark theme version is also available for kde.org and planetkde.

It is using prefers-color-scheme: dark media query so it’s only available if you browser prefers the dark theme version.

List stores in kde.org/applications

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 20:35:35 +0000

Announcing a small update for the goal: KDE is All About the Apps. kde.org/applications is now listing the stores where the application is available. For the moment, it’s only listing Linux and the Windows Store, but support for F-Droid and the Play Store is planned. Stay tuned!

Windows download link in kde.org/applications

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 11:35:35 +0000

Some quick news about a new feature of kde.org/applications! With the amazing work done by Hannah von Reth and Christoph Cullmann, we now have more applications in the Windows Store.

KDE applications on Windows

I updated kde.org/applications to display this important information. Now if you are browsing for example the Kate application page using Windows, you should see a button “Install on Windows” instead of “Install of Linux”.

Since the generation of this website use the AppStream standard and this standard allow to add some custom fields, I added a vendor prefixed field to it: KDE::windows_store. Et voilà, the metadata is available to the php code.

The next task is to add a list at the bottom of the supported platform, in case the operating system detection doesn’t work. This will let the visitor know about all the supported platforms.

If someone is interested in doing this task, please contact me on irc/matrix #kde-www and username ‘Carl Schwan/CarlSchwan[m]’. The repository is available in the new KDE Gitlab instance: invent.kde.org/websites/kde-org-applications/.

New webpage for Plasma Desktop

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 09:35:35 +0000

In my quest to improve the website of KDE, I updated the Plasma Desktop webpage. This is a huge improvement to the old website, which didn’t show any screenshots and didn’t list any Plasma features.

I already teased the improvements I made in the Plasma BoF in Milan to the Akademy.

The redesign got a lot of positive feedback by the Plasma team and after some small modifications the changes landed.

The webpage looks like this now:

Thanks to all the people from the Promo team and vinz who helped me write the text and give me some ideas.

Improving the KDE websites: Junior Jobs

If you want to help improving the web presence of KDE, I regularly add some Junior Job to this Phabricator Workboard. Lots of things need to be updated, so don’t hesitate to propose other changes in the kde-www mailing list.

Discussion: Reddit or Mastodon

KDE websites infrastructure update and new websites

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 11:35:35 +0000

Since my latest post two months ago, a lot of things changed regarding the KDE websites. More and more KDE websites are switching to the Aether theme designed by Ken Vermette. You can follow the progress at the Phabricator task T10827.

New websites

All three wikis were updated to MediaWiki 1.31 and are now using the Aether MediaWiki theme. There are some visual glitches when using the dark theme version that can still be observed. They are usually very simple to fix, so please report them in bugs.kde.org.

The French speaking KDE websites was also updated to use the Aether Jekyll theme. It’s only an aesthetic change and some parts of the content still need to be updated. If you speak French and want to help, contact the French speaking KDE community in #kde-fr (IRC/Matrix) or via email.

Choqok also got a new website.

The wiki explanation page was also updated.

Behind the scenes

Using a single codebase for the CSS theming

One of the big problems encountered was the multiplication of different versions of the CSS files. There is a CCS file used by konsole.kde.org and choqok.kde.org, one for all the MediaWiki instances, and one for kde.org. This was getting harder and harder to maintain, so I decided to create a single SASS codebase for all the KDE websites.

The code is located in the KDE Gitlab instance and uses Symfony Encore to generate all the CSS files from the SASS codebase.

For the moment, the CSS code is only split into multiple SASS modules and the tooling builds multiple versions using some generic components (breeze buttons) and other more specific components (MediaWiki dark theme).

Compiling the SASS files to CSS is done using the KDE Binary Factory and produces two versions of each file, one with versioning (e.g. boostrap.hi8yh2huh.css) which is intended for all the dynamics websites (MediaWiki, kde.org, …) and another one without versioning for the static websites (Hugo and Jekyll).

Using versioned assets in a MediaWiki skin

MediaWiki uses ResourceLoader to load assets, but in our case we want to use the Webpack generated manifest.json to load the versioned file. For this, I’m using a Symfony component asset that is doing most of the job for me.

Here is the code used:


$urlPackage = new UrlPackage(
 'https://cdn.kde.org/',
 new JsonManifestVersionStrategy('https://cdn.kde.org/aether-devel/version/manifest.json')
);

$out->addStyle( $urlPackage->getUrl('aether-devel/version/bootstrap.css'), 'all' );

I actually created a fork of the JsonManifestVersionStrategy class because of a bug in the library. I hope my change will be merged upstream.

New features in the Jekyll theme

The Jekyll theme got some nice new features added by various contributors.

Eike Hein added support for meta tags allowing some basic SEO from page metadata
Jumpei Ogawa added support for a custom navigation menu
I added a blog component

And special thanks to Mark Winter for fixing a small typo.

Junior Job

There are multiple other websites in the pipeline and any help is welcome.

Update RKward website
Update KMyMoney website
Update Umbrello website I already started it, but if someone wants to take care of it, they are welcome.
Update kde.org/plasma-desktop There are still some screenshots and videos missing.

If you are interested in one of this tasks, join us in #kde-www in IRC/Matrix.

Websites Bof at Akademy

I’m going to Akademy and I will organize a BoF about the websites. It will take place Tuesday, 10th September 2019 in room U2-08b, just after the Plasma BoFs.

If you are interested and want to attend, you can put yourself in the list T11423.

The new userbase wiki

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 11:35:35 +0000

I’m happy to announce that the userbase wiki is getting a new theme and an updated MediaWiki version.

New theme - Aether

The old userbase theme was called Neverland and looked a bit antiquated. A new theme was created with a similar look to kde.org.

The new theme features a light and dark modes using the new prefers-color-scheme: dark CSS media query. The new theme is also mobile friendly.

I think this is quite an improvement over this:

I am confident that Claus_Chr and me found most of the visual glitches, but if you do find a glitch, please report it to me on my talk page.

The new theme is hosted in KDE gitlab instance. Contributions are welcome.

New MediaWiki version

We jumped MediaWiki from the obsolete version 1.26 to 1.31, the latest LTS version. This should fix some of the long-standing bugs and allow us to get all security updates with minimal maintenance needs.

What’s next?

A similar update for the community and techbase wikis should be comming soon™. The only thing that we still need to work is an update of the configuration files and some testing to make sure nothing broke during the update. A preview version of the community wiki can already be tested at: wikisandbox.kde.org.

Contribute to Userbase

When you find a kool feature in KDE software, you can write a small tutorial or just a small paragraph about it and the KDE Userbase Wiki is the right place to publish it. You don’t need to know how to code, have perfect English or know how MediaWiki’s formatting work, to contribute. We also need translators.

Admire my GIMP skills ;)

Thanks to Blumen Herzenschein and Paul Brown for proofreading this blog post and to Ben Cooksley for pointing me to the right direction.

Discussion: Reddit or Mastodon

New website for Konsole

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 11:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, konsole.kde.org got a new website.

Doesn’t it look nice? As a reminder the old website looked like this.

The design is very similar to the kontact.kde.org and kde.org websites.

The content could probably still need some improvements, so if you find typos or want to improve the wording of a sentence, please get in touch with KDE Promo. The good news is that you don’t need to be a programmer for this.

Community goal

With Jonathan Riddell, we proposed a new community goal: KDE is All About the Apps.

One part of this goal is to provide a better infrastructure and promotional material for the KDE applications (notice the lowercase a). I think websites are important to let people know about our amazing applications.

So if you are maintaining a KDE applications and want a new shinning website, please contact me. And I will try to setup for you a new websites, following the general design.

Technical details

The new website uses Jekyll to render static html. Because the layout and the design aren’t unique to konsole.kde.org, I created a special Jekyll located at invent.kde.org/websites/jekyll-kde-theme, so that only the content and some configuration files are located in the websites/konsole-kde-org repository. This make it easier to maintain and will make it easier to change others website in the future without repeating ourself.

This was a bit harder to deploy than I first though, I had problem with installing my Jekyll theme in the docker image, but after the third or fourth try, it worked and then I had an encoding issue, that wasn’t present on my development machine.

How can I help?

Help is always welcome, the KDE community develops more than 200 different applications, and even though not all applications need or want a new modern website, there is tons of work to do.

If you are a web developer, you can help in the development of new website or in improving the Jekyll theme. Internalization, localization and accessibility still need to be implemented.

If you are not a web developer, but a web designer, I’m sure there is room for improvement in our theme. And it can be interesting to have small variations across the different websites.

And if you are neither a designer nor a developer, there is still tons of work with writing content and taking good looking screenshots. For the screenshots, you don’t even need to have a good English.

If you have question, you can as always contact me in Mastodon at @carl@linuxrocks.online or with matrix at @carl:kde.org.

You can discuss this post in reddit or mastodon.

New features for kde.org

Sat, 15 Jun 2019 11:35:35 +0000

In the last week, there have been various small improvements to the kde.org website.

Search bar in kde.org/applications

KDE has a lot of applications and with the last update to kde.org/application made by Jonathan Riddell, all these applications are now displayed on the website.

The problem is that it’s now difficult to search for a specific application, so I added a search bar to this page. See Merge request 5 kde-org-applications

Support multiple screenshots per application

According to the AppStream specification, an application can have multiple screenshots. If before only the first screenshot was displayed, now all screenshots are displayed in a carousel. See Merge request 3 kde-org-applications

Adding schema.org information

The application page now contains some additional metadata information. This can help search engines to better understand the content of the webpage. See Merge request 7 kde-org-applications

Improving the Plasma product page

With Plasma 5.16, we now have a new wallpaper, so I changed the wallpaper displayed at kde.org/plasma-desktop. Problem: the contrast between the text and the background wasn’t great. So I added a small breeze like window, created only with CSS and HTML.

Junior jobs

There still are a lot of things that can be improved, and we would appreciate some help to do it. If you always wanted to contribute to KDE, but don’t have any knowledge in Cpp and Qt, then you can also help with web development.

If you are interested, I listed some junior jobs.

The carousel used to display the application screenshots still has some problems. The next and previous buttons don’t use the same theme as the carousel shown on the homepage. Also, when screenshots have a different size, the transition is not perfect. For more information, see bug 408728.
We need to add a description for each page in kde.org. This will improve the SEO used for KDE. First we need to define the new variable in aether, use it, and then we can start adding descriptions. This task needs to be done in cooperation with kde-promo and this should help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

I wrote a small installation instruction on how to setup your local development environment. And if you need any help, you can as always contact me in Mastodon at @carl@linuxrocks.online or with matrix at @carl:kde.org.

I was at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2019

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 11:35:35 +0000

I had a nice surprise last Monday, I learned that the city where I live Saarbrücken (Germany) is hosting the 2019 edition of the nice Libre Graphics Meeting (lgm). So I took the opportunity to attend my first FOSS event. The event took place at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar from the Wed 29.05 to Sunday 02.06.

I really enjoyed, I meet a lot of other Free Software contributors (not only devs), and discovered some nice programming and artistic projects.

There were some really impressive presentations and workshops.

Thursday 30.05.

GEGL (GIMP new ‘rendering engine’) maintainer Øyvind Kolås presented, how to use GEGL effect from the command line and the same commands can be used directly from GIMP. This is helpful, when we want to automate some workflow.

In the afternoon, I discovered PraxisLIVE, an awesome live coding IDE where you can create effect with Java and a graph editor and showing the effect instantly on for example a webcam stream or a music track.

Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente explained their past workshop in Porto where the participants create pixel art fonts with git and the gitlab-ci.

Friday, 31.05.

On Friday, I took part to two workshops. The first was GIMP, there I met a lot of GIMP/GEGL developers. But it was more development meeting than a workshop where I could get my hand dirty.

I also took part in the Inkscape workshop, where I learned about all of the nice features coming in Inkscape 1.0 (a new alpha version was released during the LGM 2019 and users are encouraged to reports bugs and regressions). I also learned that Inkscape can be used to create nice wood works:

The model is published in the Thingiverse under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

After this productive day, most of the LGM participants went to the ‘Kneipentour’ (bar-hopping) and enjoyed some good Zwickel (the local beer).

Saturday, 01.06.

After last night, it was a bit difficult to get up, but I was able be only one minute late to see Boudewijn Rempt talk “HDR Support in Krita”.

In the afternoon, I took part in the Paged.js workshop, where we were able to create a book layout with CSS and HTML. Paged.js could be interesting for generating nice KDE handbooks with a professional looking feel, because it’s only using web standards (not implemented in any web browsers), and we could generate the pdf from the already existing html version.

Sunday, 02.06.

Sunday I took part in the Blender workshop, and Julian Eisel did an excellent job explaining the internal of how “Blender DNA and RNA system” archives great backward compatibility for .blend files and make it painless to write UI in Python almost directly connected to the DNA.

Conclusion

In summarize, LGM was a great event, I really enjoyed it and I hope I will be able to attend the next edition in Rennes (France) and see all these nice people again.

Oh, and now I have now more stickers on my laptop.

You can comment to this post in Mastodon.

Many thanks to Drew DeVault for proofreading this blog post.

Contributing to the kde userbase wiki

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 11:35:35 +0000

This is the story about how I started more than one month ago contributing to the KDE project.

So, one month ago, I found a task on the Phabricator instance from KDE, about the deplorable state of the KDE userbase wiki. The wiki contains a lot of screenshots dating back to the KDE 4 era and some are even from the KDE 3 era. It’s a problem, because a wiki is something important in the user experience and can be really useful for new users and experienced ones alike.

Lucky for us, even though Plasma and the KDE applications did change a lot in the last few years, most of the changes are new features and UI/UX improvements, so most of the information are still up-to-date. So most of the work is only updating screenshots. But up-to-date screenshots are also quite important, because when the user see the old screenshots, he can think that the instructions are also outdated.

So I started, updating the screenshots one after the other. (Honestly when I started, I didn’t think it would take so long, not because the process was slow or difficult, but because of the amount of outdated screenshots.)

But I also learned a lot about KDE doing this. For example did you know that Blink (Chrome webengine) is a fork of Webkit (Safari webengine) and Webkit is a fork of KHTML (Konqueror webengine). I also learned about the existence of lesser-known KDE apps, for example Kile (a latex IDE), Calligra (an office suite), KFloppy (a floppy disk editor), …

How to update the screenshots

As a non-native english speaker, I found out updating screenshots and quickly checking if the information is up-to-date is easier as I first though. There aren’t a lot of requirements, you only need a Phabricator account and the default Breeze theme installed. The Phabricator account is easy to create and the default theme should already be installed.

Then for each wiki entry, you only need to download the software, find all outdated screenshots in the wiki entry, take a new screenshot for each old screenshot, and upload the new screenshot.

For all icons, I quickly generated a png from the svg file with the following command:

convert -density 1200 -resize 128x128 -background transparent /usr/share/icons/breeze/apps/48/okular.svg okular.png

It’s not finished, there are still a lot of outdated screenshots in the wiki, but every day the amount decreases. :)

Geting involved

And you, dear reader, can also help. Like I said: this job doesn’t need any programming skills or perfect english skills, just a bit of motivation. If you need help, there are some instructions available to get started editing the wiki: Start Contributing, Markup help, Quick Start. You can also contact me: on the fediverse @carl@linuxrocks.online or on reddit (/u/ognarb1).

Thanks to XYQuadrat for proofreading this blog post. :D

Good practices for your Nextcloud app - Database

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

IQueryBuilder in 33

In Nextcloud, we use an query builder to create SQL request. This is quite a bit more robust than just writing SQL directly, as this enable the standard static analysis tools of PHP to run on it, avoid string concatenation and helps abstracting the various database engines by hiding some implementation details.

Our implementation of IQueryBuilder is based on the QueryBuilder from the doctrine DBAL project and is basically just a wrapper with some additional tweaks and the same API stability guarantee as the rest of Nextcloud.

In the coming Nextcloud 33, we exposed some new features from the underlying QueryBuilder to our wrapper. Namely, more type-correct APIs for fetching the results from the query builder. Now instead of:

$qb = $this->connection->getQueryBuilder();
$result = $qb->select('...')
 ->from('mytable')
 ->executeQuery();
$row = $result->fetch();

You can do:

$qb = $this->connection->getQueryBuilder();
$result = $qb->select('...')
 ->from('mytable')
 ->executeQuery();
$row = $result->fetchAssociative();

The advantage is that now static analysis engine like psalm consider $row to be either an associative array if a matching entry was found in the database or false otherwise.

Also available are IResult::fetchNumeric, IResult::fetchOne, IResult::fetchAllAssociative, IResult::fetchAllNumeric and IResult::fetchFirstColumn. Porting to the new code can be tedious, this is why we also added some rector rules to our rules collections that does that for you automatically.

Rector is a very nice tool which allow to modernize your codebase automatically, to newer version of PHP and your dependencies. You can find out to use it in your Nextcloud app in this tutorial.

In addition, we added two new methods IResult::iterateNumeric and IResult::iterateAssociative which can be an attractive replacement for IResult::fetchAll as these prevents the PHP process to hold the whole result in memory which can in some cases then exceed the memory limit of the PHP process and lead to crashes.

Finally regarding the changes for 33 related to the QueryBuilder. We finally deleted the long deprecated IQueryBuilder::execute method. You should port your app to IQueryBuilder::executeStatement or IQueryBuilder::executeQuery. This two methods have a more correct return type that the static analyser can use. When porting beware that IQueryBuilder::execute was throwing an third-party exception from doctrine, while the new methods are throwing an \OCP\DB\Exception.

Snowflake IDs

We are also thinking about deprecating and removing getLastInsertedId. This feature is not longer supported by the latest release of Doctrine in all databases we support and to use snowflake ids instead. More information about that will be published in a following post.

SQL functions

While analysis a bug report, we found out that in some places the ÌQueryBuilder::createFunction was misused in various places. While the documentation explicitely indicate that column names should be escaped, this wasn’t done before. For example, this was invalid:

$qb = $this->connection->getQueryBuilder();
$qb->select($qb->createFunction('COUNT(id)'));

And the correct way to do that with createFunction is:

$qb = $this->connection->getQueryBuilder();
$qb->select($qb->createFunction('COUNT(' . $qb->getColumnName('id') . ')'));

But a simpler way to do it, is to use the IFunctionBuilder. This is way harder to get wrong and is shorter to type.

$qb = $this->connection->getQueryBuilder();
$qb->select($qb->func()->count('id'));

There is still some legitimate uses of createFunction, for example subqueries, but many uses can be replaced by the IFunctionBuilder.

Future

For the future, there is already work ongoing to fully add type hints to the ÌQueryBuilder and related classes. There is already some work toward that on this draft pull request. This should help static analysers to find errors even more.

Additionally, there is some ongoing research about how we do entities in Nextcloud, so that app developers can avoid in many situation touching directly to the query builder. One current direction, is to provide a new Entity API based on modern PHP features like attributes and simple objects. Here is an example on how this would look like based on the current progress on this WIP pull request.

#[Entity]
#[Table(name: 'twofactor_backupcodes')]
final class BackupCode {
 #[Id(generatorClass: IGenerator::class)]
 #[Column(name: 'id', type: Types::STRING, length: 64, nullable: false)]
 public ?string $id = null;

 #[Column(name: 'user_id', type: Types::STRING, length: 64, nullable: false)]
 public string $userId;

 #[Column(name: 'code', type: Types::STRING, length: 128, nullable: false)]
 public string $code;

 #[Column(name: 'used', type: Types::SMALLINT, nullable: false, default: 0)]
 public int $used = 0;
}

KDE websites and documentation news (December 2020 - March 2021)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This last few months have been focused on improving the website tooling uing the Hugo framework. The base theme that was developed for kde.org was moved to a seperate repository and is now completely reusable for other projects to use. Other than the speed improvement other Jekyll, there are two big improvements in using Hugo instead of Jekyll for the KDE websites: the translation system is a lot more mature and by using go modules it is easier to share assets, scss modules, templates and translations between websites.

The new Hugo theme was quickly made of use inside the Kate website making it looks nicer and more consistent with the other KDE websites.

Phunh has done a lot of cleaning in the kde.org hugo codebase to simplify it and reduce the amount of duplicate content.

Phunh then ported the planet.kde.org website to use Hugo. The most notable user visible change is that there is now a small tool on the left to navigate between articles. Aside from that the localized feed page is now completely translatable.

Similarly I made plasma-mobile.org switch to Hugo and I’m slowing making every pages translatable. I also added in the homepage a list including most of the Kirigami/Maui applications. This list is provided by apps.kde.org, so that it remains up to date and is localized. Help would be welcome around updating the rest of the plasma-mobile.org website to make it more up to date with the development of the project.

Another big news is that Pablo Marcos finished his SoK project and ported the okular.kde.org website to Hugo and the current KDE theme. It’s looking great.

In term of documentation, Clau Cambra improved his Kirigami intruduction and updated the Configuration-related articles. I wrote a new article about how to use Akonadi and Kirigami to build a mail viewer and imported a few old KWin and Plasma tutorial from techbase to develop.k.o. This include the old KWin Window Switcher tutorial, the KWin scripting guide and the Plasma theme tutorial.

Working with QtWidgets

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you know me, you probably know that I have been a big than of QML and QtQuick as technology. I’m started NeoChat, Tokodon, Arianna, Kalendar (now known as Merkuro), ported KWordQuiz to QML and regularly contribute to an handful of other QML projects inside KDE.

Recently I started working at GnuPG on Kleopatra and other Qt components of the GPG4Win and GnuPG-VS Desktop product, which are all QtWidgets based. This has been a quite rewarding learning experience as it is both very similar and different to QtQuick in various aspects.

These two technologies share a lot in term of data structures with all the containers being the same (QVector, QString, QHash, …) as well as the concept of models (QAbstractItemModel) and the QObject signal/slots mechanism to react to user interactions. So nothing really new from this side. There stuff are getting different is related to graphics.

QtQuick uses QML as it primarely way to design an user interface. It is a really nice language and it’s really easy to interact between QML and C++.