Introducing KIO AFC

A KIO worker for accessing iOS devices through the Apple File Conduit service.

Dolphin file manager showing the directory contents of an iPhone. Folders include "Apps", "Books", "DCIM" (Camera), "Documents", "Downloads", and 8 more.
Dolphin browsing the contents of an attached iPhone

While there have been several projects like this for both KDE 4 and Frameworks 5, this one has been written on top of the latest KIO classes and will be officially part of the next KDE Gear release. It is now part of the kio-extras module, which also houses the Android counterpart for transferring files over the MTP protocol.

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Performance Musings

Sometimes while using my computer I notice random slowness when launching a certain application or some feature that just doesn’t run very well. That’s always reason enough for me to take a deeper look.

My tool of choice for analyzing performance issues is Hotspot, KDAB’s excellent perf visualizer. It comes with an easy to use GUI for browsing the results collected by it. Particularly its flame graph lets you quickly detect, well, hotspots during execution. Just launch an application through Hotspot or attach it to a running one and look at the graphs. Depending on your system configuration you might need to adjust the perf_event_paranoid kernel setting in order for it to inspect other processes.

Hotspot window showing a “flame graph” of Spectacle’s startup sequence, with a big chunk occupied by the “kImageAnnotator” constructor.
Found an obvious issue in Spectacle’s startup sequence
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