free software and outside world

i'd like to say a word on kde 'marketing' topic as well.

i think for free software developers marketing should really mean paying attention to bugzilla and fixing/implementing what users are asking.

this way users whose wish was fulfilled will readily spread the word about us.

i know few people who have ideas on how to improve the software they use (for example DJ software),
but chances that owners of non-free software will implement them are low. so the point is to show that it is worth filling the bug reports, i.e. that a user will be heard.

P.S. i closed 9 lokalize bugs in the last 2 weeks :)

creating passion, not creating product

this phrase have caught me in Dion Moult's blogpost "The kde-www war: part 4"

this is actually the main idea behind some scientific theory of society. 'economics should be transformed into pedagogics': people should learn how to make products like food, clothes, buildings, railways, electronic equipment, and the side effect of their learning would be real products.

but nowadays most of the people take part in activities focused on creating consumer products, and get [minimal needed] knowledge only as a side-effect.

the point in the pedagogics society is that when you have learned smth, and also tought it to others, you move on to another industry field. this way you never get bored, and you feel yourself a human, not a non-conscious machine that does same thing all the time.

Do you know about World Festival of Youth and Students?

This gathering can be of interest IMO for the free software community, as a self-organizing movement.

The gathering is a general one, has a long history and, I believe, can particularly touch intellectual property subject. It's happening on 13-21 of December. See Wikipedia article and offical site for the current 17th gathering.

On a side note, during the last weeks I returned to Lokalize development: fixed few bugs reported via bugs.kde.org, did few optimizations. I hope you'll like a more polished Lokalize in KDE 4.6 (sorry, the wishes that require new messages will have to wait until KDE 4.7...).

KDE on Mac test report

So I tried running KDE apps I miss on Mac on Mac Snow Leopard (kdevelop and kopete mainly).

I installed macports following procedures on their site, issued sudo port install kdenetwork4 (kde version is 4.4.x).
I also wrote simple Portfiles for kdevelop 1.0.2., but couldn't run a dbus session using the command given me in the terminal after each kde package install. To fix this i edited /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist and changed OnDemand and Disabled options in it to the opposite values.



Unfortunately KDevelop crashed after i tried importing a project (you can see the backtrace on the screenshot). Other apps like KTorrent, Kopete, Lokalize are usable (although being a little ugly in the terms of appearance).

Lokalize in KDE SC 4.5

Lokalize, the KDE translation tool, saw an evolutional development during 4.4-4.5 period. Most of the changes are bug fixes. I'd like to say 'thanks' to Papp Laszlo, Hungarian translator and Chakra developer (among other things), for doing a lot of work in this regard.

As for the features, the most essential changes are:
* filestats is cached on a disk now, so the initial project scan is alot faster now.
* translation memories are improved in terms of target language: now Lokalize should be more suitable for separate projects (when .po files for all languages are in the same folder)
* simple project creation is back
* glossary storage is rewritten to use QDom classes (should eliminate any previous related crashes).

Skreener 0.1 Preview Release

For the last 4 month me and several other people (see the sourcecode) had been working on a new piece of software called Skreener, to FLOSS-replace the proprietary and GTK-based Wink, tutorial and presentation creating software.

Skreener is most suited for showing how to use software, and not for showing animation effects. The main difference between Skreener and recordmydesktop (and the like) is that Skreener takes usual screenshots only once per second, and mouse cursor smooth movement is then restored during the playback. For this purpose SVG format is used (Wink generates Flash movies). This allows you to easily cleanup recorded screencast by removing non-essential frames, making the mouse cursor go strictly to the target position.

Today I decided to release the first public preview release of Skreener, just for the case if someone else decides that he is fed up with uncontributable Wink. Basic functionality is implemented, To be done is adding comments (continuing only when user clicks 'continue'), polishing.

example screencast (archived, 800 kb)
example screencast (immediate, safari-displayable, firefox-not, other browsers flicker)

On the project page, .deb package and win32 build are available.

Testing KDE 4.3 translation with Lokalize

I created Lokalize script to automate UI translation testing: it compiles currently opened PO file and puts it under ~/.kde where KDE can see it, so that when you start your application next time, it will use your translation.

To use it for your language (you'll need Lokalize coming with KDE 4.3):

cd trunk/l10n-kde4
svn up scripts
dolphin scripts/lokalize

then open Lokalize with project for your language, go to Project -> Configure project -> Scripts and drag-n-drop msgfmt.rc from dolphin to the settings area in Lokalize. Restart Lokalize. You should see a new item under Tools menu.

To make this script available automatically for all your team members copy this msgfmt.rc to l10n-kde4/LANG/lokalize-scripts (they will also need to svn up trunk/l10n-kde4/scripts).


Now a few words on packages.
I have been given write access to Debian KDE packaging repository (thanks to Sune Vuorela), where I was able to specify right dependencies and recommended packages for Lokalize. If any of other distro packagers are reading this, please sip on the spec.

P.S. I installed kde 4.2.96 packages from debian experimental (it conflicts with kdevelop package, so I reinstalled kdevelop manually with dpkg -i kdevelop_3.9.94-1_i386.deb afterwards).