Fading Memories

So, today we not only have Canarias, the second beta of KDE 4.2 (which is seriously cool), and the release of OpenSUSE 11.1 (which is seriously cool), but at Hyves, Arend (ex-Krdc hacker) and me (krita hacker...) released the first version of the Hyves Desktop!

It's "only" a beta, and right now only Gold Members of Hyves can download it, but they are free to pass installers onto their friends and their friends unto their friends unto the nth generation.

But we did it! In only about four months we, that is Arend, me, Girish and Roop (of KOffice ODF fame) managed to hammer out a chat application with built-in photo uploader and blog/photo/news viewer. And it runs on Windows, OSX and Linux (though you probably won't have sound on OpenSUSE -- blame the gstreamer backend of phonon)

I'm a bit dizzy (also because of the celebratory beer) and excited and all that. This has been a cool ride. And now for a nice holiday and then for the final release -- which will be usable and useful for just about half the population of the Netherlands.

And I even managed very nearly at least one commit to KOffice this week, even though those were small commits :-)

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Oh the shame! It so happens that I have only two running versions of Krita: 1.6, to compare trunk with, and trunk. Now, as I said earlier, I happen to be working on loading and saving, and I suddenly thought that it would be way cool to be able to test loading Krita images saved from older versions.

But I don't have those versions, and I don't have images saved with those versions either... So: todays plea for help is "anyone who has Krita images, preferably with more than one layer, saved with Krita version 1.4 and 1.5, please, please contact me -- then I can test whether Krita trunk can still load old images."

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It's really, really, really a pity KOffice is in feature freeze: just after the freeze went into effect, Lukas Tvrdy, the Summer of Code student who created the sumi-e brush engine (which simulates brush hairs), created another way cool brush engine: the deform brush, apparently inspired by the Gimp's iWarp filter. (Is that really with a small i and capital W?). This means that you can paint deformation on you canvas, and that's just so must fun!

For instance, quickly throw down a couple of semi-transparent radial gradients, and then use the star tool to paint star-shaped deformation onto the canvas:

In other news, there are people out there in the real world using Krita, which is always gratifying: Creating Storyboards.

And thirdly, I've done a lot of work on our brush engines lately, but right now I'm first going to finish our saving and loading code. I feel I have to, having read Cyrille's latest blog entry! (But in a good, gung-ho, way)

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That was one intensive Sunday. Not helped by an awful bout of flu, either, so I had to crash early in the (CET) evening. But for Krita, the koffice bug day was a great success. The triagers -- Lemma, dtritscher, jtamate, gkiagia, m4v (who is also the author of the picture in my previous blogpost), Med, Hum and Blauzahl (and isn't it weird when you start thinking of people by their irc nicks?) went through the bugs like there would be no tomorrow. Nothing better to get into release mode than a clean slate in bugzilla. We managed to close at least 19 bugs and the rest of the bugs have, for the most part, become much clearer.

Many, many thanks to everyone who participated!

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I'm really looking forward to hanging out on #kde-bugs tomorrow. I'm not sure wether I'll skive off going to Church in the morning, but in the afternoon I'll be there for sure. The way the BugSquad prepares these things is nothing short of amazing in its thoroughness. Just look at the techbase pages that have been prepared:

• KOffice Bug Day1: Triage
• Koffice Bug Day1: Krush

For Krita, the goal will be on triaging bugs more than finding new bugs -- we've collected quite a few reports over the years, and frankly, I kind of lost my grip over the past year-and-a-half. And so much has changed in Krita, it's really important to go through all the bugs and check whether they'll still valid.

And, given that Krita is now cross-platform, everyone can join in:

So, join us in KOffice Bug Day and Krush!

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And a screenshot to prove it:

However, all is not completely well yet. It was quite hard to get this far -- thanks are due to the fantastic helpfulness of all the people on #kde-mac. Thanks Illocical, Iggy, Mek and Rangerrick!

There are basically three options if you want KDE4 applications on your Mac:

• Install the dependencies using fink or macports, and compile yourself
• Install everything using macports
• Install using pre-built packages

I opted for the first option (after trying the others, too: I suspect that had I been aware of the dbus issues, I could have success with both. This is how I did it:

Read more ...

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To find good Qt hackers looking for Qt-based work, given that it has taken me years to lose my amateur status. Maybe I just didn't go the right way about it: I always thought it was difficult to find a Qt job -- but it turns out to be just as difficult to find Qt developers who want to work in sunny Amsterdam.

To me, that suggests that companies (not only the one I work for, but also companies like Nokia who want everyong to relocate to Helsinki (brrr!), or TrollTech^WQt Software who want people to relocate to Oslo (brrr!) or Berlin (not brrr!, but not feasible for me either)) need to recognize that this is a big world, and if you want to skim the cream you have to be distributed and allow people to work from wherever their life is.

That said, if Amsterdam appeals to you and you do Qt, don't hesitate to contact me :-)

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Last week's big debate was (again) whether Phonon is a Good Thing or not. And coincidentally, one of my tasks last week was to implement sound notifications in the cross-platform Qt4-based chat application we're building at Hyves. Qt4, so the first thing I reached for was Phonon.

I had looked at phonon before, but that was in a failed attempt to make a phonon video flake shape for koffice. Failed, because I couldn't find a good way to make phonon output video data something that isn't a real widget. That may well have been solved now with widgets-on-canvas for something like QGraphicsView, but whether that solution is portable to flake, I'm not sure yet.

But last week was the first time I tried to use the Phonon api myself: and really, it is a wonderfully easy to understand api. I didn't have to do much coding at all. It was more of a problem to actually get Qt compiled with phonon on all three platforms, and the biggest problem was that the macdeployqt tool bundled with Qt doesn't deploy the plugins, only the library frameworks, although the documentation suggests it does. That took quite a bit of time to figure out.

But all in all, I think that Aaron is right: phonon is one more good reason to choose Qt for your cross-platform application.

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I've been working for Hyves now, and these were pretty intensive weeks. I never realized how much, exactly, I owe to people like Alexander Neundorf for the KDE build system. We have spent time setting up a cmake-based build system on three platforms, an automated update system for our product, unittests, I've spent time evaluating Squish for automated GUI tests -- in short, we're doing all the Right Things at the Right Moment, that is, before we're actually starting coding. I wish my cmake book weren't for 2.2, instead of 2.6.

But as I said, these have been pretty intensive weeks. If you've sent me mail, in particular if it is a long mail that needs a considered answer, and you haven't had an answer yet, well, this is why. I simply haven't had time to write long, considered mails.

And I haven't had time to hack on Krita either. Part of that is because while I've got some spare time on the train, I haven't had the time to setup a KOffice development environment under OS X (I tried, but the damn dbus dependencies make me stumble already when compiling kde-support, and running Krita in a virtual Linux machine isn't a good idea. Some interaction between vmware fusion and Qt makes Krita spend 30% of its time updating the canvas projection QImage.)

But I will be going to the Trolltech dev days in München, with two colleagues, and there are all sorts of exciting plans being hatched. We really need more Qt developers here in Amsterdam :-).

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So yesterday was my first day I was paid to develop software with Qt. I've previously lamented having to work with Borland C++ (which is truly horrible and obsolete) on Windows. That lament make André Somers forward me a mail from Arend van Beelen to the kde-i18n-nl mailing list, where Arend asked for people interested in working on a Qt-based desktop client for the company he was working for. Well, you bet I was interested!

And about a month later, I'm working with Hyves -- by far the largest social networking site in the Netherlands. My three teenage daughters are all going on about the sheer coolness of that. As for me, I'm so happy to work a place where technology is cool, where there are proper developers working on interesting things, where the needs of developers are taken seriously. And where there's real energy going round -- just like it was a Tryllian when I joined there in 2000.

What I'm doing is really quite interesting: we're going to first port the existing little desktop chat application Hyves provides its users to Qt and make it cross-platform to start with. The main chat UI is written in Ajax and will run in a webkit widget; the communication layer will be done in C++. Extensibility through javascript (the initial idea was to use Python, but for now, we're going for an as much out-of-the-box solution as we can). Then we're going to extend it to include plugins, widgets and other extensions. I'm already reading up on plasma, because I've got a gut feeling that not using plasma will mean we're reinventing the wheel, which is a Bad Thing in my books.

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