Month: October 2012

Dave’s Useful Tools – KDED Tester

KDED is a daemon for running lots small workspace tasks. Tasks such as monitoring display changes, notifying you if you run out of free space, power management and so on. Running each of these as it's own process has a lot of overhead and as each task is really tiny they are built as plugins all loading by one process, the kde daemon (kded).

As there are lots of plugins at once this makes debugging a real pain, there is lots of noise from various other plugins and it can be quite hard to see which plugin is at fault in the event of a crash or memory leak. Furthermore it's difficult to test without restarting kded, which can cause over issues.

To solve this I've built a tool for running one KDED module on it's own, purely for debugging purposes.

Software is available from

git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/davidedmundson/kdedtester

Usage is very similar to KCMShell, a tool for running a KCMModule at a time.

KDE Telepathy 0.5.1 Released

Today we are releasing 0.5.1 of KDE Telepathy, the first patch release in our 0.5 series.

We have fixed over 14 bugs since release, including:

  • Skype no longer appears in the list of available protocols if it is not available
  • Fixed issues when KWallet is disabled
  • Log viewer crashes fixed
  • Loading logs for facebook users
  • Fixed log viewer not showing names in group chats
  • Added an indication that an account is connecting in the presence applet
  • Presence applet autohides if the user has no telepathy accounts
  • Presence applet fits in smaller panels correctly

    • A full list can be found here

    Many thanks to the entire KTp team, as well as to all the testers and bug reporters who helped in this release.

    Source code is available here and it should be in distributions shortly.

    Find out more about getting involved in KTp here

    An update on Extra Mile

    The aim of the extra mile project is put some energy into fixing the little annoyances in KDE, the small bugs and UI issues which get in the way of the user.

    We've been working on areas all over KDE, I've outlined some of my favourite changes I've been working on over this past week.

    Redoing the Network Manager Authorisation Prompts

    This prompt is for when you need to re-enter a password for your wifi connection. The main issue is that the layout cut short, but it is also lacking clear context as to what the dialog is asking. Important text and instructions should be put in the window and not only in the windor title. A bit of text and an icon shape everything up nicely.


    Before


    After

    Improving the Akonadi KCM

    Padding and margins are one the most important tools to a designer, uneven and misaligned spacing can quickly make a really good piece of technology look unfinished.


    Before


    After

    Improving Kate dialogs

    Aurélien Gâteau made some changes in the kate dialogs, updating icons to reflect the actions and updated the tooltips to give a appropriate description of the actions each one does.

    Get Involved

    There's still lots more to be done, and it's a great opportunity to get involved in KDE or even just getting more familiar with a different area of KDE.

    There are two ways to get involved in the extra mile project. We need people to go through applications, dialogs and workflows spotting areas where we can improve by opening extramile bugs, as well as going through this list and getting things fixed.

    Find out more about the project on the wiki page, or join us in our IRC channel #kde-quality on Freenode.