I’m extremely happy to announce the release of Akunambol 0.2! =)

Here is an extract from the announcement on the main site:

This is the first release of the 0.2 series, which will be the last one of the 0.x series. We’re in fact planning exciting new things for the 1.0, but we first wanted to release a version for everyone to use, so that it’s possible to sync all the most used PIM data (contacts, events, tasks).

This release should be quite stable, since all reported bugs have already been fixed, and it also introduces the much awaited support for multiple calendars or address books, so you get to choose what you want to sync. Investigations on how to support syncing multiple calendars together are also being done.

From this moment onwards Akunambol will also have a new home, reachable at the address http://akunambol.ruphy.org. The repository still lives on gitorious for now, but will migrate to KDE’s git as soon as it is ready.

In addition to this, akunambol has also gained a new bug tracker. To report a bug or a wish you can now use KDE’s bug tracker (bugs.kde.org) and file a bug against akunambol.

Since this is also a blog post, I could say some more words about the “exciting new things” that we’re planning. In few words, we would like to extend Akunambol’s possibilities beyond PIM, by putting all the syncing logic into plugins. These will be dynamically loaded, like plasmoids, and could sync anything, from contacts to pictures to random files.

This way, it will be possible to provide a complete syncing framework for KDE (ala Android), in which it will be possible to build services based on the web (like RSS fetching) to backups, or even Dropbox-like clones, together with things like ownCloud.

By putting all the logic into plugins, we also loose any kind strong dependency from any library. At the same time there will be both some classes that (for example) will help you if you choose to use a standard protocol (like SyncML), and a generic interface which will allow you to do all the things you’d might like to do.

This will be either controlled by a kded daemon and a notification icon, silently living in the background, or by a GUI application.

The possibilities are indefinite, but we have just started to work on the plugin infrastructure. Let me know if you want to help, or have any idea about a nice syncing plugin. You can do so by either leaving a comment or opening a wishlist bug.

Anyways, we’ve spent way too much words on the future of Akunambol. I mean, you still haven’t tried out Akunambol 0.2!

So, what are you waiting for? Get it while it’s hot, and have fun! =)

Hi!
I just released Akunambol 0.1, a KDE application to sync your Akonadi data with a SyncML server. You want to use Akunambol to have a full backup of your contacts and calendar, and why not, synchronize and share your address book (and calendar) between your mobile, your iPod touch, your Google account and your KDE desktop. Read more to know how to do that.

Akunambol has been built using the Funambol C++ SDK, as part of their code sniper program. I announced it yesterday on their mailing list, but I think that it deserves also a blog post, since it may be of interest for the KDE community. This is the first release aimed at first adapters; however in my testing it resulted to be very stable for the few things it does. There shouldn’t be any data losses, but a backup is as always advised.

If you want to check out the code, please beware that it still kills kittens here and there. For now this is a release that works, and I will  fix most code issues for 0.3 when I’ll be implementing calendar support, thus abstracting much of the code.

Check it out, follow the development, fork, clone and hack on it at: http://gitorious.org/akunambol
Or, just download a tarball from http://github.com/ruphy/akunambol/tarball/v0.1
(yes, it’s github, unfortunately gitorious is still implementing on-the-fly tarball generation for a tag )

Here’s an extract from the mail sent to the funambol mailing list:

This is a stable release, but of a very immature software – please
treat it as such. Make sure you have a backup of your data before
attempting to synchronize. Fortunately Akonadi allows that with a
single click (check out the akonaditray utlity).

For now Akunambol only synchronizes contacts, the code still kills some
kittens in certain places, but I already successfully synced several
contact datasets flawlessly.
In other words, the few things that Akunambol does for now should work
perfectly. If they don’t it’s a bug.

Please test it and report any problems, suggestions or patches you
might have.

Ok, now that you know something about akunambol, how to get started actually using it?

First, you need to compile and install the funambol SDK. Download it at http://download.forge.objectweb.org/sync4j/funambol-client-sdk-8.0.1.zip, to compile it it’s the typical autotools build system. There may also be a Debian package available created by a funambol developer, I will edit this article with the link once he sends it to me.

Once Funambol is installed, you can compile and install Akunambol like a normal KDE application, using cmake.

The next thing you need is a SyncML server on which you can push and retrieve your contacts. A “remote storage”. You can either install your own or get a free account at my.funambol.com.

Now you’re set. Start Akunambol, insert your username and password, eventually change the sync URL, and press “Sync contacts” to let the magic begin.

That’s all for now! Next releases will include a much more sexy UI, calendar and tasks syncronization too. Stay tuned!

Just in case you haven’t noticed, I uploaded the full resolution pics of Tokamak 4 on my Flickr account:

Get this, and much more, totally uncensored, at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruphy/sets/72157623502131953/

hi, very quickly… just like I wrote on the plasma mailing list, my recent flood of commit on workspace was due to several small (offline) changes to base applets, on which I implemented the slot configChanged().

This is a slot that is called every time an applet’s configuration is changed behind its back. This is usually because there’s a configuration script running (at startup?) or anyways, the user is modifying the settings from a different place than the configuration dialog.

I finished today with the kdebase applets, now I think that I will start with the ones in kdeplasma-addons (much more fun ).

So, if you’re an applet developer you may want to do a similar change in your code (and backport it to the 4.4 branch too), or if you’re looking for a junior job to get started with development I think this is a perfect task for you. If you plan on working on such things, please drop me a line though (you can get my mail on my blog… it’s there on the left, yeah, there! black and shiny), so we don’t step on each other’s toes.

You can get a better idea of what you have to do by looking at the commit diff on this cumbersome websvn page:
http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=1088785

As you see you simply have to move the configuration reading and setup from init() to configChanged(), and eventually use it from init() too.

Oh and by the way… I’m going to Tokamak 4!

hello everyone
i’m blogging this one because i really fell off the chair laughing when i read it.

so, short introduction: i admit that it’s really a while that i’m not blogging, and because of that 99.9% of the comments on the blog posts are just mere spam. Most of the times it’s just uninteresting russian or brute force porn links, but this one is so amazing i think it’s worth sharing. Only important note: this was on the page where I blogged about the mockup of the battery plasmoid

okay, the introduction is over, this really speaks for itself:

Hi,

Thanks for writing such an interesting article. Its really good to know about the batteries in detail. Seriously do we realize how many things in your house that need batteries? Let’s count it, from the flashlight, cell phone, iPod, cameras, and many more. Knowing it should make us realize on how essential the presence of the batteries in our daily life. However, with that so many kinds of battery, which is generally different between one to another, sometimes we have some difficulties in finding the desired type.

Find the right batteries supplier is not hard if you check out  *REMOVED LINK* because this website provides the widest selection of batteries and you can choose the right battery based on the categories. You can get the procell batteries which available in several sizes and voltage. You also can find Duracell batteries that divided into duracell plus batteries and duracell ultra batteries. All of the batteries come with cheaper price because this website provides the discount batteries in bulk, wholesale, and retail quantities.

Thanks,

- Andrew Morales

yes, amazing.

- roophie (which is going to have more kde news to blog about)

(and, oh yeah, i have to fix blockquote…)

Yes, the new planet went live finally today, with a new fresh look which takes it out from the last nineties and brings it down directly to the modern times.

The design has started at akademy, on wade’s commission, and then got several rounds of refining and polishing, last of which been done by nuno who was trying to accomodate the usual bikeshed that developers’ taste brings up.¹

We still have to work some more on it, pixel perfectionness is the first thing that comes to my mind, then some more fluidity in the layout (thanks to felipe who told me is working on a patch for it), and, most important of all, someone that knows about CSS and HTML that can give a hand. Jonathan has done a terrific work, but, as he says, that’s the best that his web skills permits him.

Then we need to refine all those little things like alignments, shadows, and so on…

Anyways, already a great improvement, no?

Enjoy the new planet!

- Your beloved Roophie

¹ no offence meant, we already cleared that up, just… history!

so, today’s blog entry is presented in fuzzy vision, for solidarity to drunk people.

Yesterday I was feeling pretty pissed off by how things were going. But fortunately, the KDE community demostrated once more how great and friendly it is. =) I received a lot of virtual hugs and good words on IRC, on private mail and in comments. And I’m really thankful to everyone of you for the kind words, they really helped me. =)
Sebastian turns out to be our most favourite teddy bear ever, and today, despite he woke up at 5 AM and was just back from a long journey, popped up on IRC and pinged me, we explained ourselves, and in a few minutes the atmosphere and everything was back to the usual KDE hugs and kisses. Misunderstandings are pretty bad, but fortunately now all seems good. Or, as sebas writes… I love teddy bears! =)

So, today I finished my mockup for the battery, and sent it to the Plasma devel mailing list. I’ll show it also here, so that I’ll gather some more feedback.
However, before I’ll show it, a couple of notes:
The icons (especially brightness icons) are temprorary, as you might guess. I’ll probably add a brightness label too, I was just feeling lazy .
Some icons will probably also need to be made ad-hoc, for now I just borrowed some from the icon theme. In place of the ‘java’ icons there will be icons specific to each profile.

Apart for that, this is the mockup for the popup that will appear clicking on the battery in the panel, while on planar (desktop/dashboard/media-center…) contianments there will be just the ‘status’ part (the part above the line) with a little togglable button (label for it? “options…”?) bottom-right which will slide out the configuration options and will make the plasmoid look like the following mockup, which is designed, as I said, for the panel.

Some other points that are worth noticing:

• I tried to pack up the space, and manipulating the background with inkscape is not the easiest thing ever. I’m sure that the end result (especially with better font rendering) will look less cluttered.
• a ‘brightness’ label on the slider might be good, I was just hoping for cleaerer icons. let’s see how this turns out.
• the checkbox “disable warnings” will become another thing, used to toggle “presentation mode” (no autosuspend, no warnings, no screensaver, …)
• yes, I will show the CPU frequency in the progressbar
• we need better wording =)

Ok, so, after the notes… here it is!

And, yes, this is meant to become the controller for powerdevil. =)

As a sidenote, and to unveil the last part of my title, lately I got pretty annoyed with the status of the development of raptor so far. Especially with the estimated developed times being 20.000 years (I’m saying the truth, check here if you don’t believe me! (towards the end)) . To put it bluntly, things were simply stagnating for way too long. So I sit down, met, talked to and recruited some devlopers (namely Dario ‘drf’ Freddi of PowerDevil’s fame, Davide Bettio and Lukas Appelhans), we created a git repo, and we started the fun.
We’re being hosted at github for now, like arora, and we plan to merge back to SVN right before moving to kdereview.

The repo URL is: http://github.com/ruphy/raptor.

The biggest work will likely be the view, so if you have some expertise in QPainter, layouts, or computer graphics, and feel like you want to give us a hand, don’t exitate to drop us (or me) a line or fork the repo on github. =)

So, now, our stated goal is to have raptor ready for 4.2, with *at least* basic functionalities and legacy category support.
Note that, once we’ll have some usable code, we’ll badly need some feedback from users so that we can see what we can optimize further and what are the concepts that work better, so that we can then optimize the menu the best way possible.

We’re all motivated and dedicated to do it, we’ve just completed the design phase, and me and drf will meet in RL weekly for some code sprints on it, too. And we’ll also be joining our forces with our good friend Ivan Cucik (please pardon me the accents, ivan =) ), author of Lancelot, to be able to faster kick, kickoff, off.

Wow, that was long! Later on!

don’t really know why I chose this moment to blog, or why this argument, I’m not even sure this should appear on the planet, as I’m pretty pissed off now, and just can’t get asleep because of that. certainly utf 8 chars look good on a title, but please feel free to skip this blog entry if it’s not in the mood for you, i don’t want to make this a bad day for you. i’m sure you’d actually skip it anyways when you would realize that, so i shouldn’t even really bother telling you. but whatever. you’ve been warned. so i’m being pretty pissed off because of how are going things currently with me and kde. since around one week i guess. or well, maybe not about me and kde. there’s not been any significantly episode so far that puts me in the mood I am now, so maybe it’s not kde. but people stepping on your toes all the time, or always being overcomed, or making a lot of sacrifices for barely no reward or anything can kill anyone’s motivations. and no, this time I’m really not the exception to the rule. note that i’m not pointing my finger at anyone as being culprit of this. not even you sebas, i (now) know you’re stressed as hell. so maybe it might simply be me being silly, idiot and pathetic. so yeah, please, anybody, don’t feel accused or anything like that.

however, the fact remains: I’m back on blogging. finally. and, on a related note, i’m also burning out. so maybe i need it. maybe reading all the nice people will stop me from wanting to just give up on the stuff. dunno. but fuck, yeah, i’m not even rereading the post this time. that’s pathetic. i’ll just stop here wasting space on the planet. bye.

Davide ‘WindowsUninstall’ Bettio asked me to add a note to remind that i might have blogged in another happy moment before now too. but as i said in the opening, i don’t really know why i did that right now.  the happier ones will follow i guess.

happy birthday to you!!! =)

Yea, I know it was yesterday (the 18th) but you decided to disappear from IRC… … and I can’t blame you for that.

On a sidenote, what did I become now, the official KDE birthday reminder? At least judging from all the posts I’m writing lately…
Hmm… this has to be fixed… but… never fear! I will be back blogging about stuff asap!!! =)

Happy birthday David! Happy birthday Eugene!

(that’s just alphabetical order)

For those who don’t know, today it’s the birthday of two of our great fellow artists! David ‘davigno’ Vignoni and Eugene ‘it-s’ Trouneuv. To their health!

(to be sincere I wanted to put here a birthday e-card but then I considered that this would have resulted in being more creepy than what I eventually already am. So, take just the words please )

For the rest, I’m continuing with the complete graphic revamp of this blog, sorry if it doesn’t look completely shiny now, but I will make it so in the next days. Great inspiration in my mind…

And a flood of articles are coming too… I just didn’t want to post anything until the revamp had finished, and I’m only making an exception to the rule just for this special occasion.

See you soon my lovely fellows!

P.S. krunner is coming along greatly!