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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Another new component is the convergent SpinBox from the
org.kde.kirigamiaddons.labs.mobileform module.
This is just a normal spinbox on desktop.
But on Plasma Mobile/Android the touch target becomes bigger.
Aside from this two components this release contains some small bugfixes and other minor API improvememts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another feature allows you to search within a book for a specific word.
Arianna will soon be available in Flathub (once the submittion is accepted). Please also ask your distribution to package Arianna.
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.
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.
You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.
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!
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.
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:
For a complete list of changes, have a look at the CHANGELOG.
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 :)
This is a continuation of my previous blog post where I shared my mid-journey experience while being a Season of KDE mentee.
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.
JBB
albertvaka
@k3ys:matrix.orgtimelinetest.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.
TimelineTest after implementing the above tasks can be seen in the gif below.
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!
It’s been a month since my first post about my work as KDE Software Platform Engineer, so let’s have a look at what I have been doing since then.
The scope of what falls under “Software Platform” work is arguably quite wide. I like to describe it as “Taking care of everything needed so that people can build and enjoy awesome software”. Of course that often means hacking on source code, but that is by no means the only thing I do. A significant part of what I do is talking to other people, discussing ideas, reviewing code, making architecture decisions, documenting things, triaging bugreports, and just generally being useful to others. A lot of this work is strategic in nature and the benefits will only show in the long term, but some short-term improvements happend this month also.
My main area of focus was working on polishing the Plasma 6 and Frameworks 6 stability. This means staying on top of things that happen throughout the stack as well as squashing remaining issues. As a result several more projects now have CI builds against the latest development branches of frameworks. Furthermore, I fixed several places where coexistence of Qt5/KF5-based and Qt6/KF6-based software was causing issues.
Qt is an vital part of our software stack, so an important part of being KDE Software Platform Engineer is being involved in its development. Last month I submitted a patch to Qt, fixing a build issues affecting our code. Besides that I have also reported some bugs that were affecting KDE and participated in code review. Another important piece of our stack is our Qt5 Patch Collection that collects bugfix patches for Qt5. I contributed two such patches by backporting them from upstream.
In terms of documentation I have published two blog posts recently. The first explains how to build the development version of Plasma using kdesrc-build. While doing that I have also fixed some related issues in kdesrc-build to make sure building things is as smooth as possible. The second one is explaining some technical details about how theming and platform integration works in Qt/KDE apps. I hope this helps with some of the discussions around this topic that are coming up once in a while.
Besides these “Bigger Picture” topics I have also worked on some concrete enhancements for KDE software. With a series of changes various system windows no longer display an internal and technical application name like “Portal” or “KDE Daemon” in their window title. I have also restored the ability to configure the time interval for determining whether two mouse clicks should be interpreted as a double click. This was present in the legacy mouse settings, but got lost in the transition to libinput. Another thing that got improved was the VPN support in our network settings. When importing a VPN configuration fails Plasma now shows the relevant error message, giving you at least some indication about what’s wrong. Futhermore I fixed a crash when importing VPN configurations when the relevant NetworkManager plugin is missing.
Another area I was working on is our powermanagement settings. Currently they are quite complex, both in terms of UX and implementation. We are working on improving this, which involves quite a bit of technical ground work.
A month from now the Plasma team will meet in Augsburg, Germany for the first in-person Plasma Sprint since 2019. I have been planning and organizing this event. This will be an important opportunity to plan for an awesome Plasma future. However, such meetings are not cheap, so please consider donating to KDE e.V. to support it.
