KDE

Fetching APIs with Qt In these past two weeks I’ve been learning how to fetch APIs with Qt and I finally got something working! In this blog post we’re going to create a little application to fetch data from a specific github user. First Steps I’ll ... [More] be using this Kirigami tutorial as a starting point. First we’re going to create two files src/controller.h and src/controller.cpp then add src/controller.cpp to the src/CMakeLists. [Less]

Unfortunately we didn’t get any 15-minute bugs fixed this week, and overall activity was lower than usual. I suspect at least part of the reason is fallout from the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has affected several prominent Ukrainian KDE ... [More] contributors and also cut off Russian contributors from many of their usual internet resources. Some humanitarian aid and media organizations that you can donate to may be found here. Let us all hope for peace, and remain united in our pursuit to build the finest and most humane software. Nevertheless, back in KDE land we did accomplish quite a bit, including a fancy new “Firmware Security” page in Info Center! 15-Minute Bugs Resolved None! Current number of bugs: 81, up from 80. Current list of bugs New Features Skanpage now lets you configure which scanner settings are visible on its scanner options sidebar, in case you regularly use any uncommon or non-default scanner options (Alexander Stippich, Skanpage 22.04) KRunner and other KRunner-powered searches can now convert teaspoons and tablespoons to and from each other and other units (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Frameworks 5.92): Just in case that was something you ever wanted to know Info Center now has a new “Firmware Security” page that provides information about the security of your system’s low-level components (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25): Bugfixes & Performance Improvements In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake’s “slide up/slide down” animation now works (Tiernan Hubble, Yakuake 22.04) Adding tracks to Elisa’s playlist when shuffle mode is being used no longer causes the added tracks to have the wrong names (Martin Seher, Elisa 22.04) When using a session, Kate now correctly saves its list of open documents/tabs when the app is automatically quit by logging out, restarting, or shutting down, so that the next time you open it, it shows that you were working on last time (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04) Dolphin’s context menu is now significantly faster to open when Ark is installed (Kai Uwe Broulik, Ark 22.04) In the Plasma Wayland session, screen sharing/recording/casting in full-screen apps now works (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.3) In the Plasma Wayland session, colors are no longer sometimes weirdly dithered with certain hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.3) The “Help” buttons in Info Center once again work (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.3) In the Plasma Wayland session, the virtual keyboard no longer overlaps half of your vertical panel setup (if you are using such a setup) when it appears (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24.3) When showing seconds in a Digital Clock applet, seconds no longer skip at minute changes (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.3) In the Plasma Wayland session, hitting the Escape key while dragging something now cancels the drag like you would expect (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25) In the Plasma X11 session, rotating a touchscreen no longer leads to touches going to the wrong area of the screen; everything now works as you would expect (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25) Dolphin and Gwenview no longer crash when you drag a file or folder over the top of their Places panels (Someone going by the pseudonym “Snooxx”, Frameworks 5.92) User Interface Improvements Compressing files from Dolphin’s context menu now produces an archive file whose filename is based on the names of the compressed files, not the folder they live in (Méven Car and me: Nate Graham, Ark 22.04) System monitor bar charts no longer erroneously lack spacing between bars (John Fano, Plasma 5.24.3): Applet labels in the System Tray grid view are now vertically aligned such that the first line in multi-line labels always matches other applets even those with 1 or 3 lines (Michail Vourlakos, Plasma 5.24.3): Text in Breeze-styled vertical tabs is now vertically centered in the tabs, rather than awkwardly top-aligned (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.3) Menu items in Breeze-styled GTK apps are now exactly the same height as menus in Qt and KDE apps (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25) KRunner and other KRunner-powered searches now let you spellcheck words in any language with enabled dictionaries, not just the primary one (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25) The quick process view window that you can see by pressing Ctrl+Esc now remembers its size and position (in the X11 session, at least), and gets initially placed according to the specified window placement mode (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.25) …And everything else This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors. How You Can Help If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite! Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation. [Less]

The source for all the tools mentioned in this blog post is available here qml-dap: QML debugger for editors While working on qml-lsp, I took a tangent to write a DAP implementation for QML. This ended up being a very long tangent, but it's worth ... [More] it: being able to debug QML without needing Qt Creator available. The DAP protocol is the debugger equivalent to LSP: it's a cross-editor and cross-language protocol that allows debuggers to implement DAP and get support for a bunch of editors, and allows editors to implement DAP and get support for a bunch of debuggers. In short, this means that you can use qml-dap in combination with a DAP-supporting editor of your choice, and gain access to a debugger. Note that QML DAP doesn't support the entirety of DAP, but supports enough to serve as an improvement over print debugging. More of the protocol will be covered as I improve qml-dap. qml-dbg: QML debugger for the terminal While writing the code necessary for debugging QML programs for qml-dap, I realised that QML had no command line debugger. So, I wrote one, and called it qml-dbg. The output of a sample qml-dbg session is provided here for your browsing: ❯ qml-dbg Hi, welcome to qml-dbg! Type "help" if you want me to explain how you use me. > attach localhost:5050 Connecting to localhost:5050... I connected to the program! Now, you can start debugging it. > b a.qml:13 I set breakpoint #0 The program will pause right before it starts to run that line of code You can disable it with 'breakpoint-disable 0' See active breakpoints with 'breakpoints' > breakpoints Breakpoints: #0 at a.qml:13 > breakpoint-disable 0 Disabled breakpoint 0 > breakpoints Breakpoints: (disabled) #0 at a.qml:13 > breakpoint-enable 0 Enabled breakpoint 0 The program paused! Run 'backtrace' to see a stack trace. > > bt Most recently called function: onClicked in a.qml:13 (file:///home/jblackquill/Scratch/a.qml) > eval btn1.text = "hello debugger!" "hello debugger!" > continue > qml-lint: standalone linting tool If you really liked qml-lsp's lints, then you can now have them standalone on the command-line. ❯ qml-lint a.qml 12:3 - 12:6 a.qml Don't use var in modern JavaScript. Consider using "const" here instead. (var lint) var a = 5 15:2 - 15:14 a.qml Don't use anchors.fill in a RowLayout. Instead, consider using "Layout.fillWidth: true" and "Layout.fillHeight: true" (anchors in layouts lint) anchors.fill: parent Tags: #libre [Less]

Dear digiKam fans and users, After one month of active maintenance and another huge bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.6.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with ... [More] this release. Bundles packaging improvements ICU support in Linux AppImage Bundle Long time ago, the AppImage packaging suffered from an important lack of International Components for Unicode (ICU) support. [Less]

Of the challenges humanity faces in its struggle to power modern-day civilization, energy conservation is one of the more difficult to achieve. But it is also the most worthy of pursuing, as ultimately many of the current sources of energy we depend ... [More] on are finite. That is why reducing the amount of energy we consume is a priority for KDE Eco. All KDE projects are Free Software, and Free Software entails transparency and user autonomy. The first has always provided users the opportunity to inspect and learn from how software runs; today, this transparency has been extended to include software’s energy consumption when in use. The second allows Free Software users to install what they need on the devices they want, bypassing unnecessary and battery-draining spyware and bloatware while extending the lifespan of their hardware. Both combined give KDE Eco and Free Software developers the means to develop energy-saving improvements for applications and frameworks, to continue support for otherwise unsupported devices, and deploy exactly what people want and need. Germany has declared 5 March Energy Conservation Day. Today we are inviting you to join us at KDE Eco! (Image: CC0) Clearly, energy conservation for a small number of software products is not going to make any noticeable difference. But imagine if we start a trend; imagine conserving even small amounts of energy on every app, game, and framework; on hundreds of thousands of programs, running across millions of devices with continuous support. Users will enjoy longer battery lives and lower electricity bills. They can keep using still-functioning hardware, with greater personal savings yet reduced global C02 emissions by avoiding the unnecessary production and shipment of new devices. Most importantly, as a species we will use fewer shared resources while keeping humanity’s digital civilization running. You can be part of that. Germany has declared 5 March Energy Conservation Day, and today we are inviting you to join us. Whether you are a user concerned with the carbon footprint of your computing usage, or a project looking to improve the efficiency of your software, visit our website to find out how to participate in KDE Eco and join us in our chat room to talk live to other members of the project. See you on Energy Conservation Day! Funding Notice The BE4FOSS project was funded by the Federal Environment Agency and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV1), who organize the Tag des Energiesparens (Energy Conservation Day). The funds are made available by resolution of the German Bundestag. The publisher is responsible for the content of this publication. 1 Official BMUV and UBA-Logos are sent only by request at: [email protected] [Less]

Squish GUI Tester 7.0 is the first Squish edition to offer a unique new feature: video capture of test executions to debug and document tests.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2022-09. Reflets coincidentally invites itself in the Ukrainian police cars | Reflets.info Tags: tech, security, iot, ukraine A good example of why such equipment needs to be properly setup and not just thrown ... [More] in. Nice to see they quickly reacted and fixed the situation once the issue was reported. https://reflets.info/articles/reflets-coincidentally-invites-itself-in-the-ukrainian-police-cars I’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever | Cory Doctorow | The Guardian Tags: tech, facebook, gafam Honestly… same here. There’s a chance it might finally collapse at least partly. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/24/ive-been-waiting-15-years-for-facebook-to-die-im-more-hopeful-than-ever Interop 2022: browsers working together to improve the web for developers Tags: tech, browser, web, frontend, css, interoperability Interesting stuff coming especially on the CSS side. https://web.dev/interop-2022/ GitHub - hoppscotch/hoppscotch: 👽 Open source API development ecosystem - https://hoppscotch.io Tags: tech, web, api, tests Nice application for testing APIs. https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch Python Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and races | B. Nikolic Software and Computing Blog Tags: tech, python, multithreading This completes the article about why the GIL doesn’t prevent data races. It explains in a bit more detail how the incrementation was creating the data race. http://www.bnikolic.co.uk/blog/python/2022/02/22/gil-race.html Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be | TypeOfNaN Tags: tech, web, frontend, javascript, solidjs, react Not the first time I bump into an article about that one. Solid.js is definitely getting close to something I might enjoy using (unlike React which I dislike quite a bit). https://typeofnan.dev/solid-js-feels-like-what-i-always-wanted-react-to-be/ 5 things you don’t need Javascript for Tags: tech, web, frontend, css CSS is definitely a rabbit hole full of features. That delays quite a bit the time when you need to use Javascript. https://lexoral.com/blog/you-dont-need-js/ How to make MPAs that are as fast as SPAs | Go Make Things Tags: tech, web, frontend, complexity Interesting set of tips. Indeed that’s a good way to reduce quite a bit the complexity of your application web frontend. Might not be always applicable though. https://gomakethings.com/how-to-make-mpas-that-are-as-fast-as-spas/ Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences) - the sporks space Tags: tech, linux, portability Interesting food for thought at places. In any case clearly highlight the difficulties of delivering application binaries on Linux platforms in a portable way. https://sporks.space/2022/02/27/win32-is-the-stable-linux-userland-abi-and-the-consequences/ VIM - Minimal Setup Explained Tags: tech, vim Couple of interesting tips in that vim setup. Always surprising how much can be achieved with such a small setup. https://www.guckes.net/vim/setup.html Numbers Every Programmer Should Know By Year Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, networking, ssd, performance Oh this is really neat! This is a good way to visualize how it evolved over time, I find the period starting in 2005 especially interesting. https://colin-scott.github.io/personal_website/research/interactive_latency.html How Does Perspective Work in Pictures? | Aaron Hertzmann’s blog Tags: tech, photography, 3d, perspective, vision Very interesting article about perspective. It touches upon human vision, painting, photography and 3D. In the in what we produce is mostly an artistic choice and it gets into interaction with how our brains interpret them. https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/02/28/how-does-perspective-work.html Bye for now! [Less]

For when you are using Feral Interactive’s GameMode and want some UI indication of its use. https://invent.kde.org/sitter/plasma-gamemode

We have been recently talking about the QML to C++ compilation, but this was mostly describing the process of compiling your JavaScript code. Along with it, however, there is another compiler coming in Qt 6.3 - the QML type compiler (or qmltc for ... [More] short), available as a tool in the qtdeclarative repository. This compiler is part of the Qt Quick Compiler technology and, complementing QML script compiler (qmlsc), it aims to look at the QML language from a different angle. In this blog post you should learn about this part of QML and the process of compiling your QML types to C++, no components left aside. [Less]

We are excited to release a new major version of the Squish GUI Tester, the software quality assurance tool chosen by thousands worldwide for cross-platform GUI application test automation.