Monday, November 21, 2011

New job

Today has been my first day in my new job. I've started working as Software Engineer for



Since late August I had been doing interviews here in Barcelona but most of them were not really interesting only fullfilling the last of my four wanted points:
* Interesting job
* Linux related
* Free Software related
* Barcelona based

Working for Canonical gives me those four points and as an extra the salary is better than the average Barcelona job, so I can't complain :-)

As note i am almost sure my regular work will *not* be working in creating Kubuntu so don't ask me for feature improvements/bugfixes for it.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

KDE/Harmattan brings me back to Berlin!

Until this summer I had never been in Berlin. And now after going there this August for the Desktop Summit, I am going back this weekend for the KDE/Harmattan sprint. My plan for this sprint involves trying to port KTuberling to Harmattan, should not be too difficult after my Blinken port, investigate how to use a proper kdelibs instead of libkok and try to learn as much of possible from all the attendants :-)

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Okular and Send by Mail

There are regular requests about Okular having a "Send by Mail" menu item in the File menu.

In terms of implementation, it is a five minutes hack, since all you have to do is create a new KAction that calls KToolInvocation::invokeMailer with a few params and you are done.

Yet, i have been refusing to implement it since i do not think it is Okular responsibility to offer this feature.

I can understand that users are used to Adobe Reader having it, and in the unintegrated world of Windows it makes sense that every app includes as many features as possible since it is you versus the world.

On the other hand, in KDE land we pride ourselves of having things properly integrated and each feature in the software where it logically belongs, and in my book, the action of initiating the sending of an email, does not belong to a document viewer.

It is true though, that even if I've been involved in UI designing/programming for a while I can't still say I know what belongs to a given program or not.

Because once we add it to Okular? Why not to gwenview? And why not to Calligra? And And And?

What do you think?

Thursday, November 03, 2011

Blinken: First KDE App on the Nokia Store?

Today Nokia approved Blinken for the N9/N950 and it appeared in the Nokia store.

I started coding Blinken (back then known by the ksimon name) in February 2005 and a few months later it joined the KDE Education project.

The last few months I've been playing with the N950 that the nice people at Nokia lent me and soon I realized that thanks to the Document Viewer (based in Calligra) it has some sort of kdelibs on the device (by the name of libkok) so porting KDE applications to it became a bit easier.

With the aim of having Blinken on my phone I started to work and after a few ifdefs for the mouse hover handling and a bit of QML for bits of the UI I ended up with this commit that makes Blinken available for another platform and to my knowledge makes it the first KDE application in the Nokia Store.

PelleTut, we love you too!

A nice user by the nickname of PelleTut just dropped by the #okular IRC channel and after me telling him "use evince instead of okular if you like it more/does what you want", he answered with a nice "lol, retard" and then quit.

Great way to convince us to implement those missing features!

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Some Okular testing, please?

There are three newsworthy things today in Okular world:
* Michel Ludwig merged into master the branch he had been developing to help him use Okular better from Kile. This should had no impact in regular Okular users but as this is a biggish change it would be great if you all master branch okular users update, recompile and complain if you see any regression
* I committed a patch that will make the UI more responsive on opening for documents whose pages are slow to render. There is no real speedup, but the fact that you have the UI up and running sooner is nice. Again this should be pretty innocuous but if you run master and see any new weird thing on opening files let us know.
* I created a new branch named kill_poppler_thread whose only commit removes a lot of code from the PDF/poppler backend that is not needed anymore since there is now generic code that provides the threading functionality that code had. This should also be innocuous but i am a bit hesitant of merging it into master so it would be cool if some that use okular with PDF files intensively switched to the kill_poppler_thread and verified everything works as it should. If you do, please tell me and it will make my decision of whether merging into master or not easier.