Monday mornings, you guessed it, are not a good thing. Especially when it’s all rainy and you get run over by a car. Luckily nothing really happened to me, only a few scratches and a new experience (I’ve never had this Hollywood style “rolling over the hood of the car” thingy happen to me before). Let’s move on to better stuff then 😉 maybe I can even write about KDE related things.
Just now I got the confirmation that KDE will have a booth at the 2nd Ecumenical Church Day which is way in the future – May 2010. More about that later.
What I wanted to talk about… Yesterday, Eckhart moved Attica into kdereview.
We’ve been poking at this nice library for a few days now, and we’re really happy that it’s ready to be used more widely now 😀
Attica is a cool little library that allows us to integrate applications nicely with the web services provided by “Open Collaboration Services” servers. Yay, for the buzzwords there! Actually it sounds more complicated than it is. Can you hear the voices in my head? I can. And that makes me happy 😉 So let me repeat for those not hearing (the voices in my head):
Someone in my head: So you might wonder, what’s that stuff good for anyway???
Me: Well, let’s see what could be done… we have a data engine to provide plasma applets with all that goodness, so it’s possible to let the user know what’s going on around him and with his friends. …
Someone in my head: Wait! You are telling us, you just wrote a facebook clone?
Me: Not exactly. We still have KDE and our users in mind. So imagine, you really like some application that is also on kde-apps.org. And since you use it daily and it’s really cool, you decide to become an fan of the application (come on, just click that button, it doesn’t hurt!). Now the author of your favorite app publishes a newer version. And you get a note right to your desktop, that a newer version is available.
Someone in my head: Ok, that’s like half way social… but…
Me (interrupting rapidly): More goodness comes from the neighbor list. Say you come to Stuttgart for a short visit. And once you go online there, you see, one of your favorite KDE developers is actually in town also. Quite interesting you think and just a click later you have sent a message to meet up. What a nice evening! Or take the event list. Here you get notified, when an event takes place close to your location. Get notified of that developer sprint next door and just drop by to meet all the cool kids. I admit, these examples are still a bit KDE-geeks-are-great centric. But they are just examples and the beginning. More stuff is yet to come. Maybe you have ideas too?
Someone in my head: Me, ideas? Uhmmm… maybe I’ll leave them in the comments…
Ok, enough talking, let’s see some action!
One thing I spent much time on last week, was getting our Get Hot New Stuff implementation knewstuff2.5 ported to use Attica in addition to the classical XML files we used so far. With the help of Jeremy I got something working by now. Yes, it still has many rough edges… Anyway – using Attica gives us some of the features that we wanted to have for a looooong time already. After ripping a lot of things apart, we’re slowly piecing the puzzle back together. Internally we now support rating and adding comments but that needs more GUI work. So today the Hotter New Stuff is server side search. If you like a certain wallpaper or that special script, it will no longer disappear after a while. Have fun watching me, trying to talk to myself here:
Watch it on Blip.tv, download ogg video. (I can’t seem to get it embedded here… giving up now…)