COMMUNITY REPORT
3RD QUARTER 2014 | ISSUE 29
WELCOME MESSAGE
Annual General Meetings of KDE e.V. for the treasurer position a few Lydia Pintscher has been part of the are always important since it's the months earlier and Aleix was newly KDE e.V. board of directors since 2011 time of the year all the members of elected. and was vice-president since last the association get together for a day year. The board is confident that with to discuss the status and future her in the president position we have direction of KDE e.V.. both the continuity all organizations After short deliberation the new need but also the new blood and board decided that Lydia would be ideas to make sure KDE e.V. the new president, Marta would continues to flourish. This year's AGM was especially continue as treasurer, Aleix would be significant since president Cornelius Vice-President and Albert and Schumacher stepped down. Three of Pradeepto would continue as board the five board positions were up for members. Thanks Cornelius! Thanks Lydia! election. After the election the new Thanks Marta! Thanks Aleix! board would choose a new president among the board members. Cornelius Schumacher was part of the board for nine years, four as treasurer and five as president. He Lydia Pintscher, Marta Rybczyńska has been a cornerstone in the and Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez were elected shaping of the successful to the open positions. Lydia was re- organization KDE e.V. is today and elected after her first 3-year term, the board wants to thank him for his Albert Astals Cid Marta was re-confirmed after she work and continued devotion to such for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors had volunteered to fill in temporarily an important role.
CONTENTS Welcome Message ...... 1 Featured Article: The Visual Design Group ...... 2 – 4 Supported Member Activities ...... 5 - 8 New Members, Financial Report and KDE e.V. Board ...... 9 Featured Article THE VISUAL DESIGN GROUP
By Jens Reuterberg, Thomas Pfeiffer and Andrew Lake After a while of regular contribution, we usually invite new members to communicate with the “old hats” The beginnings of the KDE Visual Design Group more closely. That way, a kind of “core group” has formed over time (which is as much in flux as the The KDE Visual Design Group started in January 2014 general community), which currently consists of nine as a way to improve the visual design of KDE projects people from different backgrounds, each with a bit of with a specific focus on the Plasma Desktop focus in a certain area: Environment. We have our “founding father” Jens Reuterberg, who At the time the Plasma Desktop Environment was comes mainly from illustration and sees as his job to going through the final leg of a transition from 4.x to make sure that if things go well, all those who Plasma 5 and the visuals, the desktop concept and contributed to them get the credit they deserve, but if the design goals were all in need of a touch-up. The things go badly, he takes the blame. choice was to try to open up design work both as a counter action to perceived “design ivory towers” We have Andrew Lake, an aerospace engineer with a where a group of designers self-isolate themselves penchant for design, who cares a lot about the details, and the work in progress and as a way to bring the which is why he was the driving force behind the idea of design into a better place. A place where it design of the Breeze Plasma-, Widget- and Window can be not only debated openly and constructively Decoration themes and also did most of the work on within a community, but where members of the the visual design part of the KDE Human Interface community feel invited to participate as equals. Where Guidelines. Andrew also knows how to code, which he the goal should be to have individual members feel demonstrated by creating the media player strengthened and empowered by the work as well as Banagarang. learning about design along the way. To Open-Source design. We have Uri Herrera, a graphics designer who specializes on icon design and has created the Breeze icon theme almost single-handedly.
Who we are and how we work Then there is Thomas Pfeiffer, a psychologist who specialized in human-computer interaction and now One of the defining attributes of the VDG is that in the coordinates everything that has to do with usability spirit of Free Software, literally everyone can within the VDG and KDE at large, trying to keep contribute to our work. In contrast to programming, everything consistent and everyone working towards one does not need to learn a new language in order the same goals. to contribute to design. While practical design experience and/or a formal design education, along The other two members of the usability team within with experience with using applications like Inkscape, the VDG are both psychologists as well: Heiko Tietze, is certainly helpful, we made sure that the barrier of who did most of the interaction part of the HIG and entrance into the VDG is almost zero. brings deep knowledge of user research methods such as surveys to the table, and Björn Balazs, who Even people who are not comfortable using tools to has been contributing to KDE probably longer than visualize design ideas can still contribute by providing the rest of us combined and especially provides us constructive textual feedback to other people’s with strategic and methodical guidance. mockups. Then we have Andres Silva, a designer who took it This is also the reason why the membership of the upon himself to revolutionize the System Settings VDG is in constant flux: People start contributing, design. The newest members of the “core gang” are some become regular contributors over time, then Philipp Stefan, a biologist who dives deep into maybe they have to reduce their contributions a bit application user interface design and makes sure we due to reduced time availability, only to pick up their don’t live in an ivory tower, by hanging out and previous contribution level again when other things talking with the developers on IRC; Andreas K. who have settled. regularly designs icons by request from application
2 developers and engages with the rest of the VDG on t the forum very actively; and Ken Vermette, a web the availability and transparency of design work designer and -developer who is the man behind the within KDE and Plasma. Breeze cursor theme and likes to explore revolutionary user interface concepts such as Dynamic Window Decorations. We have reworked and revamped the UI controls for Plasmoids and worked on a new interaction method for the System Settings combined with a usability Accomplishments during 2014 survey to reorganize the System Settings’ current layout. During the one year the Visual Design Group have been active, our work has amongst other things been With the support of User Prompt, led by Björn Balazs, the Breeze Desktop experience, including the Plasma several usability surveys and icon recognition studies theme, the more spacious, typographically correct have been conducted to improve, refine and test our widget theme (which was implemented by Hugo work at all levels, in order to ensure a solid balance Pereira of Oxygen fame), as well as the Breeze icon between usability and aesthetic goals. and cursor themes with their goal to be a successor to Oxygen as a professional, easily understood as Applications like Plasma Media Center, Calamares, well as aesthetically pleasing set. We created a new Krita, Labplot, Kmymoney, Koko and Jungle have splash and login theme to minimize the friction been given updates, touch-ups and redesigns within between login and desktop and to complete the set of the Visual Design Group and several more are in the Breeze design we redesigned the window decorations pipeline for 2015. and created a new color theme. Finally we have tried to support the work of the As part of our goal of a more open and transparent developers by clearing up design and usability bugs. design workflow we updated the Human Interface Guidelines using user centered design studies What’s Next conducted at Akademy 2014 to improve the documents through reorganization and restructuring. We’ll be spending more time applying the updated We added new application and plasmoid design HIG content to new and existing application designs, guidelines, icon and typography guidelines, search plasmoid designs, and desktop configuration design, and filter guidelines and combined with the updated we will continue fleshing out the Breeze icon theme, guidelines for UI controls and the mockup toolkit KDE refine the Breeze widget style and window decoration, can now boast with one of the best Human Interface create a Breeze Compact widget style, and build a Guidelines available and with it we greatly increase robust library of themed wallpapers. We will explore new interaction methods like dynamic window
3 decorations, explore new desktop layout designs, support ongoing design efforts (Plasma Media Center, Muon Discover, Jungle, Bangarang) and support building a collection of sample HIG layout patterns using Qt and KDE Frameworks.
We also want to get a larger section of graphics designers involved in the promo work as the need for visuals, photos and layout work increases and there is an untapped potential lying within the community.
Our biggest effort for the future will most probably be trying to get the debate going about what the vision and goals of Plasma and KDE are. To try to find a common goal for all of us to work toward in some way without being constricting but gaining a sense of shared focus.
Further we plan on broadening the scope of the Visual Design Group, considering that a large set of what we do is Interaction Design, even future-proofing ideas and concepts about the desktop. To do that we need to evaluate the way we work and strive onwards trying to make the Visual Design Group even more inclusive, more open and more accessible to all no matter what the skill level.
4 SUPPORTED MEMBER ACTIVITIES
Developer Sprints
KDE FRAMEWORKS SPRINT
BARCELONA, SPAIN
24-28 April 2014
The month of April, 2014; the Blue Systems Office in Barcelona served as a host to the Frameworks Team, to piece together the final bits and pieces after two years of persistent hard work for the shift to KDE Frameworks 5. contributions from application RANDA MEETINGS 2014 Aurélien Gâteau worked along with developers, elevated number of David Faure on the tarball scripts automated tests and peer reviews RANDA, SWITZERAND and lastly, a finer grained feature for the releases to make releases 9-15 August 2014 possible without much overhead. delivery. Aurélien also tackled translation The Randa Meetings, brought Aleix Pol worked primarily on support and handled KApidox for together KDE contributors once CMake, especially the modified generating API documentation for again to create wonders amidst install variables. KF5 on api.kde.org and integrated the backdrop of the Switzerland the switch to the Jinja2 template from the 9th to the 15th of August, Alex Fiestas and Kai worked on engine hereby facilitating 2014. Solid, added QML support and generation of an up-to-date list of designed the new asynchronous Frameworks on the landing page Two GSoC students working for power management API. with Frameworks 5 as the default. KDE Edu on Marble got together with their mentors for the first The week ordained as the Alex Merry dealt with the failure of time. Developers of Rocs, Kig, Frameworks Sprint was a very a few KItemModels unit tests, fixed Artikulate, KStars, GCompris significant stepping stone leading the issues and also worked on the represented the KDE Edu to the successful release of install paths, meta data files and community in Randa. Frameworks 5. the Advanced Git tutorial. Bruno Coudoin along with other Pertaining to the KDE Frameworks This sprint happened in Q2 but the report developers ported more than 140 Release Cycle, the decision of was missing from previous Quarterly so activities in GCompris to Qt and doing away with bugfix releases to we added it to this one. KDE technologies. He also did live pave way for monthly feature releases was made with a viewpoint to facilitating a faster turnaround of new features.
Kévin Ottens acted as the primary task manager and the driving force behind getting the work done in an orderly manner and highlighted a few processes for monthly releases for the team such as better self-testimonial promotion via framework developers, more frequent
Martin Klapetek (CC-BY-SA)
5 user testing with kids for the same. LAKADEMY 2014 On the 2nd day, Sandro Andrade took an introductory course on Qt KMyMoney was ported to KF5 SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL focused on helping the newcomers during Randa and the Windows in the audience learn to develop 27-30 August 2014 port was also tackled. cross-platform applications via Qt. Lakademy, the Latin America KDE Gwenview, Kate, KDevelop and Summit, took place at University of The last two days included Jungle were among the other Sao Paulo in Southeast Brazil from numerous hacking sessions and a applications that were also 27th to 30th of August, 2014. BoF on KDE Promo. During the successfully ported. hacking sessions; Bovo was ported After the first Brazilian KDE Summit to KF5, Filipe started porting Tyson Tan created a Randa Konqi called Akademy-Br in 2010; after Cantor to KF5 and created a meta- especially for the meetup with a seeing the people assembled at package for KF5 in Mageia, white star and an Edelweiss in the Summit dedicatedly preaching Boaglio and Sandro developed a hand as on the flag of Randa. KDE in their respective circles in GUI front-end for openmsx Universities and Companies; the emulator. Amarok and the KDE Multimedia impact of such efforts became Team worked on the bug triage visible and thereafter the first The KDE promo BoF saw while solving more than 200 bugs, LaKademy was held in South discussions on development of polishing their handbook and Brazil in 2012. promotion material, webinars, Phonon. promo via social networking and This was the second stint of financial aspects of it. The GStreamer Phonon backend Lakademy with KDE talks, Qt was released and KMix the KDE introductory sessions and The details for the next Lakademy Mixer Application got boosted contribution sprints spread to be organised in the first half of ahead. throughout the four days of the 2015 were also discussed. event. The future plans for Kdenlive were Viviane, Wagner and Adriana discussed with Till Theato, Simon The first day included talks by produced Konqi and Lakademy Eugster and Vincent Pinon and Lamarque – on Eduroam and wallpapers in two days along with Vincent’s wife Lucie Pinon who Plasma Network Management; a Lakademy commemorative used Kdenlive professionally was Rafael Gomes – on KDE SysAdmin; KSplash theme. interviewed and her user inputs Ronny Yabar – on KDE Connect served as good feedback. Aracele, Camila and Bianca and Filipe Saraiva on Qt and KDE worked on techbase translation applications on Android with A new edition of KDE Guide was which grew from 18% to 24%. worked upon in Randa and various special focus on GCompris. smaller teams and single developers also worked on their respective projects.
The Gluon group worked on developing a way of creating and playing games, the KF5 port and discussed future plans. QMLWeb was worked upon by Anton Kreuzkamp working hard to improve the code and connect with new people.
Randa celebrated the enthusiasm and spirit of KDE to the fullest and saw wonderful buzzing minds coming together and collaborating and pushing KDE farther ahead to greater heights.
6 LaKademy ended with a bang in Sascha suggests distributed GCompris works both on desktop the form of beer, pizzas, lightning production and processing via and mobile platforms, and is a talks and KDE keyrings from 3D networks disentangled from the happy fit in the KDE Edu printers. central units as being an answer to community. the problem. X-Lab, run by Sasha works on building alternative Albert Astals Cid talked about infrastructures for achieving reformatory objective AKADEMY 2014 technological advancements measurements for quality in KDE inhibited by current legislations; software and about anonymous BRNO, CZECH REPUBLIC GNURadio being one of the biggest user usage pattern tracking 6-12 September 2014 examples of the efforts. which’ll help in getting better usage feedback. Akademy 2014 held at Brno, His advice of permitting distributed Czech Republic; the perfect place methods while laying the Cornelius Schumacher talked for people to get together and foundation of societies, about KDE Frameworks and the celebrate the spirit of KDE; saw communities or governments website inqlude.org offering Qt many changes and transformatory stayed in the minds of the library archives for Qt developers. decisions made in the week from audience. Daniel Vrátil talked about Akonadi, the 6th to the 12th of September; the shift from Nepomuk to Baloo, symbolizing truly the growth and After the keynote, Alex Fiestas and the newest features in evolution of KDE, heading towards started up the fast tracks by Akonadi such as Remote Search, unending progress. addressing the question, “Why do we do what we do?” and talked Tag storage and performance The mornings consisted of single about his struggles, his journey optimizations for large folders and track talks, with two tracks in the with software development in his emails. afternoon and 10 minute fast track startup, the way he got started Martin Gräßlin talked about the presentations filling up the with KDE, became the maintainer architecture adjustments in KWin, schedules. of Solid, organized sprints and became a proud member of KDE. with rendering and input handled On the first day; September 6th, His answer to the question was, by Weston. 2014; the keynote speaker Sascha “KDE gave me just what I was Sune Vuorela talked about using Meinrath talked about the crises in looking for”. KDE Frameworks in a commercial democracies which isn’t in tandem application called Angelstow and with societal and industrial Bruno Coudoin talked about they’ve released a QDataCube progress leading to acceptance of GCompris, which was distributed library offering different views on products harming our privacy. successfully in commercial Windows channels, now turning a item models as a contribution to proud 14. Now ported to QtQuick, the community.
Akshay Ratan, Kevin Funk, Bhushan Shah all talked about their GSoC projects on Plasma Media Center and KDevelop.
Ivan Čukić gave a workshop about C++ idioms and David talked about porting to Frameworks 5 while Sebastian Kugler talked about the journey of Plasma 5 coming into existence.
Day 2 kickstarted with a keynote by Cornelius Schumacher sharing his entire journey with KDE and
7 how it helped him become a themed talk and expounded on a and love for KDE. better person. few processes for designers. The Akademy Awards were Cornelius stated the three main Jonathan Riddell gave an inspiring presented at the end of the second reasons behind KDE being such a talk about his association with day with Jean-Baptiste Mardelle great environment for growth were KDE. winning the Application Award, Freedom, Common Goals and Fun. Michael Pyne winning the Non- Vishesh Handa and Alex Fiestas application Award, Ben Cooksley talked about their application winning the Jury Award and the He defines a new goal for KDE as Jungle, an intelligent video player. organizer award to Daniel Vrátil giving people access to great and the entire Akademy 2014 technology; bringing our ambitions Jan Kundrát spoke about usage of team. and KDE to the people. the Gerrit Code Review Tool in KDE via the XIFI project. The following days included Kévin Ottens talked about hacker numerous BoF sessions discussing culture and software Aleix Pol talked about work on Solid, Plasma Media Center, craftsmanship. Alex Fiestas talked KDE for various mobile platforms Inqlude, UI design, Frameworks on about KDE Connect, Kai Uwe and feels that the way forward the first day; Accessibility, Release Broulik about integrating KDE apps now is with Android and about Team, User Information Reporting, with Android/IOS devices and Jos work being done on KDevelop5. KDE Application Websites, about dealing with people “Away KDevelop and share-like-connect From the Keyboard”. Fredrik Gladhorn talked about in the remaining days. accessibility issues and fixes in Björn Balazs talked about usability KDE for blind people. Amidst the chilly backdrop of in KDE and Albert Astals talked Brno, the week comprising of about the release management Kévin Ottens discussed and Akademy 2014 lived up to all the processes. pointed out some of the problems hopes and wishes of the attendees hampering the KDE community as and provided them with much Andrew Lake from the Visual of now; while suggesting agile more; a rejuvenated enthusiasm to Design Group talked about methods as a solution for them. keep on contributing and loving community building and and using KDE. highlighted his approach for a The sponsor presentations took good design production in groups place including Blue Systems and also shared a multi-year represented by Jonathan Riddell, roadmap for building up the Digia by Tejo, RedHat, KDAB, Open design community. Invention Network, SUSE represented by Bruno Friedman, Jens Reuterberg and Thomas ownCloud by Frank Karlitschek, Pfeiffer continued on the same Froglogic, Google and BasysKom, subject in the form of a zombie all showing their unending support
Martin Holec (CC BY 4.0)
8 Sysadmin Report Finances for Q3 2014
We have decided to stop including financial information in KDE e.V. Quarterly Created 34 contributor accounts reports, including it only in the Annual report. Disabled 2 contributor accounts
Created 1 kdemail.net aliases The financial information given by Quarterly reports is often misleading due Created 14 kde.org aliases to how KDE e.V. operates, getting sponsorships deals and fundraisers at Modified 2 kde.org aliases Disabled 1 kde.org aliases different times of the year every year, having Akademy in different quarters every year, getting money before or after events the money is for, etc. Created 5 kde.org mailing-lists: api-comments kde-gardening lakademy-attendees This makes having the financial information in KDE e.V. Quarterly reports not kde-at very useful since you can never compare one quarter to the other. funq-devel
Disabled 5 kde.org mailing-lists: owncloud For that reason we have decided to release KDE e.V. financial information kde-i18n-fry once per year, so numbers make more sense and are properly comparable bugsquad-triage between years. nepomuk-bugs konq-e
KDE e.V. Board of Directors
New Members Financial Support
KDE e.V. is happy to welcome the following new members: - Devaja Shah If as a company or individual you are interested in providing financial support - Franklin Weng to the KDE community on a continuing basis, please visit the Supporting - Michael Bohlender Members page on the KDE e.V. website, - Pau Garcia i Quiles http://ev.kde.org/getinvolved/supporting-members.php - Sven Brauch - Victor Blázquez
Report prepared by: KDE E.V. BOARD Albert Astals Cid Lydia Pintscher - President Devaja Shah