During this period, I prepared the mock-ups for the activities “10’s complement” and “Grammatical analyze.” Based on my mentor’s reviews the mock-ups were modified further.
The design for other levels of 10’s complement can be found here.
This bonding period is provided so the newcomers can get familiar with mentors and projects. As I’ve contributed for a few months now, I am comfortable with mentors and a little less confident with the project. So I decided to increase my understanding by finding the sub-tasks in other activities I needed to complete 10’s complement and Grammatical analyze. I also contributed to one another issue. Also, during this time, my first activity got merged (Left and Right Click Training which was later renamed as Mouse Click Training).
Current Progress
The first activity is going to be 10’s complement. This activity is divided into three separate sub-activities. The base logic is the same, but the implementation and difficulty of these activities are different. So for a better user experience, the activity is divided in this way. (here)
Level 1: Sub activity 1
In Sub-Activity 1, the user places the 10’s complement of the given number by, first clicking the number card inside the number container (left side pink box), then clicking on the question mark card to which user wishes to replace with.
Currently, the containers and the cards are implemented using dynamic size so that it is adaptable to different screen sizes.
Challenges faced and learnings
When I first started, I struggled with “what to do” and “how to do”, and now I struggle with “how to do” (mostly). I think earlier, I didn’t know where to find the solution to my problem, but during these months of contributing, one thing I’ve learned is that GCompris is a massive project with so many activities in it. Anything we are trying to do is already done in some way or the other we just have to find out “where”.
While implementing the replacing the number card with a question mark card, I was unable to implement this feature. What we are doing is, after the successful replacement of the card, the number card should be gone. In simpler terms, to change the visibility of the number card to “false” when we click on the question mark card. But after a few hours of struggle, it was solved. The solution is the number card is a separate component shown with the help ofDataModel. First, we find the index of the card in the model we wish to change, and then using the “setproperty“ function, we change the visibility property of the component to false on successful replacement.
What’s next?
Implement the next, reload, and okay buttons and make them functional.
Add datasets for all the levels in sub-activity 1.
The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the releases of Plasma Mobile’s updates for May-June 2022, as well as the release of Plasma Mobile Gear ⚙ 22.06.
Shell
Plasma 5.25 was released on June 14 and that brought all the improvements developed from February to May 2022 to the shell.
Task Switcher
Yari changed the task switcher to sort by last app opened, rather than alphabetically.
The bug which showed two app-minimize animations playing when opening the task switcher was fixed.
Aleix ported the task previews to the new KPipewire component.
Action Drawer
Yari Worked on several things to improve the action drawer, the component you see at the top of the screen and that allows you to configure thing like WiFi, battery, airplane mode, etc.
Firstly he added a feature that lets the action drawer display pages. This means that the different options in the action drawer can now accomodate more quick settings. He also added a component that allows for scrolling labels. This means that you can scroll though long text displayed in the action drawer and media player and that is wider than the width of the label. Finally, he worked on adding the ability to pull down the full quick settings panel in one stroke from one corner of the screen (this feature is configurable).
Devin added the capability for the media player in the action drawer to control multiple sources, and Aleix added a screen recording quick setting.
Navigation Bar
Devin added vibrations when buttons on the navigation bar are tapped. Vibrations can be customized in the settings.
Yari added a swipe left/right gesture from the navigation bar to quickly switch apps.
Lockscreen
Devin ported the lockscreen to the kscreenlocker v3 interface, laying the groundwork for supporting passwordless logins. He also fixed lockscreen notification actions not being triggered after unlock.
Homescreen
Devin fixed an issue in which multiple fast sequential flicks did not open the app drawer.
Breeze Style
Devin worked on improving the performance of shadows on buttons and other controls. They were previously disabled due to performance issues on lower-end devices, but are now fast enough to be enabled.
Weather
Settings dialogs were ported to use consistent Kirigami components.
Settings
Devin added settings in the shell settings module to use reduced animations. He also added settings that let you turn off task previews to improve performance on lower-end devices, and fixed issues in the display and colors settings module.
QMLKonsole
Devin reworked the UI for saved commands, moving it from the sidebar to a page and dialog. He also fixed eliding text in the bottom key buttons.
AudioTube
Devin worked on improving the media player UI, and worked on the application header bar.
Kasts
Apart from general bugfixing, Bart worked on the following improvements:
The podcast update routine has been completely overhauled, solving several bugs. It’s now using multithreading, and it will also update existing episode information.
General improvements were made to make sure that the app fits well on small screens in both portrait and landscape modes.
Episode images will now be retrieved from id3v2tag if available.
New episodes will be added to the queue in ascending chronological order (rather than descending) per podcast.
A switch has been introduced to optionally adjust the time left on an episodes based on the current playback rate.
The episode details pages now have a context action to go straight to the list of episodes for that podcast.
It’s now possible to sync with custom GPodder servers (i.e. other than the official gpodder.net instance).
Podcasts can now again be updated even when the sync server is unavailable. This was a bug in previous versions.
Tokodon
Carl work on adding basic support for notifications. Now you can read previous notifications and you can also get native desktop notifications. Aside from that, Carl added initial support for Nextcloud social and implemented social cards to get a preview of links.
Contributing
Want to help with the development of Plasma Mobile? Take Plasma Mobile for a spin! Check out the device support for each distribution and find the version which will work on your phone.
Our documentation gives information on how and where to report issues. Also, consider joining our Matrix channel, and let us know what you would like to work on!
We are living in 2022. And it is now possible to digitally sign a PDF document using libre software. This is a love letter to libre software projects, and also a manual.
For a long time, one of the challenges in using libre software in ‘enterprise’ environments or working with Government documents is that one will eventually be forced to use a proprietary software that isn’t even available for a libre platform like GNU/Linux. A notorious use-case is digitally signing PDF documents.
Recently, Poppler (the free software library for rendering PDF; used by Evince and Okular) and Okular in particular has gained a lot of improvements in displaying digital signature and actually signing a PDF document digitally (see this, this, this, this, this and this). When the main developer Albert asked for feedback on what important functionality would the community like to see incorporated as part this effort; I had asked if it would be possible to use hardware tokens for digital signature. Turns out, poppler uses nss (Network Security Services, a Mozilla project) for managing the certificates, and if the token is enrolled in NSS database, Okular should be able to just use it.
This blog post written a couple of years ago about using hardware token in GNU/Linux is still actively referred by many users. Trying to make the hardware token work with Okular gave me some more insights. With all the other prerequisites (token driver installation etc.) in place, follow these steps to get everything working nicely.
Howto
There are 2 options to manage NSSDB: (i) manually by setting up$HOME/.pki/nssdb, or (ii) use the one automatically created by Firefox if you already use it. Assuming the latter, the nssdb would be located in the default profile directory $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<random.dirname>/ (check for existence of the file pkcs11.txt in that directory to be sure).
Open Okular and go to Settings → Configure backend → PDF and choose/set the correct certificate database path, if not already set by default.
Fig. 1: Okular PDF certificate database configuration.
Start the smart card service (usually auto-started, you won’t have to do this): either pcsc_wd.service (for WatchData keys) or pcscd.service.
Plug in the hardware token.
Open a PDF in Okular. Add digitial signature using menu Tools → Digitally Sign
This should prompt for the hardware token password.
Fig. 2: Digital token password prompt when adding digital sign in the PDF document.
Click & drag a square area where you need to place the signature and choose the certificate. Note that, since Poppler 22.03, it is also possible to insert signature in a designated field.
Fig. 3: Add digital signature by drawing a rectangle.
Signature will be placed on a new PDF file (with suffix -signed) and it will open automatically.
Fig. 4: Digitally signed document.
You can also see the details of the hardware token in PDF backend settings.
Fig. 5: Signature present in hardware token visible on the PDF backend settings.
Thanks to the free software projects & developers who made this possible.
Dear digiKam fans and users,
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
Bundles packaging improvements Qt 5.15 LTS used in Windows and MacOS bundle With this release we take care about upgrading the Qt framework with a LTS version.
The summer sun is here and new apps come with it -- unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case, congratulations! You got past the winter solstice, and it's all longer days and new app releases from here onwards.
LabPlot 2.9.0
New worksheet elements to annotate curve data point and to show images on the worksheet.
LabPlot is KDE's open source and cross-platform data visualization and analysis software. It is accessible to everyone, and Labplot 2.9 adds a bunch of new features, such as new worksheet elements to annotate curve data points and to show images on the worksheet.
You can also now plot the data against multiple and different axes. A new visualization type, box plot provides a quick summary of the basic statistical properties of the data set, and a collection of multiple well-known color maps and a feature that allows for conditional formatting of the data in the spreadsheet let's you obtain insights into the structure of your data and its statistical properties directly in the spreadsheet.
We added Hilbert transform to the set of analysis functions and LabPlot can now import and export more formats, having added MATLAB, SAS, Stata and SPSS to the list.
Haruna is the KDE video player with YouTube integration. This new release has support for global menus, can be configured to pause playback when minimised and save the time position when shutdown. It also adds a "recent files" menu option, and useful actions to load the last file, restart playback and jump to your "watch later" list.
GCompris provides kids with more than 100 fun educational activities.
Our educational activities app, GCompris, has made a number of new releases over the last few months and, among other things, has managed to reduce the space it takes up on disk by 30%. GCompris has also added new voices in Norwegian Nynorsk and Malayalam, and new, updated images makes it look prettier than ever.
You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. It's also available from the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.
Digikam 7.6
Digikam's new Flow View plugin.
DigiKam 7.6 has made their AppImage slicker by using ICU for full Unicode support and Qt 5.15 and libraw.
There's a new Flow View Plugin which uses the masonry layout. Masonry is a grid layout based on columns, but, unlike other grid layouts, it doesn’t have fixed height rows. Basically, Masonry layout optimizes the use of space inside the canvas by reducing any unnecessary gaps. Without this type of layout, certain restrictions are required to maintain the structure of layout, as with the main icon-view in digiKam album window. This kind of layout is used by the Pinterest social network for example.
DigiKam 7.6.0 source code tarball, Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles, macOS Intel package, and Windows 64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.
KStars 3.5.9
KStars
KStars is probably the most feature-rich free astronomy software around and the 3.5.9 release adds some exciting new features.
HiPS (Hierarchical Progressive Surveys) is a technology that provides progressive high resolution images of the sky at different zoom levels. KStars fully supports online HiPS where data is downloaded from online servers and cached to be displayed on the Sky Map.
A new simplified and powerful Mosaic Planner directly integrates in the Sky Map and greatly benefits from HiPS overlay to make your target-framing spot on. Toggle the Mosaic View from the toolbar, and select your equipment and the mosaic configuration. You can also use it as a very simple tool to frame a single 1 x 1 tile.
KStars also adds the ability to refocus after a meridian flip is complete. This is very useful for some optical train setups where the focuser might shift the duration the flip.
KStars can be installed on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.
RKWard 0.7.4
RKWard.
RKWard is KDE's R app for statistics and has improved the first use experience in its latest versions. RKWard devs have done that by reworking the "Welcome to RKWard" page entirely: it now serves as a "dashboard" with some of the most important tasks, including, among other things, several new options for importing data from other programs. Several unnecessary dialogs that used to greet new users have been removed.
Beyond this, almost all plugins now support a preview, helping you see results faster, and to send only intended output to the output window.
The Tellico project, creators of KDE's collection manager app, has released version3.4.4 and mended a bug that stops a nasty potential data loss when using emojis.
Okteta 0.26.9 comes with more translations and fixes that help Okteta remember settings values. Grab Okteta from your distro's Linux package manager, FlatHub, Snapcraft or as a testing Windows build.
KDE's diff tool for comparing files, resolved a major performance regression in handling Windows style line endings in version 1.9.5.
RSIBreak 0.12.15, KDE's wellbeing app that helps prevent repetitive strain injuries from overusing your keyboard and mouse, adds an option to suppress breaks while full-screen windows are visible.
Pre-release betas
Making its way closer to release, isoimagewriter has published a build for Windows.
Plasma 5.25’s first bugfix release came out a few days ago, and the next one is due early next week. Hopefully most of the bugs you folks found will have been fixed! And among those are few 15-minute bugs too.
Occasionally people ask, “Jeez, it feels like you guys are fixing bugs all the time… shouldn’t they all be fixed by now? Why is your software so buggy?” Thing is, that’s the nature of software. There are always more bugs to fix, no matter how long you work at it. And the more people who use it, the more bugs they’ll find. This is universal, for every piece of software. The best metric is not really “number of bugs fixed,” but rather “egregiousness of bugs fixed.” You want to see that the bugs we fix get weirder and more esoteric over time, which indicates that the basics are becoming more reliable. We’re not all the way there yet, but I believe we are making progress!
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 59, down from 65. 0 added, 2 found to be upstream issues, and 4 resolved:
In the Plasma X11 session, the search icon displayed inside search fields throughout Plasma widgets and KWin effects is no longer comically large (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.96)
The “Open With…” dialog that you’ll see in non-sandboxed apps now has a “Get more Apps in Discover…” button, just like the different-looking dialog seen in sandboxed apps (Jakob Rech, Frameworks 5.96):
And yes, before you ask, it’s silly that we have two different “Open With…”dialogs with different appearances and codebases. Unifying them is an active area of work!
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!
I’ve been selected for GSOC this year. My task is to redesign and port the KCMs currently in Qt Widgets to QtQuick/Kirigami
Thanks, Nate and David for agreeing to mentor me.
Why do this ? Before this, I was already working on KCM for setting gamma in KWin. The MR is in work progress because I decided to add these settings option into kscreen’s KCM instead of creating new one which is pending atm.
@samarthraj:kde.org
rajeesh
Install on Linux
Download from Flathub
