The FOSSASIA Summit 2023, held from April 13-15 at the Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore, As an exhibitor for KDE at the FOSSASIA Summit 2023, I had an incredible experience showcasing our latest projects, networking with industry professionals, and engaging with attendees from all walks of life. I was thrilled to be part of such an esteemed gathering of like-minded individuals, all of whom were dedicated to advancing the field of open-source software development.

For context, FOSSASIA is an organization developing open source software applications and open hardware together with a global community from its base in Asia. Its goal is to provide access to open technologies, science applications and knowledge that improve people’s lives. FOSSASIA was established 2009 by Hong Phuc Dang and Mario Behling. Visit https://fossasia.org to learn more about the summit.

Getting back to the activities, our booth at the exhibition hall was bustling with activity throughout the three-day event, as developers, engineers, students, and enthusiasts stopped by to learn more about our latest offerings. I was particularly proud to showcase our flagship product, the Plasma desktop environment, along with KDE Connect, Dolphin, Konsole and other applications and tools that we have developed for the open-source community.

As I explained the features and benefits of our software to attendees, I was struck by the level of interest and enthusiasm that they showed for our products. It was clear to me that we are making a real difference in the lives of users around the world.

Beyond showcasing our products, the event was filled with informative keynote sessions and panel discussions, featuring speakers from around the world who shared their experiences and insights on open-source software development. As an exhibitor, I was particularly impressed by the discussions on collaboration and the importance of building sustainable communities around open-source projects. It was clear to me that the open-source community is dedicated to advancing the field of software development in a collaborative and sustainable way, and I am proud to be a part of that community.

In addition to networking with other industry professionals, I also had the opportunity to engage with potential users of our software. I was delighted to see the level of interest and enthusiasm from attendees, many of whom were eager to learn more about our software and its features. As I explained the benefits of using open-source software, I was struck by the level of curiosity and enthusiasm that attendees showed for our products.

I also met some old accomplices from KDE and local technical communities from Delhi. Anu Mittal, now working at a company in Singapore, attended the conference and also spent time with me, manning the booth and talking to many visitors at our booth about KDE software. I also met Raju Devidas, a Debian developer who has been contributing to Debian for more than a decade. He was manning the Debian booth along with a few other developers from Sri Lanka.

Overall, the FOSSASIA Summit 2023 was a resounding success for me as an exhibitor for KDE. I was able to showcase our latest products, engage with attendees, and collaborate with other industry professionals. I look forward to participating in future FOSSASIA Summits and continuing to contribute to the growth and development of the open-source community.

You can find the event photos here. I hope that these photos will help you experience some of the highlights of the summit!

I will post a few photos from the album above.

Gallery

I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to KDE e.V. for sponsoring my visit to the FOSSASIA Summit 2023 as an exhibitor for KDE. Without their support, I would not have had the opportunity to showcase our latest products and engage with attendees at this important event. Their continued support for the development of open-source software and the promotion of collaborative communities is truly inspiring, and I am honored to be a part of the KDE community. I look forward to continuing to contribute to the success and growth of our community, and I am grateful for their support in helping me make this visit to FOSSASIA Summit a resounding success.

I’m happy to announce the first bugfix release of Arianna. This release contains a lot of improvements to the accessibility of Arianna. Thanks a lot to @bgtlover@linuxrocks.online who reported many accessibility issues. Aside from fixing some bugs in Arianna, this also resulted in fixes in Kirigami, Kirigami Addons and Qt, which are on a seperate release schedule so not every bug fixes is already available. I’ll write a seperate blog post which will go into the technical details.

Aside from the accessibility fixes, this release fixes a few crashes when parsing some books. Thanks to those who tried Arianna and reported bugs (with backtrace!).

And finally, this release also improve the translations coverage, with for example Galician being one of the new supported language.

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.

New Falkon version 23.04.0 is being released as part of KDE Gear.

Notable changes

There is a handful of changes in this release.

KWallet

The format under which the passwords are stored has changed from Binary to Map. The passwords can now be viewed from within KWalletManager and even edited. While editing and adding new ones I would be careful with the data field and updated that as well. (This is some Falkon password internal mechanic) The Folder under which the passwords are stored changed from Falkon to FalkonPasswords. This was done to not overwrite the old passwords and potentialy ruin them during the migration to new format.

Support for dark color scheme

Note: This is NOT browser dark mode support.

Falkon internal pages now respect the dark color scheme, if it is forced through chromium flags in environment variable.

A small demonstration can be seen below. The color scheme might not be the best since it was designed on display with weird color settings.

Changelog

• Look for spellchecking dictionaries at location specified by QTWEBENGINE_DICTIONARIES_PATH environment variable
• Show QtWebEngine version on Falkon Config page
• Implement prefers-color-scheme (dark mode) for internal pages
• Add option to enable GPU acceleration (by Hao Chi Kiang)
• PyFalkon: addBookmark - make C++ own parameters (fixes potential crash)
• KWallet: Store passwords in a map format
• History: Don’t delete all items under dates when filtering
• AdBlock: Workaround for “Blocked content” page
• AddressBar: Search with default search engine by default
• Fix crash when adding new folder to the bookmark toolbar
• Fix: Bookmarks folder disappears when moving it onto itself

Download: ffalkon-23.04.0.tar.xz (sig signed with EBC3FC294452C6D8)

Recently I started using KTimeTracker to record the time I spent working, and I really like it. So far it’s the only productivity app that meets my needs. So I began playing with porting it to Qt6.

I’m weak with algorithms, but I know my way with building programs. I made a long fluff post about compilation, even. So I was feeling confident that I would make at least some progress.

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.

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.

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:

• https://twitter.com/maui_project.
• https://mastodon.technology/@mauiproject.

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:

• https://twitter.com/maui_project.
• https://mastodon.technology/@mauiproject.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.