The most recurrent and difficult question I get, and probably the most recurrent in the industry is how’s the world gonna look like in 5 years? What’s the next big thing?. My usual answer is “if I knew, I’ll be doing that” (and that’s probably what’s happening ) but the point is that the horizon of predictions in this fast paced internet era is too close to us.

Two years and 6 months ago the first, rudimental and slow Android device was born. If feels like prehistory now, and it’s just 2 years ago.. then the DROIDs came, then the Galaxys, and you can see their impact on the world in this beautiful video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Do you see how quickly this is happening? What’s in your face IS a revolution, because when you buy one of them, you don’t just get a brilliant colorful expensive eye-catching plastic toy.

What you buy is the sense of protection, for not feeling lost when travelling though neighborhoods or new cities, for always having friends within reach and multiple ways of communicating with them, for always knowing which is the closest+cheapest+healthiest+toprated Korean place, and when you are looking at your calendar and you arrive perfectly on time at that very important meeting you’ll even feel like a better person (well, this applies just to me, and few other Italians .

Talking about the revolution, do you see it now?

Well.. I admit that I felt a little proud after seeing the good old KDE3 on the trailer of the upcoming “The Social Network“.

For those who didn’t see it, here it is:

This is a KDE desktop with:

• the Keramic widget and window decoration style (so it’s at least a KDE 3.1, released on Jan 2003)
• a konqueror window (god, I loved that browser) showing the /home/mark directory (obviously Mark Zuckerberg)
• a terminal, probably xterm, showing some wget-ting going on to fetch the pictures displayed in the other konqueror window
• a mozilla window displaying the www.eliot.harvard.edu/facebook/index.shtml URL, probably something like the directory of the house

Apart from that it all looks very standard to me.. do you see any other customization/hint on the picture?
Come on, unleash your CSI skills!!

I remember it was KDE 3.2 that made me fall in love with this awesome desktop environment (it was really the top of the class at that point, with konqueror, the kio slaves, and a browser that was about to change the history) and my first opensource code commit was about 6 years and 8 months ago.. and I enjoyed every second of that. (and now it pays the bills too! lol)

Well… looks like I’ll be at the movies on Oct 1st!

As promised, here is a list of some KDE ideas that the people left in my previous post, along as mine. They’re available for free, so feel free to pick one and make it yours As a side note, I’m making a KDE Prediction for 2010: KDM will receive lots of love! You can see that the stars are aligning. In fact I’m going to split this post into 2 ideas scenarios to reflect that.

KDM Ideas

1. QML in KDM
   This is all about animations, user interaction and eye candy. See this for example.
2. Plasma in KDM
   This is about consistence and configurability.
3. Webcam Login (face recognition) in KDM
   Show your face (or Mona Lisa‘s one) and you’re in! No password typing needed. Integrating with the pam-face-authentication may be the smart way to go.
4. Fingerprint Login in KDM
   This is KDE’s most requested feature… you can’t be wrong implementing it

KDE Ideas

1. Unified webcam library
   Webcam’s are being utilized a lot lately: they’re cheap, widespread, and they’re working good under Linux. Projects come out with webcam support, like Fotowall, Kamoso, Kopete and there are efforts to get it working in Phonon.
   Note that a camera is a source of video, images but also can be used for authentication and may even be used for user input – can you imagine manipulating stuff with your fingers? Note that webcams must usually be read in single instance, so the approach here might be 1 Qt-Only userspace daemon supporting multiple connections.
2. Unified Theme Manager
   One theme manager to rule them all: styles, colors, plasma theme, windeco & all. Of course the themes must be packed and shared in a binary-compatible manner with any other KDE system (yes, the challenges are there..
3. Unified Configuration Panel
   Making systemsettings really the one and only configuration tool and provide backends to the distributions for adding/changing modules so KDE systems will have the same feeling for configuring the system. Some modules like ‘partition disk’, ‘edit boot menu’ and ‘manage startup programs’ (daemons) should be added and left to the distribution for implementation – I think they will. Note that current systemsettings lets you configure the joystick even if you don’t have one (!).
4. KWIN: draggable windows
   And for windows I mean (actually J. Janz means) the whole non-interactive panel. Blank space as well as inactive labels should be draggable. From the user POV there is no window-deco + window contents. It’s a panel, let’s use it, move it, resize it, context-menu-it as a whole.
5. Raytraced UI
   I’ll blog more about this, but this is a little thing I’d really like to do but I don’t know if I will find time to do that. Do you think that iPhone gui is cool? Raytrace the .ui high-level gui definition format and you’ll get something better. Glassy too. Mail me if you want to know more about this

Conclusion

I’m sorry I missed some interesting suggestions but I don’t have space here to detail them; just look to my previous blog entry’s comments to find more about BasKet note pads integration into Plasma, file browsing enhancements (context dependent actions, menus, warnings and kparts) qt4 gui for vi, etc.

As someone pointed out there is quite a bit of overlap and dispersion between the ways to collect ideas. I can count:

• KDE Bugzilla’s wishlist
• KDE Forum’s brainstorm
• distribution specific bug trackers
• blog posts (ehm….:-)
• GSOC ideas
• kde-look’s brainstorm
• developers mailing lists
• other bugtrackers
• techbase or userbase
• direct mails and irc chats

Directing users to provide their feedback in a low-dispersive, constructive, modern, layered (from generic directions to specific actions) and focused way is probably one of the challenges that should be added to Aaron’s list for 2010.

You often think “this KDE idea of mine would kick ass” but then you don’t have time to implement it and finally you forget about it? Welcome to the club!

Collecting Ideas

I want to blog about some cool things to do for the KDE project on week-1 2010. I’ve got just a couple of good ideas, so I’m asking you to add your ideas so we can make a good collection of nice things to do. You can either reply to this post (don’t be shy, just post it!) or send it to me at <enrico.ros@gmail.com>.

Sharing your idea with the community raises the chance of seeing it implemented!

Seven days after the release of the Tech Preview 1, we released the latest stable Windows build of Fotowall [1] that was based on Qt 4.6. Somebody could argue that this is a bit imprudent. We did that because the benefits of the 4.6 release are worth the risk of the move!

Indirect Benefits, or ‘what you get for free’

• Improved quality and better speed in the OpenGL QPainter
• Better speed in the GraphicsView framework

Direct Benefits

• Animation Framework: this simply r0cks! I don’t know about the whole Kinetic stuff, I just mean the ability to create simple property animations.
  I don’t have a video to show you but just take a look at the Fotowall’s Top-Bar, the tabs appear and disappear with a nice and smooth grow-shrink animation, that make the program look soo 2009-ish! finally!
• QNetworkReply::isFinished(): thanks to this method I could implement a smart time-saver: when the user starts to drag a flickr picture, Fotowall starts downloading it. It can happen that, upon drop, the content has already been completely downloaded (so it can be placed in the canvas) or partially downloaded (so the used only needs to wait for the missing percent)

Drawbacks

• There are some graphics glitches when animating the opacity property of a QGaphicsProxyWidget (in OpenGL)
• Even by setting the QGraphicsItem::ItemSendsGeometryChanges flag, the previous behavior is not perfectly restored (we used itemChange, and the new behavior doesn’t allow Fotowall’s mirrors to sync properly to the objects)

Movie Time!

I’ve tried hard to record a screencast about the Cuteness & Performance of Qt 4.6, but in the end I had to use my camera.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks Nokia for this great release!

[1] Fotowall is a creative program to mix local and online graphics content and build original work.

Fotowall 0.8.2 has just been released and we’re already getting some great feedback

Cherry picked  features from the delicious 0.8 release:

• Now you’ll be able to deform text changing the shape of its baseline visually (see the “Fotowall” string in the image above and its Bezier control points)
• Pictures can be cropped to a certain area, for example to select a single person from a group. Also picture’s transparency can be adjusted, to create nice fading effects
• A lot of work has been put into enabling OpenGL acceleration, really useful if your canvas has 100+ semi-transparent objects
• You can now work with a transparent window (or blurred, on Vista)
• The top-bar is now context-sensitive. We’ll move more and more content properties to that instead of the old content configuration window

Plus a lot of user suggestions and fixes have been implemented to make Fotowall always easier and intuitive to use. The 0.8 release now ships in 6 different languages: english, italian, french, german, brazilian, polish. You can even contribute your own translations.

But our favorite news is that Fotowall now has it’s official website

What about next: we’re working hard on the 0.9 release and we already have lots of new features! You’ll be surprised by what you’ll be able to achieve with the next version

A final special thank to Zack Rusin who created the Text on path example that was the basis of our shaped text.

Note for planetqt readers: the title should be ‘Quax 4 – a tale of porting’

Once upon a time, a little application called quax was landed on kde-apps. As imagination is better served by a picture, here is what quax looks like:

Quax after being ported to Qt 4.5.

It’s nothing but a simple and easy to use screen magnifier. You can move it around and place it near the detail to magnify. Plus it lets you pick the color of a pixel. It’s the perfect tool when you’re tuning the style, pixels and gradients of your beloved app It had only one drawback: it was build with Qt 3.

Porting Quax to Qt4

It was the first time I had to port an application from Qt3 to Qt4. Here are some stats:

• The porting took 3 hours (you can see it from the git history, dinner included )
• I did the following:
  • create the project files
  • use qt3to4 with that files
  • make it compile disabling some code chunks
  • re-enable the disabled code in a qt4 way
  • disabled qt3 support from the .pro file and fixed all until it compiled
  • update the packaging informations, readme’s
  • published Quax 4 in kde-apps
• The source code dropped from 670 to 547 lines of code. So Qt4 saved 14% of code compared to Qt3 for this project.
• The cleanness went drastically up, the API of Qt4 is a big improvement over that of Qt3.
• I can’t talk about speed or graphics improvements.. but if you look at the old screenshots you’ll see that the font rendering was really improved in Qt4

Conclusion

Finally I have quax back, and you can have it too! The source code is on gitorious, and here is the kde-apps page. A final thank word to Claudiu Costin (the original author) and Vlad Oancea (the skin designer). I won’t maintain quax4 and I don’t plan to add any features, I’m just glad I can keep my box Qt3 free while designing pixel-perfect graphics thanks to this cute little utility

Hello everyone, my blog has just been aggregated into planet KDE.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a long time KDE user (since 2.2), I worked on several KDE projects like okular, kdm, amarok, konqueror, as well as releasing other software like Fotowall and other stuff on various repositories.

This planet is the collector of many of my favorite blogs and it’s an honor for me to be here.

See you soon (with some developer tool hacks…stay tuned) !

L’escalation verso la 1.0 continua con una nuova milestone

Nuove caratteristiche presenti in Fotowall 0.6

Se non vi sono bastate le tonnellate di migliorie della 0.5 ecco che arriva una 0.6 che quasi raddoppia la base di codice e introduce una serie di caratteristiche che danno un taglio professionale senza intaccare la facilità di interazione e la libertà di giocare con Fotowall E ancora non avete letto nulla…

Integrazione con PosteRazor

Non ci vuole un pennello  grande, ma un grande pen Fotowall 0.6!

PosteRazor, di Alessandro Portale, è un programma che consente di stampare a casa propria dei poster grandi a piacere con una stampante comune.In pratica divide l’immagine in tanti fogli che una volta ritagliati ed incollati vanno a formare un Poster.  La capacità di Fotowall di sintetizzare immagini in altissima definizione e l’esportazione con PosteRazor permettono di creare composizioni grafiche di risoluzione notevole in uno spazio piccolo, quale lo schermo del PC.

Oltretutto, l’unione di Fotowall e PosteRazor, rappresenta un avvenimento davvero raro nel panorama opensource. Sono infatti frequenti i fork, quando gruppi di persone vogliono evolvere un software in modo diverso dalla linea prestabilita e così si finisce con più programmi che fanno la stessa cosa, ma i join, come questo caso, sono davvero rarissimi!

Oggetto Video, o Specchio

E” un oggetto manipolabile (come le Foto o il Testo) che contiene il video ripreso dalle webcam collegate al PC. E’ detto anche specchio perchè spesso i portatili sono dotati di una webcam che ti riprende, quindi è un po’ come inserire degli specchietti in Fotowall

Export Guidato

L’assistente consente di esportare la scena attuale in 4 modi: impostando lo sfondo del desktop, salvando un’immagine, creando un poster (vedi PosteRazor), o stampando su carta. Ci sono tutte le opzioni necessarie per divertirsi Consiglio anche di vedere il modo “Dimensione Esatta” (accessibile dalla finestra principale di Fotowall), che consente lavorare a schermo all dimensione fisica specificata (tipo 15x6cm) e stampare alla medesima dimensione. WYSIWYG

Formato XML

La scena può essere salvata e recuperata (quasi, ehm.. esattamente..) nel nuovo formato XML, che assicura compatibiltà in avanti. Da oggi in poi potrete mettere via le vostre scene Fotowall preferite.

Selezione, Prospettiva &  altri 50 commit

E’ possibile selezionare più oggetti, spostarli o cambiare le proprietà in gruppo, cambiare la prospettiva degli oggetti (rotazione attorno agli assi X ed Y ), riscalare il testo come si roto-scalano le immagini, c’è l’effetto Seppia, e molto altro ancora

Enjoy your Fotowall!!

Esiste miglior diversivo, per dimenticare l’esclusione del mio progetto dal Google Summer of Code 2009, della recensione dei progetti accettati per KDE? Assolutamente no! ed ecco allora la:

Lista dei miei sorvegliati speciali 2009

• nepomuk “Improving Search and Virtual Folders”
  creazione di un widget standard per la ricerca con Nepomuk da integrare in Dolphin, nel File Dialog, etc.. e miglioramento del backend ‘nepomuksearch:’ + virtual folder (es. Immagini = tutte le immagini presenti nel pc)

• phonon “Visualizations”
  estrae statistiche (spettro, metriche varie) dal flusso audio di Phonon per fornire i dati a visualizzatori. Utile per tutto kdemultimedia oltre ai vu-meter fai da te!

• kdevelop “C++ refactoring support”
  datecelo e svilupperemo al triplo della velocita’ dateci anche “static code visualization” e ci regalate un altro emisfero cerebrale. (il motore C++ di kdevelop spaccadibbrutto, la gui/workflow e’ 10 volte meno usabile di QtCreator)

• plasma “New Widget Explorer”
  l’attuale ‘just sucks’.. c’e’ bisogno di disabilitare i plasmoidi non validi, di raggrupparli per tipologia, di avere un dialog che presenti piu’ contenuto in molto meno spazio (e speriamo che tolgano l’odiosa stellina mangia spazio )

• plasma “PlasMate Editor”
  puo’ aiutare la diffusione dei plasmoidi, ma solo *se fatto a regola d’arte*, altrimenti brucia la bonta’ di plasma.

• plasma “Media Center Components”
  componenti Multimediali per Plasma. Alessandro puo’ fare un bel lavoro qui. Optimization is needed btw

Ce ne sono ovviamente molti altri di interessanti (tra i 38 assegnati a KDE), e non parliamo dei progetti di Gnome, LLVM, GCC, Gentoo, e degli altri 900