There reports are targeting the most experienced Latte users that use different layouts and work frequently with the hidden but important Layouts Editor. In that case you may have noticed a message dialog that is appearing when opening the Layouts Editor when one or more layouts are broken.

- settings window in v0.9 -

To access these new Reports for Layouts you can use the settings dialog menu and more specific File → Screens and Layout → Information

Screens Report is produced from ~/.config/lattedockrc file and as you can see in the relevant screenshot provides screen ids and names, which screens are active, which one is the primary or secondary and which screen has no docks/panels assigned in the system and can be safely removed










On the other hand Layout Information Report provides dock/panel ids, which screen and edge they are assigned at, if they are currently active or not, what are the systray ids and if there are any orphan systrays/containments that can be safely removed when this layout is not active. At the end of the dialog there is an errors section that informs about the layout healthiness. If the layout is broken or is considered suspicious for instability (e.g. when there are different applets that use the same id  even though they should not) then the relevant errors and information appear.

First I want to thank the great Chris Raven that approached me through reddit /u/Magentium and helped me upload the technical documentation in techbase.kde.org ! Very important job and took off my shoulders a big burden.

So if you are a developer and you are interested to make your qml plasma applet to work nice with Latte or you want to provide your own majestic Latte Indicator through kde store then you can now find all the needed information.

- Latte Dock at techbase.kde.org -

For those that have missed it in the past all Latte user documentation has moved in the kde userbase website. I know that some of the information might be outdated but nonetheless as a community we can all help.

- Latte Dock at userbase.kde.org -

• Tomorrow OR on Friday: v0.9 first Beta release [tagged v0.8.97], bugs / translation strings fixes  and improvements for ten days
• End July 2019: v0.9 will be released officially as the new Latte stable version

1. As you may noticed plenty new settings are added in v0.9 and bugs can exist when combining options
2. Even though the kde localization teams are checking out the translation strings almost daily and I THANK THEM for this!! We are humans and translation strings may be possible to improve
3. For complicated settings I use tooltips in order to describe them better. If you find such option that does not have any tooltip OR its tooltip text can be explained more or be simplified feel free to report it (I am not a native english speaker)

Donations

You can find Latte at Liberapay if you want to support,    

or you can split your donation between my active projects in kde store.

• Latte Dock 
• Latte Spacer
• Latte Separator 
• Window Title Applet
• Window Buttons Applet
• Window AppMenu Applet
• Unity Indicator
• DashToPanel Indicator 

After some problems were encountered in Kaidan 0.4.1, we tried to fix the most urgent bugs.

Changelog

• Fix SSL problems for AppImage (lnj)
• Fix connection problems (lnj)
• Keep QXmpp v0.8.3 compatibility (lnj)

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz)
• Linux AppImage (x64)
• Windows (x64)
• macOS (x64)
• Android (armv7) (experimental!)
• Ubuntu Touch (armv7) (experimental!)
• Flatpak builds are only available as nightlies: Installing the Kaidan Flatpak

Have you ever heard Continuity, the solution of Apple which provides one seamless experience between your iPhone and your Mac?

You may be surprised, “Woohoo, it’s amazing but I use my OnePlus along with my Mac.” With my GSoC 2019 project, you can connect your Mac and your Android phone with KDE Connect!

And you can even connect your Mac with your Linux PC or Windows PC (Thanks to Piyush, he is working on optimizing experience of KDE Connect on Windows).

Installation instruction

1. You can download KDE Connect Nightly Build for macOS from KDE Binary Factory: https://binary-factory.kde.org/view/MacOS/job/kdeconnect-kde_Nightly_macos/. But notice that it’s not yet a stable version, and it requires that you have permission to run application from non-certificated developer. We’ll release a stable one next month on August.

2. Otherwise you can build your own version. Please follow the instructions on KDE Connect Wiki. If you’re using macOS 10.13, MacOS X 10.12 or below, we recommend that you build your own KDE Connect because our Binary Factory are building applications for only macOS 10.14 or above.

You’ll finally get a DMG image file in both 2 ways.

Just click on it, mount it and drap kdeconnect-indicator into Applications folder.

Open kdeconnect-indicator and your magic journey with KDE Connect for macOS begins!

Use

After installation, you can see an icon of kdeconnect-indicator in the Launchpad.

Click it to open. If everything is ok, you will see an KDE Connect icon in your system tray.

Click the icon -> Configure to open configuration window. Here you can see discovered devices and paired devices.

You can enable or disable functions in this window.

Currently, you can do these from your Android phone:

• Run predefined commands on your Mac from connected devices.
• Check your phones battery level from the desktop
• Ring your phone to help finding it
• Share files and links between devices
• Control the volume of your Mac from the phone
• Keep your Mac awake when your phone is connected
• Receive your phone notifications on your desktop computer (this function is achieved but not yet delivered, you can follow another article to enable it manually)

I’m trying to make more plugins work on macOS. Good luck to my GSoC project :)

Acknowledgement

Thanks to KDE Community and Google, I could start this Google Summer of Code project this summer.

Thanks to members in KDE Connect development. Without them, I cannnot understand the mechanism and get it work on macOS so quickly :)

Conclusion

If you have any question, KDE Connect Wiki may be helpful. And you can find a bug tracker there.

Don’t be hesitated to join our Telegram Group or IRC channel if you’d like to bring more exciting functions into KDE Connect:

• Telegram
• IRC (#kdeconnect)
• matrix.org (#freenode_#kdeconnect:matrix.org)

I wish you could enjoy the seamless experience provided by KDE Connect for macOS and your Android Phone!

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 19.08 release to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 18 of July.

More interesting dates
August 1, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 RC (19.07.90) Tagging and Release
August 8, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 Tagging
August 15, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/19.08_Release_Schedule

The new LSP client by Mark Nauwelaerts made nice progress since the LSP client restart post last week.

Reminder: The plugin is not compiled per default, you can turn it on via:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=“your prefix” -DENABLE_LSPCLIENT=ON “kate src dir”

The code can still be found kate.git master, see lspclient in the addons directory.

What is new?

• Diagnostics support: A tab in the LSP client toolview will show the diagnistics, grouped by file with links to jump to the locations. Issues will be highlighted in the editor view, too.

  

• Find references: Find all references for some variable/function in your complete program. They are listed like the diagnostics grouped per file in an extra tab.

  

• Improved document highlight: Highlight all occurrences of a variable/… inside the current document. Beside highlighting the reads/writes/uses, you get a jump list like for the other stuff as tab, too.

  

A feature I missed to show last time:

• Hover support: Show more meta info about a code location, like the proper type, useful e.g. for almost-always-auto C++ programming.

  

We even got already two patches for the fresh plugin:

• D22348 - Use the label when insertText or sortText is missing
• D22349 - Don’t send the Content-Type header

Both are aimed to improve the support of the Rust LSP server. As you can see, they got already reviewed and merged.

Feel welcome to show up on kwrite-devel@kde.org and help out! All development discussions regarding this plugin happen there.

If you are already familiar with Phabricator, post some patch directly at KDE’s Phabricator instance.

You want more LSP servers supported? You want to have feature X? You have seen some bug and want it to vanish? => Join!

After a somewhat light week, we’ve back with week 79 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and there’s a ton of cool stuff for you!

New Features

• The popular Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin can now pull images from Unsplash.com (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps like KDevelop can now insert a non-indented newline with the ctrl + enter/return keystroke (Ahmad Samir, KDE Frameworks 5.60)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The kstart5 command (e.g. kstart5 dolphin) now works on Wayland (Igor Kovalenko, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• The ubiquitous translucent blur effect no longer looks too dark with certain Intel graphics hardware (Fredrik Höglund, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• The System Settings Fonts page’s “Force Fonts DPI” setting now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Eliminated screen flickering at boot-up when using high DPI scaling (Aleix pol Gonzales, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The “Go to line” feature in kate and other text editors that use the KTextEditor framework once again always centers the zoomed-to line, even if it’s at the end of the document (Christoph Cullman, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• The “collapse all” icons used in many apps now correctly change their colors when using a dark theme (Natsumi Higa, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• Gwenview now correctly loads and displays files located on remote locations accessed using KIO (Tom Moebert, Gwenview 19.08.0)
• Fixed an issue causing Konsole to randomly scroll down at times, especially for i3 users (Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Konsole no longer eats the shift+backtab keystroke, so for example it’s once again possible to see history when using default zsh keybindings (and you can fix it for yourself right now by removing the Shift+Tab shortcut for “Next View Container” in Settings → Configure shortcuts) (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Kate’s “Quick Open” feature once again sorts items by recency of use and pre-selects the top item (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 19.08.0)
• Kate’s “recent documents” feature now works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settingsnow works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settings (Ahmad Samir, Kate 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• On Wayland, the user-configured keyboard repeat rate is now respected (Sam Edwards, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• When a mounted device is ejected using the Device Notifier, the message telling you it’s safe to unplug an unmounted device now remains visible for a little while instead of immediately disappearing (Stefan Brüns, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When there are no speakers or other audio output devices, Plasma now represents this by actually telling you that instead of creating a fake “Dummy output” device that can’t be interacted with (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Discover’s “Updates are available” notification is now persistent for greater visibility, and no longer clutters up your notification history after you’ve dismissed it or installed the updates (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• It’s now possible to set a global keyboard shortcut to turn Night Color on or off (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Konsole’s settings window has received a user interface overhaul, and now follows the common FormLayout style (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0):
  
• Spectacle’s “on click” trigger now works on Wayland (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0)
• Yakuake now offers blurred backgrounds, just like Konsole (Owen Chia, Yakuake 3.0.6)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

I have previously written about why we are interested in barcodes for the KItinerary extractor. This time it’s more about the how, specifically how we find and decode vector graphic barcodes in PDF files, something KItinerary wasn’t able to do until very recently.

Raster Graphics

While PDF is a vector graphics format, most barcodes we encounter in there are actually stored as images. Technically this might not be the cleanest or most efficient way, but it makes KItinerary’s life very easy: We just iterate over all images found in the PDF, and feed them into the barcode decoder.

It’s of course a bit more complicated to make this as efficient as possible, but conceptually you could script this with Poppler’s pdfimages command line tool and ZXing with just a few lines of code.

Vector Graphics

There are also providers that use vector graphics to represent barcodes in their PDF documents, for example Iberia, easyJet, Ryanair and Aer Lingus, enough to make this a relevant problem for KItinerary. The basic idea would be to render the relevant area of the document into an image and feed that into the barcode decoder. The rendering part is straightforward since Poppler has API for that, but how do we know where to look for a vector graphics barcode?

Answering that required a bit of digging into the PDF files, to understand how the barcodes are actually represented. Lacking a “GammaRay for PDF”, Inkscape turned out to be of great help. Importing PDF files there gives you both a graphical and a “textual” (via the generated SVG) representation of the PDF content. This showed three different variants:

1. A single complex filled path for the entire barcode.
2. A set of small filled paths (typically quads), for each line or dot of the barcode.
3. A set of interrupted line strokes with a sufficiently wide pen, so draw the barcode as “scanlines”.

Case (1) is the most easy one, path fill operations with a solid black brush and hundreds or more path elements within a bounding box of just a few centimeters are very rare for anything else, even more so when filtering out paths with curve elements.

The other two cases are much harder to detect without properly grouping all the involved drawing operations though. Here again Inkscape helped, as in all cases the barcodes were represented as an SVG group there, and Inkscape’s PDF import code contained the necessary hints on how to replicate that grouping in KItinerary.

So in the end we iterate over groups of path fill and line stroke operations found in the document, check them for being plausible barcodes by looking at brush or pen properties, path complexity, output size, etc, and then render them to a raster image. The last two steps are expensive, so it’s important we discard as many false positives before we get there.

As a result all remaining PDF documents with previously undetected barcodes in my sample collection now work, with minimal extra runtime cost.

Poppler’s Private API

While I’m quite happy with the result, it unfortunately comes at a cost, in form of a much stronger dependency on Poppler’s private API. KItinerary is already using Poppler’s private API for iterating over the images in a document, which makes distributors understandably very unhappy. For this dependency we had a plan on how to address it by adding the necessary features to Poppler’s public API (at the cost of processing the same document twice, once for text and once for images).

The new code however heavily relies on access to the low-level stream of drawing operations, which is a much much larger API surface to expose from Poppler than just iterating over image assets. Seeing that Inkscape has the same problem, maybe that is actually necessary though?

Contribute

This work heavily relies on access to a large variety of sample documents, to make sure we support all relevant cases. So if you encounter an airline boarding pass PDF file that isn’t detected as such with the current master branch or the upcoming 19.08 release, I’d be very interested in that test case :)

Today I was wondering what the most commonly used license that people use in OpenAPI, so I went and did a quick analysis.

Results¶

The top 5 (with count in brackets):

1. Apache-2.0 (421)¹
2. CC-BY-3.0 (250)
3. MIT (15)
4. “This page was built with the Swagger API.” (8)
5. “Open Government License – British Columbia” (6)

The striked-out entries are the ones that I would not really consider a proper license.

The license names inside quotation marks are the exact copy-paste from the field. The rest are de-duplicated into their SPDX identifiers.

After those top 5 the long end goes very quickly into only one license per listed API. Several of those seem very odd as well.

Methodology¶

Note: Before you start complaining, I realise this is probably a very sub-optimal solution code-wise, but it worked for me. In my defence, I did open up my copy of the Sed & Awk Pocket Reference before my eyes went all glassy and I hacked up the following ugly method. Also note that the shell scripts are in Fish shell and may not work directly in a 100% POSIX shell.

First, I needed to get a data set to work on. Hat-tip to Mike Ralphson for pointing me to APIs Guru as a good resource. I analysed their APIs-guru/openapi-directory repository², where in the APIs folder they keep a big collection of public APIs. Most of them following the OpenAPI (previously Swagger) specification.

git clone https://github.com/APIs-guru/openapi-directory.git
cd openapi-directory/APIs

Next I needed to list all the licenses found there. For this I assumed the name: tag in YAML⁴ (the one including the name of the license) to be in the very next line after the license: tag³ – I relied on people writing OpenAPI files in the same order as it is laid out in the OpenAPI Specification. I stored the list of all licenses, sorted alphabetically in a separate api_licenses file:

grep 'license:' **/openapi.yaml **/swagger.yaml -A 1 --no-filename | \
grep 'name:' | sort > api_licenses

Then I generated another file called api_licenses_unique that would include only all names of these licenses.

grep 'license:' **/openapi.yaml **/swagger.yaml -A 1 --no-filename | \
grep 'name:' | sort | uniq > api_licenses_unique

Because I was too lazy to figure out how to do this properly⁵, I simply wrapped the same one-liner into a script to go through all the unique license names and count how many times they show up in the (non-duplicated) list of all licenses found.

for license in (grep 'license:' **/openapi.yaml **/swagger.yaml -A 1 \
--no-filename | grep 'name' | sort | uniq)
                           grep "$license" api_licenses --count
                       end

In the end I copied the console output of this last command, opened api_licenses_unique, and pasted said output in the first column (by going into Block Selection Mode in Kate).

Clarification on what I consider “proper license” and re-count of Creative Commons licenses (12 July 2019 update)¶

I was asked what I considered as a “proper license” above, and specifically why I did not consider “Creative Commons” as such.

First, if the string did not even remotely look like a name of a license, I did not consider that as a proper license. This is the case e.g. with “This page was built with the Swagger API.”.

As for the string “Creative Commons”, it – at best – indicates a family o licenses, which span a vast spectrum from CC0-1.0 (basically public domain) on one end to CC-BY-NC-CA-4.0 (basically, you may copy this, but not change anything, nor get money out of it, and you must keep the same license) on the other. For reference, on the SPDX license list, you will find 32 Creative Commons licenses. And SPDX lists only the International and Universal versions of them⁷.

Admiteldy, – and this is a caveat in my initial method above – it may be that there is an actual license following the lines after the “Creative Commons” string … or, as it turned out to be true, that the initial 255 count of name: Creative Commons licenses included also valid CC license names such as name: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

So, obviously I made a boo-boo, and therefore went and dug deeper ;)

To do so, and after looking at the results a bit more, I noticed that the url: entries of the name: Creative Commons licenses seem to point to actual CC licenses, so I decided to rely on that. Luckily, this turned out to be true.

I broadened up the initial search to one extra line, to include the url: line, narrowed down the next search to name: Creative Commons, and in the end only to url:

grep 'license:' **/openapi.yaml **/swagger.yaml -A 2 --no-filename | \
grep 'name: Creative Commons' -A 1 | grep 'url' | sort > api_licenses_cc

Next, I searched for the most common license – CC-BY-3.0:

grep --count 'creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0' api_licenses_cc

The result was 250, so for the remaining⁶ 5 I just opened the api_licenses_cc file and counted them manually.

Using this method the list of all “Creative Commons” license turned out to be as follows:

1. CC-BY-3.0 (250, of which one was specific to Australian jurisdiction)
2. CC-BY-4.0 (3)
3. CC-BY-NC-4.0 (1)
4. CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 (1)

In this light, I am amending the results above, and removing the bogus “Creative Commons” entry. Apart from removing the bogus entry, it does not change the ranking, nor the counts, of the top 5 licenses.

hook out → not proud of the method, but happy with having results

I’m happy to announce that the userbase wiki is getting a new theme and an updated MediaWiki version.

New theme - Aether

The old userbase theme was called Neverland and looked a bit antiquated. A new theme was created with a similar look to kde.org.

The new theme features a light and dark modes using the new prefers-color-scheme: dark CSS media query. The new theme is also mobile friendly.

I think this is quite an improvement over this:

I am confident that Claus_Chr and me found most of the visual glitches, but if you do find a glitch, please report it to me on my talk page.

The new theme is hosted in KDE gitlab instance. Contributions are welcome.

New MediaWiki version

We jumped MediaWiki from the obsolete version 1.26 to 1.31, the latest LTS version. This should fix some of the long-standing bugs and allow us to get all security updates with minimal maintenance needs.

What’s next?

A similar update for the community and techbase wikis should be comming soon™. The only thing that we still need to work is an update of the configuration files and some testing to make sure nothing broke during the update. A preview version of the community wiki can already be tested at: wikisandbox.kde.org.

Contribute to Userbase

When you find a kool feature in KDE software, you can write a small tutorial or just a small paragraph about it and the KDE Userbase Wiki is the right place to publish it. You don’t need to know how to code, have perfect English or know how MediaWiki’s formatting work, to contribute. We also need translators.

Admire my GIMP skills ;)

Thanks to Blumen Herzenschein and Paul Brown for proofreading this blog post and to Ben Cooksley for pointing me to the right direction.

Discussion: Reddit or Mastodon

At the end of June I finished copy-on-write vector layers. From the very beginning, I have been researching into possibilities to make kritaflake implicitly sharable. In that post I mentioned the way Sean Parent uses for Photoshop, and adapted it for the derived d-pointers in Flake.

Derived d-pointers

TL;DR: We got rid of it.

As I mentioned in the task page, derived d-pointers originally in Flake are a barrier to implicit sharing. One of the reasons is that we need to write more code (either KisSharedDescendent wrapper class, or repeated code for virtual clone functions). Also, derived d-pointers do not actually encapsulate the data in the parent classes – for example, the members in KoShapePrivate are all accessible by descendents of KoShape, say, KoShapeContainer. That is probably not how encapsulating should work. So in the end we decided to get rid of derived d-pointers in Flake.

This leads to one problem, however, in the class KoShapeGroup. KoShapeGroup is a descendent of KoShapeContainer, which owns a KoShapeContainerModel that can be subclassed to control the behaviour when a child is added to or removed from the container. KoShapeGroup uses ShapeGroupContainerModel which performs additional operations specific to KoShapeGroup.

After I merged my branch into master, it was said that Flake tests failed under address sanitizer (ASan). I took a look and discovered that there was use after free in the class KoShapeGroup, namely the use of its d-pointer. The use is called by the destructor of KoShapeContainer, which calls KoShapeContainerModel::deleteOwnedShapes(), which removes individual shapes from the container, which then calls KoShapeGroup::invalidateSizeCache(). The original situation was:

1. destructor of KoShapeGroup was called;
2. members defined in KoShapeGroup got deleted (nothing, because everything is in the derived d-pointer which is defined in KoShape);
3. destructor of KoShapeContainer was called, which calls d->model->deleteOwnedShapes();
4. then that of KoShape, which deletes all the private members.

But after the derived d-pointers are converted to normal ones, the calling sequence upon destruction becomes:

1. destructor of KoShapeGroup was called;
2. members defined in KoShapeGroup got deleted (its own d-pointer);
3. destructor of KoShapeContainer was called, which calls d->model->deleteOwnedShapes();
4. d->model is a ShapeGroupContainerModel, which will call KoShapeGroup::invalidateSizeCache();
5. that last function accesses the d-pointer of KoShapeGroup, USE AFTER FREE.

In order to solve this problem we have to manually call model()->deleteOwnedShapes() in the destructor of KoShapeGroup, at which time the d-pointer is still accessible.

q-pointers

TL;DR: We also got rid of it.

q-pointers are a method used in Qt to hide private methods from the header files, in order to improve binary compatibility. q-pointers are stored in *Private classes (ds), indicating the object that owns this private instance. But this is, of course, conflicting with the principle of “sharing” because the situation now is that multiple objects can own the same data. The q-pointers in flake is rather confusing under such circumstances, since the private data cannot know which object is the caller.

To avoid this confusion, there are multiple ways:

1. to move all the functions regarding q-pointers to the public classes;
2. to pass the q-pointer every time when calling those functions in private classes; or
3. to add another layer of “shared data” in the d-pointer and keep the q-pointers in the unshared part.

implicit sharing

To enable implicit sharing for the KoShape hierarchy, the only thing left to be done is to change the QScopedPointer<Private> d; in the header file to QSharedDataPointer<Private> d; and make the private classes inherit QSharedData. This step is rather easy and then just run the tests to make sure it does not break anything. Horray!

After digging for around a month and a half, I can finally do some selections with the Magnetic Lasso tool, which I wrote with utter laziness as I would say.

The KMyMoney development team today announces the immediate availability of version 5.0.5 of its open source Personal Finance Manager.

After three months it is now ready: KMyMoney 5.0.5 comes with some important bugfixes. As usual, problems have been reported by our users and the development team worked hard to fix them in the meantime. The result of this effort is the brand new KMyMoney 5.0.5 release.

Despite even more testing we understand that some bugs may have slipped past our best efforts. If you find one of them, please forgive us, and be sure to report it, either to the mailing list or on bugs.kde.org.

From here, we will continue to fix reported bugs, and working to add many requested additions and enhancements, as well as further improving performance.

Please feel free to visit our overview page of the CI builds at https://kmymoney.org/build.php and maybe try out the lastest and greatest by using a daily crafted AppImage version build from the stable branch.

The details

Here is the list of the bugs which have been fixed. A list of all changes between v5.0.4 and v5.0.5 can be found in the ChangeLog.

• 368159 Report Transactions by Payee omits transactions lacking category
• 390681 OFX import and unrecognized <FITID> tag
• 392305 Not all Asset accounts are shown during OFX import
• 396225 When importing a ofx/qif file, it does not show me all my accounts
• 396978 Stable xml file output
• 400761 Cannot open files on MacOS
• 401397 kmymoney changes group permissions
• 403745 in import dialog, newly-created account doesn’t appear in pulldown menu
• 403825 Transaction validity filter is reset when re-opening configuration
• 403826 Transactions without category assignment are not shown in report
• 403885 Buying / selling investments interest / fees round to 2 decimal places even when currency is to 6 decimal places
• 403886 No way to set/change investment start date in investment wizard
• 403955 After an action, the cursor returns to top of page and does not remain in a similar position to when action was started
• 404156 Can’t select many columns as memo
• 404848 Crash on “Enter Next Transcation”
• 405061 No chart printing support
• 405329 CPU loop reconciling if all transactions are cleared
• 405817 CSV importer trailing lines are treated as absolute lines
• 405828 Budget problems
• 405928 Loss of inserted data in transaction planner
• 406073 Change of forecast method is not reflected in forecast view
• 406074 Unused setting “Forecast (history)” for home view
• 406220 Crash when deleting more than 5000 transactions at once
• 406509 “Find Transaction…” dialog focus is on “Help” button instead of “Find”
• 406525 Subtotals are not correctly aggregated when (sub-)categories have the same name
• 406537 Encrypted file cannot be saved as unencrypted
• 406608 Custom report based on Annual Budget incorrectly getting Actuals
• 406714 Home view shows budget header twice

Here is the list of the enhancements which have been added:

• 341589 Cannot assign tag to a split

QComboBox::currentIndexChanged(QString) used to have (i.e. in Qt 5.13.0) a deprecation warning that said "Use currentTextChanged() instead".

That has recently been reverted since both are not totally equivalent, sure, you can probably "port" from one to the other, but the "use" wording to me seems like a "this is the same" and they are not.

Another one of those is QPainter::initFrom, which inits a painter with the pen, background and font to the same as the given widget. This is deprecated, because it's probably wrong ("what is the pen of a widget?") but the deprecation warning says "Use begin(QPaintDevice*)" but again if you look at the implementation, they don't really do the same. Still need to find time to complain to the Qt developers and get it fixed.

Anyhow, as usual, when porting make sure you do a correct port and not just blind changes.

In June 2019 I went to Usability & Productivity Goal Sprint in the beautiful city of Valencia! As I’m a relatively new KDE contributor this was my very first sprint experience and it was awesome. At the same time the Plasma Sprint took place and it felt more like one big sprint than two separate events. We were kindly hosted by Slimbook which also organized a bus that took us to their office in the morning and back to the hotel in the evening. A big thank you to them!

In the first part of the sprint I mainly worked on continuing to improve Spectacle. You don’t know Spectacle? It is our screenshotting application with many settings: for example to control what should be captured, if you want to include your mouse cursor or to simply set a delay from when you press the button until the actual screenshot is taken.

The first feature I worked on is based on a cool idea by Felix Ernst. Spectacle now shows the time remaining until a screenshot is taken in the taskmanager like when you copy a file in Dolphin or download a file. Now you don’t have to wonder anymore how much time you have left to arrange everything for your screenshot or if Spectacle is still running or crashed somewhere in the background (even if that does not happen very often).

Configuring shortcuts inside Spectacle

Together David Edmundson and I finished porting the Shortcuts configuration of Spectacle from KHotkeys infrastructure to KGlobalAccel. This means, the shortcuts aren’t located in the Custom Shortcuts part of the system settings and duplicated under KDE Daemon in Global Shortcuts but reside in their own Spectacle category in the global shortcut settings. Even more important, we can now show a configuration dialog for the shortcuts inside Spectacle! You don’t have to fear that your carefully assigned hotkeys are reverted to default ones during this transition - they are carefully migrated to the new system. The migration program is longer than the actual required code changes and is run automatically when you receive the update thanks to kconf_update.

Continuing to work with David we investigated why persistent copy to clipboard of screenshots didn’t work - it was supposed to work after recent changes in Spectacle and Klipper after all. It turned out that there was a bug in Klipper but you can now paste screenshots into your favorite image editor or chat prorgam after closing Spectacle. Even if your clipboard history is set to ignore images (of course they will not appear in the history in this case) !

The last days of the sprint I spent on adding the possibility to have your wallpaper slideshow in a particular order in addition to the current random sequence. For now, I implemented sorting in alphabetical order and based on the time the pictures were modified but extending it with others is straightforward. In doing so I simplified the code a bit (it wasn’t touched in a long time) and reduced some duplication by using the same model to show the images in the configuration dialog and in the actual slideshow (before this was done in two different code paths). I didn’t quite finish it up during the sprint but you can have a sneak peek at it over at Phabricator.

Another bigger change I started is porting Spectacle from it’s hand-rolled configuration-managing class to a KConfig XT based approach. You write a XML file and it generates the code for you that manages the settings and their defaults (notice that currently Spectacle has only an OK and Cancel button but no Defaults or Apply button). The main settings already work but I still need to wire some things up like the new shortcuts settings for example.

Aside from that I also worked on investigating and fixing some bugs as always. For example the action buttons now fit into their respective list elements inside the virtual desktop settings, and you can’t get trapped inside Spectacle’s Region Selection anymore.

However the great thing about a sprint is that is not all hacking but you can discuss bigger changes and directions for the future, share ideas and brainstorm together in person. We had a big discussion about discoverability of widget settings and agreed on having a global edit mode where everything on your desktop will be configurable. Other points of discussions were the right click menu of the plasmoids in your panel that can be confusing when they include multiple very similar entries, the behavior of the taskmanager or the multi-screen configuration. One last thing we talked about is the future of the usability goal. We have awesome news to share so stay tuned and have an eye on Nate Graham’s blog as always.

But a Sprint is not only working with others but also meeting the people whose names you know and maybe interacted with textually, talking to them and getting to know each other. And I had a great time, starting from the first day hacking together in a single hotel room with slow wifi, to the last one when we four with the latest flights walked to the beach. So thank you to KDE e.V. that made this possible for me, Slimbook again, Aleix Pol who organized it and lastly to all the nice people who attended and made this a great experience. See you soon.

Last month the Plasma team met in Spain for their annual developer sprint. It was kindly hosted by Slimbook in their offices on the outskirts of Valencia. This time it was co-located with the Usability sprint and it was great to meet so many new faces there.

View from the rooftop bar at the hotel

Continued improvements in notifications

On 11 June we released Plasma 5.16 with a completely redesigned notification center. In the weeks since I received numerous suggestions on how to improve the system even further and I started working on them. Since this technology is relatively new there’s also a lot of activity and changes being made to the “stable” branch of notification code, i.e. the one feeding subsequent 5.16 bugfix releases. Let’s talk about some of those changes:

• Fixed job progress reporting when using Latte Dock: in the old system, there was a dedicated process kuiserver managing job tracking (the info popup when you copy a file) forwarding the information to every interested party. However, apart from plasmashell there was nobody else making use of it and it seemed like a huge waste to duplicate the DBus traffic happening while copying a file. Or so I thought :) I killed kuiserver and moved its logic into plasmashell. However, since Latte Dock also uses Task Manager progress reporting, it became random who claimed the service on login. This is resolved now using some clever DBus magic. If you still have issues with progress reporting in conjunction with Latte Dock with latest updates installed, please let me know!
• More reliable popup placement: the popup should no longer fly all over the place on Wayland.
• Ignore duplicates: When an application sends the same notification multiple times in quick succession, the additional requests are ignored.
• Improved notifications for app bundles: notification center identifies applications based on the desktop-entry hint they send. However, in case of bundled apps, such as Flatpak and Snap, the desktop file in the bundle might be different from the one it originally got built with. To address this, I now also take into account the X-Flatpak-RenamedFrom key and BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT environment variable when trying to identify an application.
• No unidentified apps in history: another side-effect of a failure to identify an application is that we cannot relate any user preferences to it. This means that you cannot prevent an application from flooding your history. Since 5.16.2 unidentified applications no longer show up in history. This is admittedly a stark behavior change for a stable release and I do apologize for breaking someone’s workflow. However, I needed a quick mitigation for the spam problem and will consider making it an option in Plasma 5.17.

Do not disturb while screens are mirrored

Speaking of Plasma 5.17, I worked on additional notification features for the October Plasma feature release: since we had a projector in the meeting room and I got tasked to run through the agenda in the mornings, I realized that having a way to automatically enter do not disturb mode when mirroring screens could be useful. Since I already used our KScreen library before in PowerDevil (which by default will not suspend your laptop when you close the lid with an external monitor connected), a patchset was quickly created.

Quick reply. Application gets to choose placeholder text and submit button appearance

For a long time I’ve been craving for a quick reply feature where you get a text field inside the notification. In fact, this has been on the notification master plan since 2016. While implementing the feature itself was relatively straight-forward, keyboard focus is an issue still to be resolved, especially on Wayland: notification windows never get focus so they can’t steal it away from other applications. However, conditionally granting focus in this particular case is a lot harder than it sounds.

Shaping up the next Plasma Browser Integration release

Plasma Browser Integration is one of the projects I’m most proud of. In case you didn’t know, there’s a browser extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers that bridges the gap between browser and desktop. It lets you share links, find browser tabs in KRunner, and control music and video playback anytime from Plasma, or even your phone using KDE Connect!

A crossed icon indicates it’s not running and the popup gives some advice about it

For the next feature release I first of all worked on better error handling. Right now, when the bridge application acts up or isn’t installed, a popup is shown. This is especially annoying when you have the extension synced across devices to computers that may not be able to run it. I now make use of a so-called browser action to place an icon in the toolbar that indicates status.

WebShare API in action

Furthermore, I added support for the Web Share API so websites can trigger a share dialog from Purpose, our content sharing framework used throughout our applications. This feature also got added to the context menu, so you can not only send links to your phone via KDE Connect but to any registered application. What I’d love to see is a Purpose plug-in for KDE Itinerary so I could store boarding passes directly from the airline booking pages. :)

Automatic dark mode, maybe?

I also toyed around with Media Queries Level 5 to support “dark mode” CSS media queries. While I managed to have it query the current system color scheme to determine dark or light mode, the media queries are currently applied by tampering with the website CSS and installing new rules with the media query unset. This seems to work well but is not something I feel very confident in shipping. Let’s hope this feature request for letting extensions enforce a color scheme goes anywhere or maybe they could just start reading the gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme setting in the future.

Finally, the plan is to enable enhanced media controls by default now that I made it less invasive and more resilient. With this you’ll get more detailed track information, album covers, and more playback controls for websites using the Media Session API. Luckily, more and more websites are starting to make use of that API.

Please do me a favor and enable “Enhanced Media Controls” in the extension settings right now and report any websites that might misbehave, so we can fix that!

OpenExpo is an event aimed at businesses and the public sector. Top topics usually revolve around cloud computing, big and open data, IoT, and as of late, blockchain technologies. 2019 was its sixth edition, held on the 20th of June in “La Nave” on the outskirts of Madrid.

Organisers tell us that 2800 visitors attended this year’s event. There were about 120 speakers and 70 exhibitors with booths. From what we could garner, most visitors were representatives of public institutions, consulting companies, and software development companies, especially from the field of cloud computing.

The Booth

KDE’s booth was right next to the entrance; on the right as you went in, in an area called the “Innovation & Community Village”. We were one of five exhibitors in the area. On our right was the FSFE. I happened to know one of the people staffing, which was nice.

KDE’s booth at OpenExpo 2019.

Behind us was a father-and-son outfit showing 3D printers. Apart from owning a shop, they apparently run courses in their neighbourhood, and that is what earned them a spot in the “Community Village”.

Then there were some people with a DIY go-kart/scooter/tricycle thingy (?). They opened a big, colourful box full of interesting-looking pieces, didn’t do anything with them, and then left.

Finally, on the other side of our table was a company/community that virtualised desktops in the browser. Interesting stuff.

There were six tables and it was first come, first served. I was first, so I picked a front-facing table. Each table was 180 by 80 cm, which is big compared to what we often get in other events, and gave us plenty of space to set up our things. There was a space for our banner in a corner, as you can see in the photograph. We added a screen on a stand behind us that ran videos showcasing Plasma, Plasma Mobile (PlaMo), Kirigami and Applications on a loop. You can see the screen in the background of the photo.

On the table, we laid out the following items:

• a Nexus 5x with PlaMo
• a Raspberry Pi with touchscreen and PlaMo running upon Yocto, courtesy of Volker Krause
• a Pinebook 14”
• a KDE Slimbook 2

From left to right, a Nexus5X phone running Plasma Mobile, a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen also running Plasma Mobile, the Pinebook 14” $99 netbook, and a KDE Slimbook II.

We also had 100 stickers: 50 stickers of Katie using a phone and with the Plasma Mobile URL, and 50 Konqi stickers with KDE.org URL. The Konqi ones ran out first.

Katie and Konqi stickers.

The aim of our table spread was three-fold. First, we wanted to show people “shopping” for software that Plasma and other KDE applications are “end-user ready”. Secondly, we intended to show how Plasma is light and can work on a wide variety of devices, including devices usually used in setups where embedded electronics are required (the Raspberry PI); low-powered, ARM-based netbooks (the Pinebook); and as a potential mobile environment (the Nexus 5X). Finally, we wanted to demonstrate how applications, thanks to Kirigami, can adapt to different hardware and screen configurations.

The overarching aim was to see if we could convince administrators of large deployments (for example, schools) that Plasma and KDE Applications would be a good choice for their users. We were also seeking contributors and sponsors for KDE, and looking to convince companies that KDE has good solutions for developing graphical applications.

What I did

To attract and engage visitors, I used several tactics I had used in the past, and that seem to work well. I stood outside the booth and approached visitors that showed interest in our spread.

I found out where the visitors were coming from and adapted my spiel to that. I demoed Plasma on laptops for administrators of large deployments, showing off features and pointing out how it was fast and snappy even on low-spec hardware.

I showed the proof-of-concepts of Plasma Mobile on Yocto (Raspberry Pi) and on postmarketOS (Nexus 5) to managers of companies that developed for several platforms. They could check for themselves how Kirigami could let them create cross-platform applications, including for Android (I had my own phone on hand for this), and how it would allow them to create applications that would adapt to different sizes of screens.

At the end of each demonstration, I encouraged visitors to scan the QRs so they could leave with more information they could research for themselves.

The thing that most attracted the visitors’ attention was the Pinebook – when they read it cost 99 USD. That sparked interest in the underlying hardware, and in what software would run on an underpowered device. A lot of people also picked up the SBC for some reason. The Pine64 I had brought along was only there to show what kind of hardware was in the Pinebook, but it seems that… er… naked electronics are inherently fascinating to visitors at these kinds of events.

After the Pinebook, the most popular devices where the phone and the Raspberry Pi with its touchscreen. A lot of visitors asked if the phone was already for sale, thinking that a pure GNU + Linux phone was already a thing and they had somehow missed it. Even though I had to burst their bubble, they were satisfied that at least some progress was going on, both in the realms of mobile phones and vehicle infotainment systems.

Visitors

The scanning application provided by the organisers of the event was very useful, and I scanned 54 people in total, but, of course, I talked to more than that. By my calculations, about 50% more one-to-one, which puts the number of people I interacted one-on-one with between 75 and 80. Four or five times while I was delivering my spiel, a small crowd of 5 to 10 people congregated around me, so a conservative total number of people I talked to would be around 100.

Many of them were system administrators specialised in cloud computing, one of the main topics of the event. Others managed large networks of end-user machines for schools, libraries and other public institutions. There were also plenty of CEOs, CTOs and other C*Os, both attending for the talks and “shopping” for new open source development software. They are the people who found things like Kirigami interesting.

There were Linux desktop end-users in the mix, too. Many of them did not use Plasma (a few did), and they were under the impression that Plasma was heavy. The Pinebook disproved that, but this (that KDE software is bloated) is something we have seen before, and we clearly must continue to work towards dispelling this notion.

I tried to make sure that visitors to the booth walked away with something to remember us by. Stickers with KDE.org URLs on them until they run out; my card, in case they needed more information; or at the very least, the links to more information in the browsers on their phones, as I encouraged people to scan the QRs associated with each item on the table.

Mission(s) Accomplished?

One of the things I set out to do was to generate some publicity for KDE in the mainstream media, since it was announced that journalists from some big Spanish newspapers, radios and TVs would be there. Unfortunately, I did not see them.

However, I was not disappointed with the day, since we achieved other things on the list. We made contacts within several Madrilian institutions, like the leaders of the MAX Linux distribution, deployed in many Madrilian schools. They are currently using MATE for their desktop, but after reviewing our spread, the said they would give Plasma a try. I will be following up with them.

Continuing with public institutions, we also talked to the people who manage the libraries in Alcorcón, sysadmins from the Congreso de los Diputados and the Ministerio de Economía and Hacienda, and developers from Correos, the Spanish post office. There were representatives from several universities, both students and professors. All visitors were impressed by Plasma’s feature set, performance and flexibility, and were excited about trying it out at work and at home.

The students from the LibreLabUCM of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid later wrote to me and asked how they could contribute. They were especially interested in contributing to Plasma Mobile.

We had a mixed bag when it came to visitors from private enterprises. There were both coders and managers among the people who came to the booth, as well as freelancing consultants. Many of the managers, including CEOs, CTOs and product managers, and all the consultants seemed to be “shopping” for FLOSS to boost productivity (the former) or to add to their portfolio (the latter). Although they were mainly after infrastructure-like software, like cloud management systems, they would often become interested when I demoed Kirigami-based software and showed them it was possible to create good-looking, graphical applications for most platforms that would adapt to different screen sizes and shapes.

From the bigger, more recognisable companies, we had visitors from IBM, Oracle, BT, Atos, Allfunds Bank and Wacom. From smaller, Spanish joints we met people from VASS, Zylk, Zendata and Certelia.

Lessons Learnt

The first lesson I learnt was not to try and do this alone again. Over twelve hours of standing and greeting visitors is not good for an unfit, overweight 53-year-old. Being alone also meant I had to rely on the kindness of the people in the FSFE booth when I had to go foraging for water and food, or for when I needed a bathroom break — thanks Pablo and Erik!

But, seriously, next time we should show off some “naked” electronics. This fascinates attendees for some reason. We should maybe acquire the RISC-V board we showed in FOSDEM. These kinds of things attract visitors like a magnet.

I noticed many visitors looking over the booth from afar, trying to figure out who we were before approaching. As the roll-up banner was to one side, it was not always obvious that it was associated with us. A solution would be to always make sure we have a tablecloth or a prominent flag with our logo, name, and URL handy. We had both at the booth at FOSDEM, and I’m pretty sure that helped.

The stickers ran out rather quickly. By two o’clock there were none left. It wasn’t a big issue, because the event wasn’t the type that attracted merch scavengers, and most people were more interested in what we had on display than in stockpiling goodies. But it would still have been nice to have had more. Also, vinyl die-cut stickers are expensive: 60 euros for 100 stickers.

Speaking of printed merch, maybe we should make attractive flyers with coloured pictures, snappy explanatory bites, shortened URLs and no marketing speak, relevant to what is on show at the booth. Not everybody has QR scanning software on their phones, and a printed guide explaining what we were showing at the booth would’ve helped and served as a reminder if attendees could’ve taken it with them.

Was it worth it?

Yes. We made a lot of contacts with companies and institutions that would have been difficult to get in touch with any other way. We also heard about problems they have, and we can use that to see what solutions we can offer. Both things will ultimately help grow the number of companies that use KDE technologies (like Kirigami) in their products, as well as help us convince institutions to deploy our software (like Plasma and Applications) for their users.

Update

It’s finally here!

After more than one and a half years there finally is a new release. Kaidan 0.4.0 is the biggest update until now and apart from some bug-fixes and many minor and major features increasing the usability, Kaidan now has multiplatform-support for all common operating systems like Linux, Windows, Android and macOS.

But have a look at the changelog yourself:

Changelog

Build system:

• Support for Android (ilyabizyaev)
• Support for Ubuntu Touch (jbb)
• Support for macOS (ilyabizyaev)
• Support for Windows (ilyabizyaev)
• Support for iOS (ilyabizyaev)
• Add KDE Flatpak (jbb)
• Switch Android builds to CMake with ECM (ilyabizyaev)
• Improve Linux AppImage build script (ilyabizyaev)
• Add additional image formats in AppImage (jbb)

New features:

• Show proper notifications using KNotifications (lnj)
• Add settings page for changing passwords (jbb, lnj)
• Add XEP-0352: Client State Indication (gloox/QXmpp) (lnj)
• Add media/file (including GIFs) sharing (lnj, jbb)
• Full back-end rewrite to QXmpp (lnj)
• Implement XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload and UploadManager for QXmpp (lnj)
• Use XEP-0280: Message Carbons from QXmpp (lnj)
• Use XEP-0352: Client State Indication from QXmpp (lnj)
• Check incoming messages for media links (lnj)
• Implement XEP-0308: Last Message Correction (lnj, jbb)
• Make attachments downloadable (lnj)
• Implement XEP-0382: Spoiler messages (xavi)
• Kaidan is now offline usable (lnj)
• Kaidan is able to open xmpp: URIs (lnj)
• New logo (ilyabizyaev)
• Show presence information of contacts (lnj, melvo)
• Add EmojiPicker from Spectral with search and favorites functionality (jbb, fazevedo)
• Highlight links in chat and make links clickable (lnj)
• New about dialog instead of the about page (ilyabizyaev)
• Add image preview in chat and before sending (lnj)
• Send messages on Enter, new line on Ctrl-Enter (ilyabizyaev)
• ‘Add contact’ is now the main action on the contacts page (lnj)
• Elide contact names and messages in roster (lnj)
• Chat page redesign (ilyabizyaev)
• Display passive notifications when trying to use online actions while offline (lnj)
• Automatically reconnect on connection loss (lnj)
• Contacts page: Display whether online in title (lnj)
• Add different connection error messages (jbb)
• Use QApplication when building with QWidgets (notmart)
• Ask user to approve subscription requests (lnj)
• Remove contact action: Make JIDs bold (lnj)
• Add contact sheet: Ask for optional message to contact (lnj)
• Add empty chat page with help notice to be displayed on start up (jbb)
• Redesign log in page (sohnybohny)
• Add Copy Invitaion URL action (jbb)
• Add ‘press and hold’ functionality for messages context menu (jbb)
• Add copy to clipboard function for messages (jbb)
• Add mobile file chooser (jbb)
• Highlight the currently opened chat on contacts page (lnj)
• Remove predefined window sizes (lnj)
• Use new Kirigami application header (nicofee)
• Make images open externally when clicked (jbb)
• Use QtQuickCompiler (jbb)
• Display upload progress bar (lnj)
• Add text+color avatars as fallback (lnj, jbb)
• Remove diaspora log in option (lnj)

Misc:

• Forget passwords on log out (lnj)
• Append four random chars to resource (lnj)
• Save passwords in base64 instead of clear text (lnj)
• Generate the LICENSE file automatically with all git authors (lnj)
• Store ubuntu touch builds as job artifacts (lnj)
• Add GitLab CI integration (jbb)

Fixes:

• Fix blocking of GUI thread while database interaction (lnj)
• Fix TLS connection bug (lnj)
• Don’t send notifications when receiving own messages via. carbons (lnj)
• Fix timezone bug of message timestamps (lnj)
• Fix several message editing bugs (lnj)
• Fix black icons (jbb)
• Fix rich text labels in Plasma Mobile (lnj)
• Small Plasma Mobile fixes (jbb)

Bug reports go to our issue tracker as always and translations are managed on Weblate.

Download:

• Source code (.tar.xz)
• Windows (x64)
• macOS (x64)
• Android (armv7) (experimental!)
• Ubuntu Touch (armv7) (experimental!)
• Flatpak builds are only available as nightlies: Installing the Kaidan Flatpak

PS: We’re searching for someone with an iPhone who can build & test Kaidan for iOS: contact us!