Category: Netrunner (Page 2 of 2)

My first year at BlueSystems

13 December 2012 / apol / 2 Comments

About one year ago, the 1st December 2012 I graduated, and by the same dates I started working for BlueSystems. Since we usually consider year periods like achievements, I thought it was a good occasion for a flashback, so there we go!

The KDE GTK Config KCM was my first assignment. It was something new for me but still interesting otherwise. I was more used to work into making applications, there I worked right into helping integrate an important part of the software we have available to KDE. I think it was successful in the sense that many people are starting to take advantage of it and hopefully enjoying the possibility to fully customize the look of all applications, haven’t you tried it already?
The second project I worked on was Muon Discover. There I spent most of my time this year, by bringing to KDE a new way to see what you have available for enjoying on your system. I think it’s a very interesting project and I’d like to keep working on it regularly since I think there’s much we can offer there. Of course my work on Muon hasn’t been limited to creating Discover, but I’ve also pushed many different internal changes in order to get different backends. Backends for OCS/KNS and Bodega, will be available from the next Muon version.
Furthermore, I’ve tried most of all to help KDE wherever I could. We organized the Pineda sprint, I’ve worked on bringing life to Plasma wallpapers, I’ve committed many fixes in the lower stack of KDE and Plasma Components to make sure everything worked and I put my grain of sand to push the People Framework.

All in all, I’m happy of what we’ve been doing from BlueSystems. I think it’s just starting, we’re doing great work, so keep tuned!

**sigh** When you have fun, time flies!

Cheers, and have happy holidays if you’re having them!

PS: … and this was only what I worked on while sponsored, it’s been a great year indeed. 🙂

Changing wallpapers

25 September 2012 / apol

The fresh air of the Swiss Alps is good for many things. I came here to work on KDE Edu mostly but I’ll be reporting first about some contribution to Plasma. During the last weeks I’ve been working, during my BlueSystems time, on a new plugin that will let you have a wallpaper written in QtQuick. I think it’s a very interesting step because it will provide a simpler way to draw KDE Plasma Wallpapers that can react to things. For now I created a couple of wallpapers: One that’s really ugly and another one that fetches ASCII animals from the interwebz and makes it move randomly from time to time. The good news is that it just works, that it has not a noticeable performance impact 1, that it’s terribly easy to write one and that it’s incredibly fun to play with them. 🙂

1 if you don’t make expensive stuff in the script, of course PS: if anybody is interested in having such wallpapers working on KDE 4.9, please tell me and we’ll manage it 😉

Discovering your OS and beyond

9 August 2012 / apol / 16 Comments

Some time ago, I already talked about the project I started along with Blue Systems called Muon Discover. For those who didn’t follow, it’s some software to get to know the resources your OS is providing like applications.

Muon Discover has had quite a good welcome, somebody even recorded some pretty awesome review, but as you will understand we couldn’t stop there.

The first Muon Discover iteration was centered into building a new GUI to figure out your system’s available applications. The second iteration though, was meant to be an engine overhaul. The GUI wouldn’t change much but technically it changed a lot. Muon’s internal library was repurposed into a backend-based system where APT is only a backend, which means basically two things:

Now we can have multiple backends
Now we don’t depend on QApt

With all these changes, I chose to add another backend too (a backend-based system with 1 backend is sad), so I created some KNS+OCS backend that works well enough. At the moment, it is providing Plasmoids to be added to your KDE Desktop and Comics for your Comics Plasmoid. Here you can see a video of Muon Discover running on my ArchLinux system. 🙂

Muon Discover, KNS Backend from Aleix Pol on Vimeo.

Now the call for collaboration:
Do you want your OS resources to be available through Muon? Create a backend!
Do you want to support other resources than we’re displaying? Create a backend, or expose those through OCS.

Possibilities are wide and it’s a great moment to explore them. What do we want to offer? Only applications? Maybe also multimedia resources? Books? We have to figure all this out, and now it’s the moment to do so by joining the project :).

If there’s any way I can help, I’ll be glad to, so don’t hesitate to ask if there’s any question!

See you!

Explore applications with Muon Discover

27 April 2012 / apol / 15 Comments

As some of you know, I’m working for Blue Systems, during the recent months it’s been on improving some bits of muon and developing a new front-end that we’ve called Muon Discover.

The idea is simple. Haven’t you ever found a tool that was perfect for your need but you only found it after some time stumbling upon it on the net? When considering to install an application, don’t you wonder sometimes if it’s really worth it? Or if it’s actually what you’re looking for.

We are trying to address these areas in this new front-end we called Muon Discover. There you’ll be able to search applications, to navigate through categories and top5 lists and figure out what they are meant for by seeing the screenshots and reviews.

Furthermore, Muon Discover will let you manage the different sources of software you have and manage the applications you’ve already installed in the past but you don’t want anymore.

Here you can see a video that shows a bit what it does.

If anybody is interested, you can try it from our cyber-stuff PPA.

And last but not least, thanks to Jonathan Thomas, Muon maintainer who was really open to new ideas in all this process!

As always, I’m welcome to feedback. Please give us feedback, we need to know what it feels like to use it with your hands! 🙂

Next KDE Workspace Iteration

7 March 2012 / apol / 4 Comments

As it has already been said in the Plasma mailing list, we’re planning the next iteration of the KDE Workspaces.

For this project, we’d like to start with gathering a group of people to figure out a vision for this next iteration. If you know you have good ideas and you want to be part of this group, please send me an e-mail to aleixpol@kde.org and we will condider your application.

Anyhow, if vision is not what you want to work on and you still want to help, also there’s plenty you can do, just read through the e-mail and you should already start to get some ideas.

New year, new life (or KDE and GTK integration)

2 January 2012 / apol / 16 Comments

Or as they say in Spanish: año nuevo, vida nueva. Well, or not. My new year started the 1st December actually, when I got my engineering degree, but I’ll talk about the project some other day.

Today I’d like to talk about my new job at Netrunner, where I started some days after my graduation.

There I have been working on a KCM module to configure your GTK2/3. To do so, I took Chakra’s kcm and reworked it a little to behave like I wanted to. Now that we’re here, big thanks to the Chakra crowd, specially Manuel Tortosa and José Antonio Sánchez, who let me fiddle with their project.

After the cleanup part, I ported the project to our git.kde.org infrastructure, so now it’s a KDE project. It’s in playground for the moment, we’ll see where it will go from now on.

The KCM itself is quite stable at the moment. Feature-wise, it lets you select the GTK styles, the font and the icon themes to be used. Furthermore, it lets you tweak some more specific settings like the icon placing on the menu and so. Also there’s the possibility to download GTK and icon themes for fun and profit. I hope you’ll enjoy it :).

For Netrunner/debian/*ubuntu users, you can install the package using this package. (Please, use this package for testing purposes only).
On other distro’s, please ask your packagers to package it :).