It’s very exciting when you’re among the first going on something new which looks terribly promising, and I’m very happy to be in this situation right now. =)

Namely, Akunambol is now hosted onto git.kde.org! Cookies to the sysadmins!

If you are following Akunambol’s development you should now clone git.kde.org:playground/akunambol.git, or check out http://projects.kde.org/projects/akunambol, which includes a very nice code browser too.

What else? Ah, yes, we get a commit filter, under the virtual svn path of “trunk/playground/pim/akunambol”.

This is all very cool, right? But since we are among the first migrating, we are experiencing some rough edges too. These are promptly being fixed by the sysadmins (you guys rock!) on IRC, and I’m trying to get some of the most important details we figure out written down for future reference.

One of the main things which created “problems” (more than problems, things-to-be-written-down) was the customization of gitolite made to suit KDE needs. Not all commands are the same that you could find on the official documentation, and most of them are undocumented (besides the usual little bugs).

So, when you move your pet projects to git, make sure to read and update this page: http://techbase.kde.org/User:Ruphy/KDEGitolite. I created it in my user’s namespace because it was meant as a wip-thing, but it can be moved as soon as we find a convenient place for it to stay.

So everybody, have a great migration! :)

Quick Update #2 [03/09]: The new tarball is up! md5sum 54475b80271a137fb56c1e39c2e470ad, or use this direct link.

Quick update [03/09]: it seems like the released libfunambol snapshot has some problems building on some platforms (with an error like this: http://pastebin.com/Rd0jpQEW). If you’re hit by this bug, stay tuned – I’m investigating and I will release a new source tarball as soon as possible. Also check http://blog.ruphy.org/posts/115.

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! =)

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 :P.
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)) :P . 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!