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Thursday, 20 April 2023

I’m happy to announce the first release of FutureSQL, a library for accessing SQLite (and other databases) in Qt projects without blocking.

It also features a migration system and automatic result deserialization.

For examples, please have a look at the README.

You can fetch the release from KDE’s download server. It is signed with my PGP key C3D7CAFBF442353F95F69F4AA81E075ABEC80A7E, which you can fetch from keys.openpgp.org.

Please let me know if you find any issues.

Sunday, 16 April 2023

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After two years of development and bugs triage, and tests, the digiKam team is proud to present the new major version 8.0.0 of its open source digital photo manager.

See below the list of most important features coming with this release.

New Online Documentation

A huge Application as digiKam needs good documentation for end users, and is well written with plenty of screen-shots and screen-casts. We have been working many months to migrate and proof-read the old digiKam documentation based on DocBook format to a new architecture, more simple, easy to maintain, and translatable. After 20 years, we left the DocBook manual for the modern Sphinx/ReStructuredText framework. This one is really a pleasure to use by documentation writers.

Friday, 14 April 2023

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-15.


The Free Software Foundation is dying

Tags: tech, foss, criticism

I don’t necessarily agree with the fine points in the proposed actions. That said the diagnosis is unfortunately very true I think.

https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dying.html


The time to figure out how to use generative AI and large language models in your code is now

Tags: tech, gpt, ai, programming

I’m still doubtful about it but maybe I’m wrong so a counterpoint to my own opinions. Of course this is a purely productivity standpoint in here which overlooks my main concerns with how this is currently deployed and used.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3693089/the-ai-singularity-is-here.html


Free Dolly: Introducing the World’s First Open and Commercially Viable Instruction-Tuned LLM - The Databricks Blog

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

This is important. We need truly open generator models. This can’t be left in the hands of a few with only API access, especially since they lack basic transparency.

https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/04/12/dolly-first-open-commercially-viable-instruction-tuned-llm


FAIR Animated Drawings: Home

Tags: tech, drawing, animation, tools

Neat tool for animating your own drawings. Impressive results for sure.

https://fairanimateddrawings.com/site/home


Run an open source-powered virtual conference! – Máirín Duffy

Tags: tech, foss, conference, video, messaging

Nice recipe on what can be used to run a virtual conference using only Free Software.

https://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2023/04/10/run-an-open-source-powered-virtual-conference/


Extracting the Essential Simplicity of the Internet | February 2023 | Communications of the ACM

Tags: tech, networking, internet, history

Excellent piece which summarises the big design decisions behind the Internet. It’s very didactic, also highlights the flaw toward the end. This is reference material.

https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/2/268956-extracting-the-essential-simplicity-of-the-internet/fulltext


CAN Injection: keyless car theft | Dr. Ken Tindell

Tags: tech, embedded, can, security, automotive

This is an incredibly informative deep dive regarding a new attack on CAN buses. Also proposes potential fixes. Let’s see how car makers deal with it.

https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/


How does database sharding work?

Tags: tech, databases, sharding

Good overview on database sharding. Points to a couple of tools which can help in some situations.

https://planetscale.com/blog/how-does-database-sharding-work


SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ And Replaced It With A Postgres Queue

Tags: tech, messaging, databases, rabbitmq, postgresql, architecture, complexity

They were probably using RabbitMQ for the wrong scenario in the first place. That said it’s a good reminder that sometimes a simpler architecture is what you want and it can bring benefits.

https://www.prequel.co/blog/sql-maxis-why-we-ditched-rabbitmq-and-replaced-it-with-a-postgres-queue


Making most of Java: Features that you should use as a Java developer – MICROIDEATION

Tags: tech, programming, java

Need to update your Java knowledge because it evolved quite a bit? Here is a little list of the features to focus on.

https://blog.microideation.com/2023/04/05/supercharge-your-java-development-must-know-advanced-features-for-every-java-dev/


Inspirel - Articles - Testing Allocation Failures

Tags: tech, memory, tests, c++

Often overlooked in test cases. Still it’s not that complicated to setup.

http://www.inspirel.com/articles/Testing_Allocation_Failures.html


Quickly formatting a stack of commits

Tags: tech, git, tools

Neat git trick, could be useful from time to time.

https://blog.waleedkhan.name/formatting-a-commit-stack/


Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams) | Stay SaaSy

Tags: tech, management

I’m not necessarily convinced by all of those. Still there are interesting ballpark numbers I didn’t have on my radar as far as management goes.

https://staysaasy.com/management/2023/03/20/numbers-to-manage-by.html


Two types of software engineers - by Thorsten Ball

Tags: tech, team, engineering

Another way to look at the fact that software engineering is a team sport. Missing this fact can lead to problems.

https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/two-types-of-software-engineers


Re-thinking Presentations. - by Rishad Tobaccowala

Tags: presentation, business, meetings

Hm… interesting framework. Especially for me, I know I tend to be too verbose. Definitely something I’m willing to try.

https://rishad.substack.com/p/re-thinking-presentations


Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars

Tags: science, physics, astronomy

This is a surprising and fascinating discovery. The scale of such events is mind bending.

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-010



Bye for now!

Thursday, 13 April 2023

Today, we bring you a quick report on the Maui Project’s progress after our previous 2.2.2 release; here you will find some detailed information on the new features, bug fixes, and improvements that have been made to the Maui set of apps and frameworks.

To follow the Maui Project’s development or say hi, you can join us on Telegram: https://t.me/mauiproject.

We are present on Twitter and Mastodon:

What’s new?

Besides the common bug fixes, some of the highlights include a refactor and cleanup of some of the MauiKit Frameworks, and new and improved Maui Apps, with support for true black color style, improved startup times, faster GPS scanning, more options in the settings app, and a brand new QPA Theme plugin for Cask to make Qt apps look and feel better under Maui Shell, among many other tweaks and refinements.

On the road to Maui 3. Focused on the framework and the apps. working on the new apps to bring them up paired with the most stable ones.

Porting to Qt6

MauiMan and MauiKit will be the two first projects to be ported, the progress so far has not been very active but now that all Plasma and KDE Libraries are now Qt6 in master, work on this area will be resumed.

https://invent.kde.org/maui/mauikit/-/issues/35

Maui Shell

For this new development cycle, the focus is on the MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps, however, a few fixes will land in the stack of the Maui Shell. Here are a few of the highlights so far.

Cask

  • Fix bugs on dragging around CSD surfaces.
  • Now uses the new MauiMan InputDevices keymap properties.
  • Now uses the new QPA Theme and set the right env var to make use of it.
  • Other Qt applications now look better with the new Maui QPA Theme.
  • Tweaked the padding of the Chrome title bars.

Maui Settings

  • The Theme module view has been refactored and split into subpages for better readability.
  • Added a new sub-page to support picking custom color schemes.
  • New QPA Theme plugin.
  • Added a new Fonts subpage in Theme.
  • Added entry to pick a custom wallpaper source directory in the Background module view.
  • Organize the sidebar modules by categories.
  • Can now filter the sidebar categories with keywords.
  • Display an error message when a module could not be loaded correctly.
  • Added the new InputDevices modules view with initial support for keyboard keymap options.
  • Tweaked the About module view.
  • Added a filter field for the Icons subpage.

 

 

MauiMan

  • The Theme module gained new props for the fonts: DefaultFont, SmallFont, and MonospaceFont.
  • Initial work has been started for the InputDevices module, starting with the keyboard keymaps options.

MauiKit Frameworks

MauiKit Core components have seen many fixes and improvements, from consistency in the UI and UX department, fixes in binding loops bugs, implementation cleanups, and new features or existing ones being exposed.

Overall you will notice an even more cohesive usage of padding, margins, and spacing in elements and content views. More work towards making it perfectly suitable for desktop and mobile use.

Gained support for two new styles: Inverted and TrueBlack, among many other fixes listed down below:

 

 

Core

  • The FlexLisItem control is now based on a Grid allowing finer control over the layout. The property columns is exposed to determine the initial layout, and child items can now be positioned using the attached properties from Layout. By default, the FlexListItem has 2 columns in wide mode and goes to 1 column on constrained widths, but if you need to position more items you can increment the number of columns.
  • Fixed the Android Gradle build files referencing the manifest.
  • The Style font properties were refined and no longer use bad point sizes. Now the font properties rely on the wide system preferences for the default font, small font, and monospaced font, this is done via the QPA Theme plugin. As a result of the refactoring now all Maui Apps will correctly redraw the fonts when they’re changed from the system settings.
  • Correct the size and style of the Switch control for consistency.
  • React to icon theme changes from the system settings.
  • Use the QPA style hints and expose some of them in the Style object, such as whether to show icons in menus: Maui.Style.menusHaveIcons.
  • Fixed the ComboBox popup implicit height.
  • New controls added: FontPicker and FontPickerDialog, which allow picking font family, best-fitted sizes, style, and filters for only monospaced fonts; and display a preview.
  • Now the rendering of the buttons and menu items contents no longer uses the QQC2 hidden implementation and instead uses the new IconLabel control.
  • Fixes to the color styles: dark, light, and custom. The custom style uses the Plasma custom color scheme definitions from files.
  • Fixed the masking area of the image in the IconItem control.
  • Removed the BasicToolButton, now that all buttons use the new Iconlabel implementation.
  • Chip control now is checkable and no longer displays tooltips unless needed.
  • The TabView control has been refactored and now using it is much easy, besides adding new tabs dynamically via the functions, tabs can now also be declared as children and it will work. Also, there is no longer the need to set the child tab sizes, the TabView will resize the children to fit. In the refactoring process, there were also fixes for the DnD reordering of tabs and focusing. The TabViewInfo attached properties gained new props: TabViewInfo.tabIcon and TabViewInfo.tabColor.
  • The MauiKit-based apps now have a new true black color scheme alternative, that can be activated from the app itself using the Maui.Style.trueBlack option, or globally from MauiMan.
  • Maintain a uniform height for the ToolActions control.
  • A few new CSD styles have been added, and the Dynamic one, which relied on applet-window-buttons, has been removed.
  • New ToastArea for in-app notifications, which allows having multiple notifications stacked. This is better than the previous implementation based on a Dialog. The ToastArea can be easily dismissed and individual notifications can be swiped off via touch or closed via mouse clicks.
  • Added notification sounds taken from the free Material resources.
  • Fixes the FloatingButton control sizing.

FileBrowsing

  • Fixes to the Tagging DB thread-safe implementation.
  • Tweak the TagDelegates and TagBar controls.
  • Fixed the FileBrowser focus issues.
  • Nicer FileBrowser dialogs.

ImageTools

  • Make Tesseract and Leptonica required dependencies.
  • Refactored the messy pointers implementation of the Geolocation classes and make it thread-safe.

Terminal – New!

  • Fixed the issue with double pasting text
  • Updated the custom adaptive color scheme, from picking it from a file to being declared in QML.
  • The Adaptive color scheme now works better, by checking the brightness and other factors.
  • The property hasActiveProcess now has a notify signal.
  • Added new property: readOnly for cases when the terminal should not receive any user inputs, but still can use methods such as sendText or sendKeyPress, etc…
  • Support highlighting search results in the history.
  • Tweaked the search bar, with a dedicated button to jump through finds and more options.
  • Added a virtual keyboard toggle floating button for mobile devices.

Maui Apps

Although in this new release cycle the focus was on Maui Shell projects, many of the Maui Apps received some love: new features, improvements, and updates.

Index

  • Browser items focus issues have been fixed.
  • A bug from the selection bar causing a failure to perform actions has been fixed.
  • The PathBar arrow delegates are now better renderer antialias.
  • Updated to use the new MauiKit ToastArea notifications.

Pix

  • New layout with a global sidebar for navigation.
  • Faster lookup of the GPS locations using concurrency.
  • The new sidebar now lists tags, sources, and known categories.
  • Split the viewer from the collection browser for faster startup time when only opening an image in the viewer.
  • Escape keyboard shortcuts to go back from the browser.
  • Fixes the navigation patterns, from the browser to the viewer.

Nota

  • Fix crashing issues with the places sidebar under Android when external SD cards are present.
  • Tweak the settings dialog entries order.
  • Check the existence of a directory before opening the file dialog in such path.
  • Escape keyboard shortcuts for exiting the recent documents view.
  • Updated to the latest MauiKit changes.
  • Collection views now display location tags if any are found.

Station

  • Support for finding text and highlighting the results.
  • Display warnings when trying to close a view with a running process.
  • Display warning when trying to close the app but a process in some views is still running.
  • Extend the translucency effect to the tab bar.
  • Use the new MauiKit FontPicker control to pick a new font.
  • Use the new MauiMan style property MonospacedFont as a default font.
  • Fixes issues when focusing the terminal and opening the virtual keyboard on mobile devices.
  • Make MauiKit-Terminal a required package.
  • Added a placeholder message when there are no tabs opened.
  • Added alerts when a process has been finished making use of the new Mauikit ToastArea notifications.
  • Fixes the virtual keyboard not being opened when the terminal gets focused.
  • Refactored the translucency entry to use a switch instead of a slider.

 

Paleta

  • Updated to latest MauiKit changes.
  • Notify using the new ToastArea.
  • Display colors WCAG contrast ratio.

Bonsai

  • Added support for more action commands, such as pull, stash, and status.
  • Refactor the Project object to allow quick cloning of new projects.
  • Now uses libkommit library instead of previous libgit2-based wrappers.

Fiery

  • Now uses sidebar navigation for browsing the collection sources.

Arca

  • Initial support for creating new archives from within the app.

And the rest of the fixes to the rest of the applications…

 

That’s it for now. Until the next blog post, that will be a bit closer to the 3.0.0 stable release.

 

To follow the Maui Project’s development or say hi, you can join us on Telegram: https://t.me/mauiproject.

We are present on Twitter and Mastodon:

New release schedule

The post Maui Report 22 appeared first on MauiKit — #UIFramework.

My second release of the day: Kirigami Addons 0.8.0. This release contains a few new components.

AbstractMaximizeComponent

This is part of the org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.components module and is a popup that covers the entire window to show some items. This is already used in NeoChat and Tokodon to magnify image and videos.

Thanks James Graham for developing the initial version and upstreaming it to Kirigami-addons.

Maximized image in NeoChat
Maximized image in NeoChat

Convergent SpinBox

Another new component is the convergent SpinBox from the org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.mobileform module.

This is just a normal spinbox on desktop.

Spinbox on desktop with small touch targets
Spinbox on desktop with small touch targets

But on Plasma Mobile/Android the touch target becomes bigger.

Spinbox on desktop with larger touch targets
Spinbox on desktop with larger touch targets

Others

Aside from this two components this release contains some small bugfixes and other minor API improvememts.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Plasma Mobile matrix channel (#plasmamobile:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

And in case, you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

I’m happy to announce the initial release of Arianna. Arianna is a small ePub reader application I started with Niccolo a few months ago. Like most of my open source applications, it is built on top of Qt and Kirigami.

Arianna is both an ePub viewer and a library management app. Internally, Arianna uses Baloo to find your existing ePub files in your device and categorize them.

Library view
Library view

The library view will keep track of your reading progress and find new books as soon as you download them.

If your book library is particularly big, you can either use the internal search functionality, or look through the various categories and find books grouped by genre, publisher or author.

Library search popup showing a few search results
Library search popup showing a few search results

Library grouped by authors
Library grouped by authors

The actual reader is quite basic as its only function is to show the content of the book. That said, it does have features like a progress bar to keep track of your reading progress and also lets you navigate within the book.

It is also fully navigable with the keyboard.

Ebook reader showing the book content
Ebook reader showing the book content

Another feature allows you to search within a book for a specific word.

Ebook reader showing the book content
Ebook reader showing the book content

Get it

Arianna will soon be available in Flathub (once the submittion is accepted). Please also ask your distribution to package Arianna.

Credits

This application would have not been possible without the previous work carried out by Foliate, from whom I copied and adapted the epub.js integration, and Peruse from whom I copied and adapted the library management code. Finally I would like to thank Šimon Rataj who made numerous contribution and fixed multiple bugs.

Arianna is also translated in multiple languages, thanks to some wonderful translators. Here is the alphabethically sorted list: Basque, British English, Catalan, Czech, Dutsch, Finish, French, German, Georgian, Hungarian, Interlingua, Mandarin, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Valencian.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Arianna matrix channel (#arianna:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I also regularly post about my progress on Arianna (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)

And in case, you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Tuesday, 11 April 2023

After a very long pause, I am happy to announce the release of Nanonote 1.4.0.

Nanonote is a minimalist note-taking application. It consists of a text area, a context menu and... that's about it!

It's handy to jot down short term notes, as a temporary place to collect copy'n'paste blocks, to draft a long response for an instant messaging app without having to fear pressing Enter too soon or any other use you can come up with!

TODO lists

Nanonote can also be used to write TODO lists. This is even better now in 1.4.0 thanks to the new task feature from Daniel Laidig, which lets you quickly create and toggle checkable tasks with Ctrl+Enter.

tasks.webm

Markdown-like headings

Nanonote is not a Markdown editor, but I often found myself separating notes with Markdown-like headings. Issue #43, convinced me to add some light styling for headings:

Markdown-like headings

More changes

For a complete list of changes, have a look at the CHANGELOG.

Get it!

You can find .deb, .rpm, macOS dmg and Windows installers on the release page.

For Linux users, Nanonote is now also available on Flathub.

KDE Connect was designed 10 years ago (!) with Android smartphones as one of our first supported platforms. Because of that, when designing the KDE Connect protocol we had to work around many technical limitations that Android had back in its infancy.

This year I will be working on a project named “KDE Connect discovery and transport protocol improvements” that received a grant from the NLnet foundation as part of the NGI Assure fund. This grant will allow me to work full time in KDE Connect, with the goal of updating the protocol and apps to modern standards.

Below are the 3 main areas that will improve thanks to this and become KDE Connect 2.0 (even though some changes will show up sooner, because we release early, release often).

Reliability

The strength of KDE Connect (compared to some of the non-free alternatives that popped up in these last 10 years) is that KDE Connect only uses your local network for communication and doesn’t need intermediary servers in “the cloud“. This adds a challenge: devices running KDE Connect have to discover each other in the network before they can talk to each other.

Discovery is possible in the current protocol using UDP broadcasts, but the state of the art nowadays is to use multicast DNS (mDNS) instead, which is more reliable and less often blocked by the network configuration. We wanted (and tried) to adopt mDNS for a while, but it was a a bigger endeavour than what we could tackle.

By focussing full time on this, my goal is to implement an mDNS backend for KDE Connect on all supported platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS) before fall this year. Wish me luck!

Security

Before Android 5, only TLSv1 and a limited set of cipher suites could be used. We always try to stay compatible with old devices and to fight the programmed obsolescence that plagues modern technology, but that meant keeping the KDE Connect protocol compatible with insecure encryption protocols.

Starting with KDE Connect v1.22 for Android, we now require Android 5 or later so we can drop compatibility with insecure encryption in all the KDE Connect implementations (and not only Android). In addition to that, we are reviewing and updating the dependencies we bundle as part of the app to make sure we have the latest security patches.

Later this year, and also thanks to NLnet, we will get a security audit by Radically Open Security. This will be the second time KDE Connect is audited, after the openSUSE security team did so in 2020.

Accessibility

We recently adopted Material 3 in the Android app (thanks Dmitry Yudin for doing most of the work!) and KDE as a whole is getting ready to migrate our desktop apps to Qt6. These times are a perfect opportunity to review the accessibility of our user interfaces, and for that NLnet is helping us get an accessibility audit by the HAN University also later this year.

All in all, exciting times for the KDE Connect project! Stay tuned for future updates :)

Sunday, 9 April 2023

Testing various functionalities of Tokodon’s Main Timeline.

This is a continuation of my previous blog post where I shared my mid-journey experience while being a Season of KDE mentee.

Week 7-8:

These weeks were spent testing interaction buttons and different types of statuses.

My first task was to write a test for boost, favourite, and bookmark interaction buttons in Tokodon to see if they worked as intended. For this, I identified the behaviour of different buttons using accerciser and then added the missing accessibility description for the respective buttons. I then wrote an appium test as part of TimelineTest to assert if the buttons worked as intended.

Next was testing the different types of statuses, Tokodon has support for two types of statuses normal and spoiler status, spoiler status is just a normal status with a spoiler text and an option to hide or unhide the spoiler text. To check whether the status had a spoiler, I checked if the length of the spoiler text is equal to zero (root.spoilerText.length == 0) if the conditional gave a True value, I assigned the accessibility description(Accessible.description) as Normal Status else a Spoiler Status. The final code for setting the accessibility description was Accessible.description: root.spoilerText.length == 0 ? i18n("Normal Status") : i18n("Spoiler Status");, which I then verified using accerciser if it pointed to the correct place. Once I had the accessibility description set for the respective status, I expanded the TimelineTest to include a new test for asserting the accessible description of the statuses in the Main Timeline, We consider the test as passed if we find the two status types.

Week 9-10:

These weeks were spent fixing the build errors after rebase and checking different types of media-attachments in timelinetest.

My mentor Carl Schwan helped me rebase work/sok/offline-tokodon to the latest master so that I could work on the latest changes, which led Tokodon to stop building due to some build and dependencies error, so the subsequent week was spent on fixing various errors which I tackled by comparing the work/sok/offline-tokodon branch with the master branch and with previous commits, my mentor Carl was always available to give me clues whenever I felt stuck.

Once all the build errors were fixed and Tokodon was able to build successfully, I worked on adding tests for testing different types of media attachments on statuses, for which I referred to mastodon’s documentation to see what response is received while requesting different kinds of media attachment, which I then integrated into the already present statuses.json file, after which I was successful in displaying different kinds of media attachment.

Once all the different types of media attachments were visible, I expanded the TimelineTest test to include testing of media attachments by asserting whether the different types of media attachments were visible.

The final TimelineTest after implementing the above tasks can be seen in the gif below.

searchboxtest

This is a call for people out there to help us test the major version upgrades on Fedora KDE via Discover.

In short: no more Dnf System Upgrade for us!

A bit of context/history: for those of you who follow Nate’s blog you might already know what I am talking about. Thanks to the awesome work done by aleasto on this MR, we closed this bug.

There are, of course, a few quirks to solve but essentially it works.

The @kdesig team has enabled a COPR repository for those who want to help us test the upgrades from F37 to F38.

BIG FAT WARNING: Fedora 38 is still in BETA

I will now explain shorty what are the steps you need to follow to perform the upgrade via Discover:

First enable our COPR:

Now open Discover, go to the Update tab, click on Refresh and eventually on Update All:

Click on Restart Now to trigger the installation of our patched discover

Once you reboot, open Discover again and after a few seconds click on Upgrade to Fedora Linux 38:

Switch to the Update tab and wait until the progress bar finishes. Finally click on Update All:

Now be patient as many packages will need to be downloaded. When it finishes, you will be asked for your password:

Important note: there is a known bug which might trigger an error message at this point. If you see it, don’t panic, just close the message and click on Update All again. This time everything should work.

Time to Reboot, grab a coffee and after a few minutes… you shall boot into Fedora 38!!!

Please try it out and give us feedback on our Matrix room 🙂

Looking forward to your feedback!