COMMUNITY REPORT
4TH QUARTER 2013 | ISSUE 27
WELCOME MESSAGE
The end of the year always brings a comers can come and make a program, a Summer of Code version period of self-reflection to people, difference with their contributions for high school students, but you and so it does also to the KDE while learning from others. don't have to be a student to join us. community. Recently we started the KDE Google Summer of Code is maybe Incubator initiative, a way for existing Looking back at 2013 we can see the prime example, nearly 50 projects to join KDE with an how the community has continued university students deep dive into our appointed helping hand to guide doing what it excels at; producing community producing in a few them through the process. great end user software as well as months great improvements or totally documentation, translations, artwork new ideas while learning about If you don't have an existing project, and promotion related work to make coding, real world multicultural, cross you are of course very welcome to our software shine even more and be timezone and non collocated just going us on IRC, mailing list and more useful to more people. collaboration. start collaborating with us, you will learn, teach and share the joy of Almost more importantly, we have Google Summer of Code is not the being part of the great values that achieved that while maintaining the only such example. We have Season KDE represents. great and welcoming collaboration of KDE, a program similar in structure atmosphere that KDE is. but instead of being driven by money it just fuels on students and The great people that helped me mentors wishing to learn and learn and made me feel welcome is improve the world through KDE what caught me more than ten years software. Albert Astals Cid ago and made me a part of KDE. for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors We are also expanding our know- KDE still is the place were new- how via the Google Code-in
CONTENTS Welcome Message ...... 1 Featured article: KDE Accomplishments - GSOC ...... 2 – 4 Supported member activities ...... 5 Developer Sprints ...... 5 – 7 Trade Shows and Community Events ...... 7 New Members, Financial Report and KDE e.V. Board ...... 8 Featured article KDE ACCOMPLISHMENTS
GOOGLE SUMMER OF Čukić. Michael Bohlender modified KontactTouch email by implementing a User Interface/User CODE 2013 experience rework and porting it to Plasma Active Components. Martin Bříza prepared the polkit agent By Devaja Shah and wrapper libraries in KDE/Qt for future Qt5 usage and to make it fit better in KDE Plasma Workspaces. Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC) brought fifty budding new shoots and branches to the mighty KDE Web Interfaces family tree, and the canopy of warmth and love offered by the community helped them blossom and The web projects saw Ahmed AbouElhamayed bloom in the three months of the program. With a few working on the web interface for a simple project snips, a little trimming and pruning, they have report, which provides information about KDE projects learned, innovated, created and contributed to one of in a single place, along with the display of statistics the largest free and open source communities in the and graphical reports, eliminating the need to gather world, and have developed software that will touch this information from several different sources. many people around the world. They now have their Chandan Kumar worked on a Localization Team roots firmly planted in the KDE community with the Management Tool that handles localization successful completion of their projects and are ready (translation) team management tasks such as app to shelter budding shoots to come! booking and the review process. The KDE Localization website has been integrated with KDE Identity to Here is an overview of the projects: provide a unified authentication system for all KDE localizers, along with the inclusion of a booking Artikulate system for all translators to request or submit a file for translation. Oindrila Gupta worked on Artikulate, the KDE pronunciation trainer. Artikulate is still under Exciting New Features development, but she, along with an OPW (Outreach Program for Women) student, has already David Rosca worked on Zeitgeist and ported accumulated recordings and translations including libqzeitgeist to libzeitgeist2, which includes direct support for Polish and French languages, and is also database access as a significant performance boost. implementing GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff) in the Luke De Mouy wrote a new Operational program. Artikulate is intended to revolutionize the Transformation-based change tracking back-end for learning process for new languages. These two Calligra and worked with OASIS to help advance the students plan to introduce this addition to the KDE change tracking specification in the Open Document umbrella of projects that will be released as a part of Format (ODF). Denis Steckelmacher implemented a KDE Edu. new query parser for Nepomuk based on lexing and parsing instead of regular expressions to facilitate the Plasma parsing of more complex and human-friendly queries and searches; he also implemented an input widget The students working on Plasma are bringing about that allows users to enter queries that are syntax- amazing additions and new features such as the highlighted and auto-completed. Henry de Valence porting of plasmoids to Plasma 2, which was worked rewrote the data processing for KStars using OpenCL. on by Heena Mahour. Plasma 2 will facilitate creation Claudio Desideri wrote a QML version of the Gluon of fluid User Interfaces and the efficient handling of desktop player and integrated it with Simple Open back-end implementation. Jan Grulich worked on the Collaboration Services (OCS) server. touchscreen device adaptive NetworkManager applet and network settings module for Plasma Active. KDE Multimedia Plasma/KWin Shell switching and conditional component loading which includes dynamically KDE Multimedia had several GSoC projects. Nikolaos loading shells and components based on the Chatzidakis implemented mpris2 support in KMix2. environment was a major contribution from Ivan Now users can control any audio player which
2 supports the mpris2 implementation right from their implementing a separate system settings module for audio mixer. Akshay Ratan made enhancements to touchpad configuration and creating a plasma applet the Plasma Media Center by having a keyboard that allows touchpad enabling and disabling. Giorgos navigation scheme so that it can be operated by the Tsiapaliokas added enhancements to the bodega keyboard alone. He also implemented features such content system (for Plasma Active) such as ratings as the addition of a Dropbox plugin and polishing of functionality for assets in the bodega-server, a existing online services. Konrad Zemek rewrote the comment system, and support within clients for statistics importers based on the existing StatSyncing collections. Denis Kuplyakov ported KReversi to framework for Amarok 1.4 and Apple iTunes, and QML/QtQuick from QGraphicsView to facilitate easy created new statistics importers for Amarok 2.x and maintenance. Pavol Rohár integrated Trojita in KDE Rhythmbox so that users can easily synchronize along with new plugins. personal track metadata (like playcount or user rating) between Rhythmbox, iTunes Clementine, Krita, Step, Android Banshee, and Amarok. Tatiana Gornak rewrote the Audio CD Collection code in Amarok to replace the Somsubhra Bairi worked on animation support in deprecated framework, which provides better support Krita by adding a timeline interface to create/edit for audio CDs in Amarok. Anmol Ahuja is revamping animation and to store it in a new format, and added the Amarok scripting interface and implementing cool new animation specific tools as well. Sahil Nagpal improved the filter module of Krita and added new new Amarok features. Matěj Laitl worked on Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) support functionality in filters such as Color Balance, Spot Blur, Match Color, Amarok, simplifying it and making it compatible with Wavelet Decompose Filter, Screen Gradient. Lukas future improvements in the Linux MTP stack, while Appelhans extended Muon to different platforms. adding new features like on-the-fly transcoding. Albert Vaca Cintora is working on communication between a user’s Android phone and their KDE digiKam desktop, to allow new features such as desktop notification on receiving a new message, syncing of Yiou Wang ported DigiKam Image Editor canvas photos over WiFi or pausing music automatically classes from Qt3 to Qt4 model/view implementation. during a call. Aniket Anvit worked on enabling support Gowtham Ashok worked on the image quality sorter in Step for simulation of friction and the creation of to allow for categorizing pictures based on quality. pulleys. Frame-Change and Back-Simulation features Saurabh Patel created a kipi export plugin to upload along with improvements in Step graphics have also photos to Google Drive and Dropbox. Nhu Dinh Tuan been implemented. worked on Exiv2 Cloud Ready Project which includes implementation of bidirectional (read/write) support Marble for http, https, ftp and ssh for Exiv2. Soumajyoti Sarkar worked on extending Digikam’s ExpoBlending GSoC 2013 brought a lot of new features to Marble. tool into an HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging Andrei Duma and Utku Aydın worked on Marble’s creation tool which gives an HDR view of the blended syncing capabilities by integrating it with ownCloud image of the stack of bracketed exposures captured which will let Marble users store their data on their through a camera. Mahesh Hegde extended the ownCloud servers and synchronize across all devices. support of Exiv2 to write metadata within video files Adrian Draghici added support for GroundOverlay for better video management in Digikam as well as rendering and developed a visual way to edit KML any other application using Exiv2. Veaceslav files. René Küttner implemented an OpenGL Munteanu is implementing an image tags manager. SceneGraph structure that will allow the abstraction of Sayantan Datta developed a Local Adjustment Tool actual graphics scenes from the rendering back-end that allows users to make localized edits to specific within Marble as well as facilitate the grouping and user-defined portions of the images. rendering of objects in 3D space.
Fresh and New A Wide Variety of Projects
Sven Brauch implemented a collaborative text editor Antonis Tsiapaliokas worked on rewriting KWin based on KTextEditor and kde-telepathy. Anant Desktop Effects using QML2 with the inclusion of Qt Kamath developed a feature to send SMS messages Quick Controls and various other components from using ModemManagerQt and Telepathy and to QML Multimedia. Shivam Makkar worked on the manage SIM card contacts using Telepathy. Alexander generation of a preview of the selected keyboard Mezin worked on better touchpad support by layout on the specified keyboard model. 3 Mohamed Anwer worked on porting showfoto thumb- interface tasks. The pool is created by the mentors of bar to Qt4 Model/View and adding many new the ten participating open source organizations who functions. Filipe Saraiva worked on improving the maintain and add to it throughout the contest. A task backend to python scientific programming in Cantor is a set of work in one of the five categories that can along with the adding of features such as syntax be completed in a short time, taking from a couple of highlighting, dynamic keywords, variable hours to a day or so to complete. In addition to self- management and many more. Jaydeep Solanki contained tasks, task series are also created where worked on improving the ePub rendering in Okular similar work is split into several tasks or related work and provided some usability enhancements as well. is split into sequential tasks. This way all sorts of work Punit Mehta worked on improving the Application can be converted into manageable pieces. Actions, Persistence file and Plot Dictionary support as well as improving the Khipu UI and code base so that However GCI is not meant to be a way of distributing it can be officially released by the end of the term. work. It's more of an ongoing communicative event where lots of small teams emerge -- students and A big thank you to Google for being the official mentors exchange ideas, collaborate and task after patron to young students and for supporting the task gets closed. Each successfully completed task growth of open source communities around the world. earns the student a point. The core of the contest Even though KDE has been a part of GSoC since its involves choosing a task and completing it, repeatedly first ever season in 2005, each year brings many for seven weeks in a row. Afterwards the number of surprising projects and fresh enthusiastic minds. successfully completed tasks is summed up. One During these three months of hard work, GSoC earns the student a certificate. Three or more qualifies students maintain their liveliness and are unstoppable. the person for a groovy T-shirt to make their friends Their time with the KDE Community helps to shape jealous. Students who are among the twenty top their minds and attitudes, provides delightful performers win a trip to Google Headquarters in memories and creates wonderful experiences. It helps Mountain View, California! them learn and grow, and perhaps even helps to provide a new sense of freedom, opening possibilities A successful GCI means finishing tasks, but fortunately for many more people around the world. The KDE they're fun to work on. Maybe even addicting, or why Community, the committed efforts of these talented else would someone work on them from dusk till young people and the experience, knowledge and dawn? Our never-sleeping students added guidance of their mentors are inspiring examples of documentation videos for all sorts of KWin effects, the power of free and open source software. updated KGeography to show recent changes, and polished KStars features. A new touch typing course GOOGLE CODE-IN 2013 for the US English keyboard layout and keyboard layout files for more languages were created for by Dennis Nienhüser KTouch. Python support of KDevelop was extended in a series of tasks, and Amarok got several new testers How does one become a contributor of Open Source to verify bugs. The Trojitá email client got a couple of development? Some start with the wish to fix that usability improvements. All sorts of new features certain annoying bug in their favorite software. found their way into Marble, among them are Others want to extend it by adding a new feature. extensions of KML support, polishing of the new However one arrives, the path to completing a ownCloud integration and initial support for tours. seemingly easy task is often not clear. Where's the Inner and outer planets of the Solar System are now source for that button? How do I make my changes shown as well as the Moon with its phases. New map take effect in the software? Finding the right path can themes were created, the interactive legend be a frustrating journey many are not willing to enhanced, the handbook and Python binding endure. Google Code-In (or GCI for short) aims to documentation extended, routing support improved help out; pairing prospective contributors with and a screencast recording feature added. There were mentors from established open source organizations 115 Marble tasks alone, a considerable portion of the builds a path to successful contributions. 259 KDE total closed tasks. At the end of the contest Mihail Ivchenko from Russia (47 tasks) and Benjamin To increase motivation, GCI is organized as a contest. Kaiser from Australia (46 tasks) ranked top among the Pre-university students 13-17 years old from many KDE students. They will part of the hard-working countries may choose from a large pool of code, twenty who will visit Googleplex in April. Happy documentation, research, quality assurance and user journey!
4 SUPPORTED MEMBER ACTIVITIES
KDE E.V. PARTNER AT QT - Quality assurance for math KDE Frameworks 5: The applications migration to Qt5 and KDE DEVELOPER DAYS EUROPE AND Frameworks 5 (Qt5/KF5) will be US - New applications in KDE Edu one of the major undertakings KDE e.V. was a partner for both during the next year. KAlgebra - Expansion into opportunities the European and the US edition and Analitza are the first KDE Edu based on However wmobile. of the Qt Developer Days, applications ported to KDE Frameworks 5 and can now be http://www.qtdeveloperdays.com/. In the hacking sessions, KTouch In Berlin in early October there used on this new foundation. The (the typing trainer) received new decision about when to start was also a Qt Contributors Day custom lesson support that allows organized by John Layt. KDE porting to Qt5/KF5 is up to each users to train using arbitrary texts. maintainer. We are encouraging community members helped The QML graph plotting plugin behind the scenes at the peope to start this process by was separated from KTouch into a early 2014. By spring we want to registration and as session chairs. new library libkqmlgraph (located At the US edition in San Francisco, have Framework branches running in KDE-Playground). Artikulate for each application. Carl Symons and Dario Freddi ran (the pronunciation trainer) the KDE booth in the conference immediately adopted this library, Mobile: New opportunities in exhibition. Of course, KDE and work was started to port mobile are appearing. The KDE technology was also present in the training statistics to it. A major Edu team wants to be part of program with a talk about KDE rewrite was started on Artikulate's mobile, and will pursue the Frameworks 5 at each of the UI, including new support for user possibilities of running on different events, and there were lots of KDE profiles. Several important bugs in platforms, as well as with different community members among the Parley (the vocabulary trainer) form factors. Qt 5 and KDE speakers. About a third of the were fixed and open bug reports Frameworks 5 provide the presentations at both events were were triaged. The new math flexibility to accomplish these made by people with strong application Khipu (for plotting 2- goals. The KDE Edu team aslo connections in the KDE or 3-dimensional functions, not yet prepared to participate as part of community. released) was reviewed by the the whole KDE community in this team; most identified bugs and year's Google Code-In, an flaws were fixed during the sprint. outreach program for high-school Developer Sprints Khipu will eventually replace students to get involved in open KmPlot, which only supports 2- source projects. dimensional plots. The near-future KDE EDU SPRINT plan is to concentrate on polishing The meeting was sponsored by Khipu, and to finish work on the KDE e.V. and the GPUL (Grupo de A CORUÑA, SPAIN few missing features currently only Programadores y Usuarios de 24-30 October 2013 present in KmPlot. Linux). by Andreas Cord-Landwehr
The KDE Educational team (KDE Edu) gathered for its annual sprint at the Computer Science faculty of Universidad de A Coruña, Spain. The sprint was a mixture of hacking, discussing, getting to know more about Spanish culture, socializing, and meeting new teammates. The hot topics were:
- KDE Frameworks 5/Qt5 migration
- The user experience in language learning applications
5 KDEPIM SPRINT Early birds very necessary given the increased number of people who BRNO Unlike with most other sprints, nowardays attend them. November 2013 where all but some local people arrive on the first day of the sprint, Bugs by Kevin Krammer there had already been a week of intense KDE hacking been going As it has become tradition, a Earlier this year it was established on. Bob - you remember Bob? - significant portion of the meeting that "Osnabrück is not a place". and his merry henchmen from the was dedicated to mercilessly Meaning that the KDE PIM spring KDE Barcelona Squad, had already squash those nasty little buggers. sprint, which traditionally took arrived earlier that week and David Faure, a man who surely place in Osnabrück, could happen hacked on various pieces of KDE need no further introduction, used at a different location and still be a software and had beer delivered the presence of several continuation of the tradition. KDE to them on trains. Yes, trains! component maintainers to get PIM's autumn sprint has for a That's the Czech Repulic for you. issues fixed. "Getting fixed" couple of years now traditionally meaning he did the actual fixing, been placed in Berlin, but since Notes being aided by the "Berlin is not a place" applies as aforementioned component well, this year's installment of the Please note that nobody worked specialists with insight into inner sprint took place in Brno. on KNotes. There were plenty of workings and assumptions of the old school sticky notes though. respective code. The previous and Even people without the Because Kevin Ottens likes to draw current maintainers of Akonadi expectional deduction skills of rectangles on white boards and had fun with things so deep down Sherlock Holmes have certainly sticky notes are a natural choice in the guts of the system that not deduced by now that KDE PIM for filling them. There were also a even the author of this article sprints happen in cities that are no lot of notes taken, notably on the would be able to fully understand places but coincidentally contain outcome of the dicussions which them. Those people are way the letters B, tag">R and N. So, without were scheduled by moving notes smarter than him! Additional to further ado, the story about the on the whiteboard. This kind of fixes in the sense of correcting KDE PIM autumn sprint, brought to structured handling of topics is a erroneous behavior this also you by KDE e.V., Red Hat and the noteworthy improvement over included several improvements in letters B, R, and N. some of the previous sprints and
6 the area of run time performance. the curious to contributors. This year we experimented with Progress something: the Akademy-fr track was the most technical part of the One of the fun aspects of a sprint Capitole du Libre. And several KDE is, aside from the obvious presentations were entered in awesomeness of hanging out with other, more user-oriented tracks great people, is to ponder and (such as Office and Multimedia). prototype potential progressive KDE was everywhere, even in the programming pieces. Mark Gaiser, 3D-printers stand that printed Michael Bohlender and Thomas some 3D KDE logos. Pfeiffer had a closer look at how to get beyond quaint, dare I say The Akademy-fr track was boring, user interfaces and enable dedicated to quality, with QtQuick based applications to tap presentations like bugs and quality into the power provided by KDE reports, architecture and code PIM libaries. quality in Skrooge, translations quality. We also had presentations Secrets about C++11 new features, Razor-qt and LXDE Fusion. In the Capitole Naturally the presence of the KDE du Libre presentations, we showed Barcelona Squad made secrecy a Krita, KDEnlive, Tomahawk-player, paramount objective. Not only do and Kolab. We also had 2 big (and we need to keep their identities full of people) workshops about confidently, a job made easy by QtQuick2 and "Draw me a dragon several Squad members disgusing with Krita". Every presentation themselves with enormous fake was recorded and are available (in beards, we are bound by oath, French) at under threat of draconian http://2013.capitoledulibre.org/conf punishment, to not talk about erences. The KDE stand did not rocket science like advances in PIM draw as many visitors as in past data search. Well, rocket science years, maybe because the event doesn't even cut it, more likely on has doubled its size and there the level of warp science! were many more things to see.
The Akademy-fr 2013 was a Trade Shows and success; thank you to everyone Community Events who contributed to its success. People came to participate from AKADEMY-FR everywhere in France, and even TOULOUSE from foreign countries. People from Toulouse helped a lot in 23-24 November 2013 managing the event for KDE. Also a special thanks to Toulibre, the Akademy-fr 2013 took place in LUG that managed the Capitole du Toulouse like the 2 previous Libre 2013 event. I have already Akademy-fr meetings. It is one of sent a message to the French KDE the most important meetings of event mailing list for the 2014 KDE contributors in France. As in organization. The main questions previous years, it was hosted by now are—Will it take place again the Capitole du Libre, a big event in Toulouse? And who will help in that targets all kinds of people managing it? interested in open software, from
7 Sysadmin Report Finances for 2013
INCOME (€): Created 27 contributor accounts Akademy: 78,787 Disabled 2 contributor accounts Donations: 40,965 Corporate Supporters: 36,379 Created 2 kdemail.net aliases Individual Supportive Membership Program: 16,615 Created 4 kde.org aliases Modified 5 kde.org aliases Others: 17,546 Total: 190,292
Disabled 1 kde.org mailing-lists: EXPENSES (€): klink Personnel/administration/office: 49,579 Akademy: 45,764 Sprints: 19,569 Other expenses: 45,394 Total: 160,296
Note: These financial numbers are for information only. The lists do not include all income and expenses and don't constitute an accurate accounting statement.
New Members Financial support
KDE e.V. is happy to welcome If as a company or individual you are interested in providing financial support the following new members: to the KDE community on a continuing basis, please visit the Supporting - Kevin Funk Members page on the KDE e.V. website,
- Alex Merry http://ev.kde.org/getinvolved/supporting-members.php
- Yash Shah
KDE E.V. BOARD Report prepared by: Cornelius Schumacher - President Carl Symons