Kai Uwe's Blog

This time we’ll celebrate early!

Date: Friday, 4 December 2015 (correct year this time around)
Time: 19:00
Place: Medocs Cafe am Bismarckplatz, Sofienstraße 7b, 69115 Heidelberg
Who: You! And fellow KDE developers and users
What we’re going to do: Have a few beers, a delicious dinner, talk, have fun, …

Please ping me, if you’re around and planning to come (contact info can be found in the Impressum, or tell kbroulik in #plasma on Freenode), so I can extend the reservation, if needed.

With Plasma 5.4.2 out the door, it’s time to look ahead at what Plasma 5.5 will bring to a Desktop near you. Even though we’ve gone mobile, we won’t neglect traditional Desktops. In the upcoming release, I took care of the little things, as well as bringing back specialized tools that haven’t been a priority for the initial releases.

User Switching done right

I could never comprehend why KRunner was responsible for switching between users – KRunner is for running applications, searching your stuff, and doing Maths. We have a gorgeous lock screen with a neat user switcher, so why not use it? That’s what I did. Continue reading Polish, Polish, Polish, 5.5 Edition

For the second time I had the chance to attend Akademy, this time in cold and rainy La Coruña. It has been a week of interesting talks, good food (except for one Tortilla incident), and hacking.

My personal highlight was obviously the introduction of Plasma Mobile on Saturday, an event that caused the one or other tear of joy. Later that day I gave a talk titled “Qt’s Road to Mobile Domination” (Update: Fixed link) looking back on what has improved with Qt on mobile platforms as well as what we can expect in upcoming releases.

One interesting BOF I attended was about LiMux where two guys from Munich shared their experiences with the Plasma desktop in an enterprise environment and what we could do to ease their eventual transition to Plasma 5 in a a few years, notably: Kiosk support, ie. locking down the UI so the user couldn’t mess it up, for which, at that very day, I wrote a proof of concept for making Plasma config dialogs smarter by automatically disabling elements whose backing config is marked immutable.

KRunner History is Back

Supposedly this was one of the reason I still saw quite a few people running Plasma 4 during the conference but now there’s no more reason not to do the switch! ;) Continue reading Fruits of Akademy