Category: my projects (Page 5 of 8)

Pairs and ugly applications

9 November 2011 / apol / 3 Comments

Hi!
Some time ago I blogged about a new game for KDE Edu, a memory-enhancing cards game. It was getting dusty in my scratch repository until Marco Calignano had the strength to push some features that it desperately needed and at the same time pushed me into gaining interest in the project again.

A lot has happened since: the name changed to Pairs (can be found in kde:pairs now) and it’s quite awesome already, I’d say. It lets us download themes from the Internet, supports different game types like image->image, image->word and some others, etc.

A couple of weeks ago we discussed about moving it to KDE Edu finally, although we decided not to and port it to QtQuick so that we can make it work in touch screens and we can get to have fancy GUI. In few days we managed to port it to QtQuick (somehow, there are some hacks :D) but now it’s a little ugly. WTH, not a little ugly, very ugly. It makes your eyes hurt and it’s on purpose.

Why would someone make such an ugly beast? Well, because we’re looking forward to find someone who can make it look nice. Now, those of you who have some pride in your artistic skills, please consider it: Could you please dedicate some time in your life to a community of hardcore developers without this sparkle for beauty? We don’t have much to offer other than considering your idea and hopefully it will get to be used by children from all around the world (now that I think of it, maybe it is something!).

What we need is quite simple:

Check the video, when your eyes hurt just stop it.
Think of what you think the GUI should look like.
Here I’d love to say that you should be able to provide a QML file, if you can’t then just a mockup.
Optionally (and preferably) you can check what it looks like by modifying the qml GUI and compiling the program. Here there are some instructions: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE_Applications
Send it to me at aleixpol@kde.org. You can also send me any questions you have, as well as posting them as comments below, so that we can discuss it all together.

Cheers, for beauty! 🙂

PS: And elegance 😉

So KDE is getting older…

5 October 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

And from KDE Spain we don’t want to let the next 14th October to pass by without a proper birthday party.

That’s why we have put together 4 mini-events/birthday parties around the country to celebrate in A Coruña, Barcelona, Castelló and Málaga. We’ll have some talks and probably some dinner if people feels like going out a little :).

If you’re interested in coming to the event, check the schedule here: http://kde-espana.es/news.php#itemKDEcumple15aoshabrquecelebrarlo

If you’re interested in helping, don’t hesitate to ask me or anyone in KDE Spain! There’s plenty you can do, including organizing another in your city, we will provide some materials for you, we want you to be part of it as well!

And for the rest, whoever you are, don’t forget to spread the word! KDE is going to be 15 and needs your enthusiasm too, for the next joyful 15 years!

\o/

KDE Spain is translatable

16 September 2011 / apol / 3 Comments

Hi!
As some of you might know in Spain many different languages are spoken and among the major goals of the KDE Spain association, we’re trying to push those to be properly available and usable in KDE.

Until some time ago, it was just possible to browse our website in Spanish, which wasn’t very coherent, that’s why we adapted the website for localization.

For the moment, besides Spanish, we just have Catalan and English which is a good start. 🙂

I hope you like it, cheers to anyone who helped! 🙂

PS: Of course it’s not like we speak that much English in Spain, it’s just in case you want to take a look…

Road to a better KDevelop newcomer experience

23 August 2011 / apol / 17 Comments

Hi fellow KDE!

Today I would like to talk a little about some work I’ve been doing recently in KDevelop in order to assure we have a good path for the new KDevelop user and KDE or free software Developer.

I think that KDevelop has been quite good at being adopted by people who know their way in the development process: in few words, people who already know the language they’re using and usually they can fill any lacking feature KDevelop might have, by doing some old-style terminal hacking :). No problem with that, but apparently not everyone is born with some wizard skills, so I’d like to improve this situation.

There are many aspects that can be improved and some have been lately. One of the most annoying things that we found (mostly in Randa, in the KDevelop team and some random spontaneous meeting) to be more annoying, was our “New Project” wizard, specially when it comes to start new technology based in KDE.

This is what it looked like before starting working on it:

There are some things I don’t like here: The tree view looks clumsy and doesn’t lead the user anywhere, so whenever I have considered to create a new project from this dialog, I’ve felt violated somehow. What I’m going to show here has to be taken as a first step towards where I want future KDE Developers experience to start (if they are starting a new project).

The idea here is that the user will select, first of all, what kind of application is going to be created, roughly: KDE Application, just a standard application, a web service or whatever it’s needed. Using KDE as an example, we’ll select if we want to create a console application, GUI application, Plasmoid, etc. Finally, we’ll select the language we want to use be C++, Python or whatever it’s available.

That last step change is important, because we’re adding more importance at what we are doing (a Plasmoid for example) than if we are going to do it in C++ or Python.

From this point there’s many things to be done:

Make it possible to create new applications from the KDE Examples
Add some category information, categories are not translatable right now and they can’t have an icon. I’d like to see this improved.
KNewStuff support to download new templates?
Make sure the KDE GUI application templates are equivalent for C++ or Python.
Improve the template’s description. Add links to techbase!
Think about the templates you always wanted as a kid and contribute them!
… many other things in your imagination 🙂

If someone is interested in helping, just ping me in IRC at #kdevelop in freenode, comment here or send me an e-mail, your call! 🙂

Oh! And last but not least, Big thanks to Àlex Fiestas for helping me sorting the templates and discussing the ideas, and Aurélien Gâteau for giving me a hand at making the GUI more usable.
After all this lonely KDE hacking, it feels great to sit down with someone else and try to take the best out of you on what you’re doing!

KDE and Free Software conferences @ home

2 July 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

Yesterday the Jornades del Programari Lliure finished. This event that was quite important to me, I’ll try to explain a little why and what conclusions did I extract from it. If you don’t really can’t bother about it, just stay with the thought that it was a great experience :).

I always like to go to free software events, regardless it’s a KDE event or not. It’s a good way to step back at what I’ve been doing for the last years and to process a little if it makes sense, if it’s worth it and to consider other’s positions to check why are they working in different stuff and if I should change my views (all in all, not everyone is working in KDE Edu and KDevelop,… surprisingly :)).

There were a lot of conversations and different opinions, I still do hear people claiming that we have to outcome the big proprietary projects. There’s been an important change here, now the best/biggest projects are those who use better Free Software (or Open Source like some people call it) wisely, I don’t think there’s that much of a battle with free software or not from the development perspective. We’re there, now we need to make KDE one of those communities that we want people to work with and to work on. That said, let’s get all this awesomeness to the end users, who usually aren’t aware of that.

Also it was nice to see more faces than in the usual meetings, it’s always good to see that there’s people who trust in what you do even if they’re not actively contributing. There’s a lot of profiles to fulfill in the free software world and we still need a lot of passionate people.

And, last but not least, thanks to the organization to put together some really nice conferences, to even bring some international speakers (hey Aaron! :)), to try to make us think a little about what what’s being done and to give us the opportunity to talk about our passion.

See you soon! \o/

KDevelop’s Randa Sprint, my take

4 June 2011 / apol / 1 Comment

As some of you will know, these days the KDevelop team is staying in Switzerland with a bunch of KDE developers where we’re having some sprints, for me it’s KDevelop sprint mostly although I’ve had very different and interesting conversations for the days here.

We’ve just got asked to tell what we’re working on. I prefered to keep it for myself so that you get surprised the next time you see it (keep in mind that a surprise can be either good or bad :)). Well anyway, here it goes:

– KDevelop Dashboard
This one actually comes from last summer, my GSoC contained the effort to create a Plasma-based Dashboard for KDevelop. Right now I decide to make some simplifications on what I came up with and now we have some place to start creating what we want this KDevelop Dashboard to be, probably after this week another post will come with what we’ve come up with. Here it comes the ¿pretty? picture:

– VCS Project Integration
Those who have talked with me about KDevelop lately will know that I had this in mind for a while and that I think that here KDevelop can really make a difference when it comes to properly adapt to the user workflow. The idea is to have coding-time information about what’s the changes in our project. For now we have this screenshot, more will come later in the future :).

Oh, and last but not least, remember all this is in our public repositories, if you’re interested in it, just try it and talk to me if you want to help!

New KDE Edu website and logo, the making of

27 April 2011 / apol / 7 Comments

I’m quite happy to see that we finally made it for the new KDE Edu design. From my point of view it’s quite hard to make all these changes from our community perspective. KDE has been built fundamentally around software developers and it’s not easy to get contributions other than that, I guess that’s mainly because I can write the type checker for KAlgebra but I really can’t work on a website design. It’s usually quite hard to get people from the community willing to put their love in projects like the KDE Edu website.

They say that there are always solutions, this time it came from Agustín Benito, who used his white wizard powers to get us in contact with a couple of designers coming from ASOLIF companies that wanted to contribute to free software somehow, and this was the way.

The experience went really well, I won’t say it was easy for me but I’d say it’s because it was my first time working like that and I didn’t know very much what to expect, but the thing is that people who worked with us are very good professionals (something that doesn’t happen always in our world as well, for good and bad) and I don’t think anyone can doubt of the quality of our result, like it or not. \o/ yay us!

edu tree

I won’t say everything was perfect, probably the whole process took too much time and communication could have been better probably, but I think it’s a great start and I’m really looking forward in seeing this collaboration paradigm gaining adoption inside KDE, and why not, taking part in these projects.

And last but not least, thanks to the KDE-www guys who were really helpful, specially Ingo Malchow and Matthias Meßmer who were really supportive with the project and helped us make the best out of it. Also thanks to Alex Fiestas who joined us in the KDE Edu sprint and broke some of his own KDE collaboration rules to give us a hand doing some development on the website.

Long life to KDE Edu and flowers! \o/

So… what’s cooking?

27 April 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

I’ve probably been talking lately too much about where I was going to spread my KDE love and talking too little about what I’ve been doing and what’s happening:

Akademy-es: Yes! we’re having the Akademy-es in Barcelona this year and I know you won’t miss it. Yay! Awesome. Well it takes some preparation, so it takes some time. I feel I’m quite lucky I could find a rather big team of local KDE enthusiasts, that way I don’t have to do it all by myself but truth is it’s time consuming and love consuming. By the way, if anybody wants to help, just poke me and remember to register if you want to come!

KDE Edu: We had our yearly meeting. In my opinion most of our group work was about getting the best out of GSoC and the rebranding. The GSoC results where out last week, I hope the best luck for all the GSoC student, as an ex-student I can remember the excitement of being accepted, so congrat’s to all of them :). About the rebranding, news will be coming soon :). On the KAlgebra side, the language has improved tons since 1 year ago, it’s quite hard to show that to the KAlgebra user I guess, but we’ll get there, for the moment rocs looks like it will be the next victim.

KDevelop: As some of you already know, I’m working on my final engineering project around KDevelop, doing some static analysis using our infrastructure. It’s still going forward but it’s keeping me to commit new features to KDevelop lately, I hope I’ll fix that soon, though… >:) I’ve got some crazy ideas to be put in place, since I don’t like to talk about something that’s not implemented, you’d better wait and see :). If anyone is interested in static analysis (on c++ for the moment) you can find me in irc/e-mail and we can talk about life and spring 🙂 oh and static analysis.

In the end, a lot of things are moving, I don’t have as much coding time as I’d like since there’s always something that sounds that if I don’t do it nobody will, probably I shouldn’t think like that… but oh well, I hope everyone will enjoy my KDE areas the way we all enjoy KDE.

Hugs for everyone! \o/

Extending Call for Papers period

22 April 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

Hi!

As some of you will know, we’re celebrating the yearly KDE Spanish event the next 20th to 22nd May in Barcelona. Since we don’t want to leave any of you behind, we’ve decided to extend the Call for Papers period for an extra week so that you can get your ideas ready in time. The CfP will close the 28th and the schedule will be ready by the 1st May.

Hope that will help to get all of you in :). And remember! If you’re planning to come, please register here: http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2011/registro.php.

If you need lodging and you are not sure where to go, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us so that we can give you some hints!

See you in Barcelona!

April of KDE

24 March 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

Hi!
Some intensive days are coming let’s talk about it a little :).

Next week I’ll be going to San Francisco because I’ll be attending to Camp KDE. It’s specially interesting to go there because it’s a very nice opportunity to get in touch with a KDE community that is not usually around in the events I’ve been going (it’s going to be my first KDE meeting outside of Europe). There I will be talking about KDevelop and KDE Edu (no wonder), two beautiful projects from a beautiful community like KDE, can’t be more proud of it :).

The day after I come back I’ll be going to Bilbao where we’re celebrating this year’s KDE Edu sprint. I feel like it’s an important step for KDE Edu because it will be the first time where we are celebrating it in an education context and because we will be gathering some important people from this country who is interested in education. Hopefully we will be able to take our project to the next level, so yay us! (again :)).

And last but not least, I’ll be going to Vigo the week after that, where I will give the KDE talks in the Free Software master by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Igalia. I’m happy to see these initiatives happening here and proud to help to take it to the next level. (yay us! bis bis).

And last but not least, thanks to all the sponsors the KDE eV board and, in the end, all the people who makes this kind of things possible :). See you soon!

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