The KItinerary data extraction engine recently got a command line interface, which can be pointed at any file KItinerary can consume (HTML, PDF, plain text, iCal, Apple Wallet passes, etc) and which then outputs JSON-LD according to the schema.org data model with the information that could be found in there. Adding this has been motivated by two separate goals: Increasing extractor robustness, and easing integration into 3rd party applications.

Robustness

Regarding robustness we have the problem that the problem that the extractor when used in an email application is essentially exposed directly to remotely provided (hostile) content. When running in-process accidentally or intentionally corrupt documents might trigger hangs or crashes of the email application. That’s especially a problem for some of the more complex document types we deal with, such as PDF.

An effective way to mitigate this is moving the dangerous operations to a separate process. This way the host application is not only isolated from possible crashes, it also allows us to sandbox the extractor using tools like Bubblewrap or seccomp, to reduce the impact of possible security issues in the extractor or the underlying parsing libraries.

For users of the KItinerary API, such as the KMail plug-in this is straightforward to use:

KItinerary::ExtractorEngine engine;
engine.setUseSeparateProcess(true);
engine.setData(...);
auto result = engine.extract();

Besides enabling the out-of-process mode, it’s important to feed raw data rather than pre-parsed documents in, otherwise the dangerous part of the process happens in the host application after all.

Integration

Another motivation for having external process for the data extraction is that it provides an easy way to integrate with applications that cannot or do not want to link against KItinerary and its dependencies, or for whom linking would bring in additional complications at this point. The browser integration work is such an example benefiting from this, there we have to deal with unaligned release cycles and two very different technology stacks.

Using the out-of-process extractor of course is not for free. The entire test suite currently needs about 8.5 seconds for extracting almost 600 samples, with out-of-process mode this roughly doubles. Per document that is about 15 and 30 miliseconds respectively, which isn’t all that bad. That is the average over all test samples though, PDFs tend to be more expensive to process than plain text files for example, while the overhead of spawning a new process is largely constant.

Prototyping

But even if the final integration might involve directly linking against the KItinerary stack, the command line interface can be useful for the initial evaluation and for building prototypes. To support this there’s a nightly Flatpak build available in KDE’s Flatpak repo. This is obviously not meant for production deployments, maintained distribution packages based on official releases are better for that. It however allows very fast turnaround times to receive the latest improvements in the extractor engine while still having the convenience of pre-built packages and co-installability.

Trying this is fairly straightforward:

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists kdeapps --from https://distribute.kde.org/kdeapps.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install kdeapps org.kde.kitinerary-extractor

$ cat trainticket.pdf | flatpak run org.kde.kitinerary-extractor
[
    {
        "@context": "http://schema.org",
        "@type": "TrainReservation",
        ...
    }
]

Contribute

As always, sample data donations are of invaluable help with this work! Of particular interest at the moment would be multi-leg Renfe tickets, as well as those with at least one international destination :)

For contributing in other ways than donating test data please see our Phabricator workboard for what’s on the todo list, for coordinating work and for collecting ideas. For questions and suggestions, please feel free to join us on the KDE PIM mailing list or in the #kontact channel on Freenode or Matrix.

I just released version 1.3.0 of SFXR Qt, my Qt port of the SFXR sound effect generator.

There aren't that many new features for end users:

• A new wave form: Triangle.
• A new file format: SFXJ.

The new file format opens the road to adding new features. I have a few ideas in mind, will see how it goes.

Nevertheless, this release brings several under the hood changes:

• Improved error handling so that you get a message dialog when the app cannot load or save a file.
• Unit-tests using Catch2, which I really like.
• Continuous Integration through Travis CI.

Finally, I borrowed Nanonote CMake code for packaging, so deb and rpm packages are available on the release page. Let me know if they work for you.

That's it, hope you enjoy generating fun sound effects!

In my quest to improve the website of KDE, I updated the Plasma Desktop webpage. This is a huge improvement to the old website, which didn’t show any screenshots and didn’t list any Plasma features.

I already teased the improvements I made in the Plasma BoF in Milan to the Akademy.

The redesign got a lot of positive feedback by the Plasma team and after some small modifications the changes landed.

The webpage looks like this now:

Thanks to all the people from the Promo team and vinz who helped me write the text and give me some ideas.

Improving the KDE websites: Junior Jobs

If you want to help improving the web presence of KDE, I regularly add some Junior Job to this Phabricator Workboard. Lots of things need to be updated, so don’t hesitate to propose other changes in the kde-www mailing list.

Discussion: Reddit or Mastodon

See, I told you I’d continue to blog about the cool things that have happened in KDE-land.

On that subject… Kate is now available for free on the Microsoft Store! So far the ratings are quite good. KDE has always aspired to make our apps available to as many users as possible, and getting them on today’s distribution platforms continues that.

For those of you who switched from Windows or macOS, think back to how helpful it was that a bunch of your favorite apps (Firefox, Chrome, VLC, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, etc) were already available on Linux and you already knew how to use them. Getting more of our apps on other platforms is a key part of easing the transition for future generations of switchers.

Beyond that, it’s been a somewhat light week because everybody was off at Akademy planning the future. A lot of really great things got discussed and decided, the results of which should start to trickle into subsequent weeks’ blog posts. So stay tuned!

New Features

• Dolphin now has a “Reset zoom level” feature that returns the view to the default icon size specified in the settings (me: Nate Graham and Shubham, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The Wobbly Windows effect no longer leaves weird trails in certain circumstances (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When clicking the currently selected sort order in Dolphin’s “Sort By” menu, the radio buttons on the bottom no longer both become unchecked (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 19.08.2)
• .docx files stored in Google Drive and accessed with Dolphin or other KDE apps using the kio-gdrive KIOSlave are now opened in the correct app rather than being treated as zip files (David Barchiesi, kio-gdrive 1.2.8)

User Interface Improvements

• When pasting text into a Notes widget, formatting is now stripped out by default, though you can paste with formatting included via the context menu if you want (Luca Carlon, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The KWin Window Behavior KCM received a visual overhaul to make it more modern and consistent-looking (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The KWin Window decoration context menu received a visual overhaul to make it consistent with the Task Manager’s context menu (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Plasma Networks applet now displays indicated any special status (e.g. “network login required” in its tooltip, not just by showing a different icon (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• KSysGuard is now High DPI compatible (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Icons for items on the desktop now have subtle shadows to help make them stand out a bit from the desktop wallpaper (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Kate, KDevelop, and other KTextEditor-based apps now have a keyboard shortcut to switch between vi input mode and normal input mode (Dominik Haumann, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Kate’s symbol viewer is now sorted in ascending order by default (Tore Havn, Kate 19.12.0)
• Gwenview’s settings window sidebar now has all colorful icons, following the new pattern (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 19.12.0):
  

How You Can Help

This is a new section I’m adding to these weekly blog posts, highlighting a new way to get involved every week!

Do you have any web design experience? KDE community members are currently working on redoing the ancient and inconsistent assortment of websites hosted on kde.org, and help is needed! If this sounds like your cup of tea, join the kde-www mailing list and check out the tasks on the Phabricator Workboard.

You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out other ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.

After eight densely packed days Akademy 2019 is over. As always it was very nice to meet everyone again, as well as to meet some people I have been working with online for the first time in real life.

CC-BY Photo by Paul Brown

Talks

There was some interesting feedback for my talks, and overlap with work of others:

• Secure HTTP usage (slides) - my suggestion to encapsulate secure defaults for QNetworkAccessManager (QNAM) in a KF5 class that isn’t bound by as strict backward compatibility requirements as QNAM itself is didn’t seem popular with the Qt community, and started a discussion to instead fix this in QNAM itself, at least for Qt 6. That’s of course the even better solution.
• KPublicTransport (slides) - I mentioned the lack of public transport data coverage especially in India and Asia, which resulted in Bhushan digging up a few Indian GTFS feeds that can probably be added to Navitia to fix that.
• KDE Frameworks on Android (slides) - There’s some overlap with the needs of the Kirogi drone control app that Eike presented, regarding Android support in existing frameworks as well as further things like embedding an interactive map. So even more reasons to address this all properly on the KF5 level.

Akademy Awards

The yearly Akademy awards ceremony provided a very unexpected surprise as I was given this year’s Jury Award. Thanks to David for the nice words, and to everyone for signing the award :)

Akademy Jury Award 2019

Meetings/BoFs

Monday to Friday saw a large number of meetings on a wide range of topics, the BoF wrap-up session videos (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday/Thursday) provide a good overview on those. The below are my key takeaways from some of the sessions I participated in.

KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6)

With Qt 6 on the horizon we need to start looking into what we want to achieve with KF6, beyond just porting to Qt 6 and cleaning up obsolete/deprecated API. We now have a Phabricator workboard to collect and discuss plans and tasks around that, and hopefully we’ll have a sprint in the not too distant future to plan this in more detail. If you have issues with or wishes for KDE Frameworks that might require breaking API or ABI, or otherwise require more invasive changes such as moving functionality between libraries, now is the time to bring this up.

More details: David’s summary

PIM

The most important goal for me here was to get some more collaboration between the Plasma Mobile team and the currently desktop-focused PIM team going, and it looks like we made progress there :)

The move of KContacts and KCalendarCore to KDE Frameworks also got its final go and should be executed next week. The next module to look at is the KDAV protocol library, which ties in with reviewing the KF5 HTTP stack.

More details: Notes, Dan’s KAccounts integration demo

Creating KItinerary Extractor Scripts

I hosted a session on how to create custom extractors for KItinerary in which we looked at the kinds of data we can encounter, the methods and tools we have available for processing this, as well as on how KItinerary Workbench can help with writing and debugging extractors. As a result there were a few new extractor contributions already.

More details: Slides

KDE Frameworks on Android

Aleix had already addressed my top agenda item before the meeting, the F-Droid repository holding the nightly builds from binary factory is synchronized again correctly and should be distributing continuous updates again.

Other topics included where to put the JNI helpers from KDE Itinerary, and how to improve packaging with androiddeployqt for plug-ins with mandatory dependencies.

More details: Notes

KUserFeedback

With all the policy/legal/procedural questions now hopefully sorted out in form of the Telemetry Policy and the Software Privacy Policy we can finally start to deploy the KUserFeedback telemetry and survey system.

More details: Notes

Hacking

Next to all the meetings and discussions there was of course also some time for more hands-on work. My personal highlight is Kai’s work on KDE Itinerary browser integration, it has come a long way since our initial research on this.

We also managed to collect quite some sample data for improving KDE Itinerary, thanks to everyone who donated their data! Some of the immediate results are Daniele’s work on completing our understanding of the barcodes from Trenitalia, as well as initial support for Renfe tickets thanks to Luca.

Thanks

A big thanks to everyone who made this event possible, the Kennys, the local team and everyone else who helped, as well as the sponsors and the KDE e.V.! Akademy is immensely valuable, the above is just a tiny glimpse into the productivity we achieve when having everyone together for a week, not to mention the massive motivational boost we get out of this.

The last week I was in Milan with my wife Aiswarya to attend Akademy 2019, the yearly event of the KDE community. Once again it was a great experience, with lots of interesting conferences and productive BoF sessions (“Birds of a Feather”, a common name for a project meeting during a conference).

On Sunday, we presented our talk “GCompris in Kerala, part 2”. First, Aiswarya told some bits of Free-Software history in Kerala, gave examples of how GCompris is used there, and explained her work to localize the new version of GCompris in Malayalam (the language of this Indian state). Then I made a quick report of what happened in GCompris the last 2 years, and talked about the things to come for our next release.

On Monday, I attended the KDE e.V assembly. On a side note, if you are a KDE contributor, you should probably consider joining KDE e.V. as an active member.

On Tuesday morning, we attended the KDE India BoF, where we discussed why the conf.kde.in conference didn’t happen for 2 years and how we can make sure it will happen next year.

On Tuesday afternoon, we had the GCompris BoF. We discussed about using the KDE Wiki for our documentation instead of self-hosting our own wiki. We also discussed the state of some translations that need to be updated. On that topic, if your language is not yet supported in the latest version of GCompris, maybe you can help us (you can check the translation status on this page). Also during this session, Aiswarya started working on some new options to adapt the speed in some activities to make them usable for people with cognitive or physical difficulties.

On Wednesday morning, we attended the “Wayland user feedback” BoF. I discussed with the plasma team about the biggest issues for using Krita on Wayland, namely tablet support and color management. The team seemed very interested to fix those, so I’ll try to provide useful feedback to help them.

On Wednesday afternoon, it was the “Day trip” to the Lake Como, a great occasion to relax and have fun with old and new friends in a beautiful place.

Congratulations to the team for organizing a great event, and also big thanks to KDE e.V. for providing travel support.

“Who are you people?”

That’s what the woman selling the ferry tickets at Varenna asked me once she realized I speaked Italian. She was definitely not used to a group of ~80 people wearing a blue badge. Another woman who was selling stuff on the street asked me if we were a school.

It’s been an amazing week and a very productive Akademy. A lot has been discussed and a lot has been decided. On my side, I’ve hosted a Dolphin BoF where we discussed both boring things (e.g. where to send bugzilla notification mails) as well as the awesome new features we are getting into Dolphin. Alexander talked about the status of the KIO Fuse project, while Méven talked about his work on the kioslave for the recently used files.

On the coding side, I wish I could have done more, but I lost a lot of times fighting with Google bureaucracy which was required to create a new API key for KIO GDrive. We need to urgently sort this out because it is blocking a working Google support in Kontact. Despite that, I managed to write a simple PoC of KUserFeedback usage in Dolphin. KUserFeedback is very easy to use if you just want the basic reportings (OS version, Qt version, and so on.). Hopefully it won’t be too hard to also get more interesting information, such as which are the features that our users use the most.

And finally, a big thanks goes to the Akademy team and the local team for the organization of the event. See you next year!

I attended my first ever Akademy! The event was held at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy this year. And the experience was splendid. During the 2 day conference, I had the opportunity to talk at the Student Showcase, where all of the SoC students presented their work to the community. There were about 8 students, and everyone gave a good briefing on their project.

My project this summer was with Kdenlive, the open source non linear professional video editor. I proposed to revamp one of the frequently used tools in the editor, called the Titler tool, which is used to create title clips. Title clips are video clips that contain text and/or images that are composited or appended to your video (eg: subtitles). The problem with the titler tool as it is, is that it uses QGraphicsView to describe a title clip and QGraphicsView was deprecated since the release of Qt5. This obviously leads to problems - upstream bugs crawling affecting the functionality of the tool and an overall degradation in the ease of maintenance of the codebase. Moreover, adding new features to the existing code base was no easy task and therefore, a complete revamp was something in sights of the developer community in Kdenlive for a long time now. I proposed to rework on the backend for the period of GSoC replacing the use of XML with QML and use a new rendering backend with QQuickRenderControl, along with a new MLT module to handle the QML frames. I was able to cover most of the proposed work, I seek to continue working on it and finish evolving the titler tool.

The folks from Kdenlive have always been very warm and helpful especially with the whole learning curve (which definitely was steep) and working with the community so far has been great, I’ve learned a lot from the experienced developers in Kdenlive and from the Kdenlive community. I seek to continue working with the Kdenlive team and KDE to continue making Kdenlive a great tool to use and a great community to be a part of.

All in all, Akademy was an unforgettable experience, I met a lot of brilliant people from the KDE community in person and the other SoC students from other parts of the world. I’m extremely thankful to the KDE community for presenting us, students, with such a fine opportunity and a platform to work and talk on our projects. Kudos to the Akademy Team for orchestrating such an event!

Here’s my GSoC Work Report: https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2019/StatusReports/AkhilKGangadharan

Our Windows Store submission succeeded, we are now officially in the store.

Try out how the Kate text editor performs on Windows for your personal workflow.

If you see issues and want to help out, contributions are welcome on our GitLab instance.

Our Windows team is small, any help is very welcome! Thanks again to all the people that made it possible to use Kate nicely on Windows.

Since a few years Kate is working well on Windows. You can grab fresh installers since then from our download page.

But the visibility of it was very low for Windows users.

Already last year the plan was made to increase the visibility of KDE applications by getting them into the official Windows Store.

Like always, Akademy is a great chance to get the last bits ironed out and the stuff done!

Now, thanks to the help of Hannah von Reth and others, we finally got Kate submitted to the Windows Store!

The submission still needs to be processed by Microsoft, stay tuned when our nifty editor will really be available there for download!

Thanks to all people that contributed to this!

The OpenForum Academy held its second 2019 workshop in Brussels this week. OpenForum Academy is a European-based independent think tank which explains the merits of openness in computing to policy makers, industry and communities across Europe. This workshop series aims at being a forum for practitioners, academics and policy makers to collaborate on various topics of openness and freedom. It is organized by OpenForum Europe, enabling it to bridge between the abstract academic world and policy discussions at the European Commissions. We set out to explore focus topics to answer current challenges to openness that the academy will develop insights and recommendations for. These topics will shape the work of OpenForum Academy for the near future.