Experiment: Short Plasma HOWTO screencasts

Being an active member in the KDE Community Forums, I regularly see users asking how to do this and that in Plasma. My usual answer is something like “Click on cashew -> [Unlock Widgets] -> Add Widgets… -> drag widgets from the “Add Widgets” dialog to desktop/panel”. Sometimes I also refer to the Plasma FAQ.

This works, but I’ve been thinking about a more… amusing way to give the answer (in lack for a better word). Inspired by the Plasma screencasts on blip.tv, I decided to make a few screencasts. In contrast to those on blip.tv, mine are very short, direct and without any text – they’re meant to simply answer one question.

A small update

For people following my The Road to KDE Devland series, I just wanted to let you know about the current status of the project. Summer holidays are almost over, and I have an exam coming up soon, which means that I haven’t had much time to study Qt or blogging recently. After the exam next week I’ll write step 4 about what I’ve accomplished in Qt – nothing big, but I promised screenshots didn’t I?

Next step is by no means the final one, but when the semester starts I’ll most likely be busy with Real Life™ again. Of course I’ll continue to give you updates of my progress, but be prepared that the time between each step will be much longer.

The interest in the series was much higher than expected. If you’re also working on becoming a KDE developer, I strongly encourage you to share your progress. If you already do, please post a link in the comments and I’ll include it in the next step. Yay.

From idea to reality

If you’ve visited KDE Brainstorm, you might have wondered what all categories are for, or how an idea is processed when it’s been posted. So I decided to make a chart that hopefully will answer your questions:

From idea to reality

The Forum Team is constantely working on improving Brainstorm – if you have any suggestions, don’t forget to post a topic in Feedback & Questions; or, if it’s a feature request, why not post it in Brainstorm? Just don’t forget to add the tag “kde brainstorm” to make it easy for the Team to find your idea.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the chart, post a comment below.

Update September 29, 2009: The updated chart can be found in Brainstorm FAQ. Click on “Take a tour“.

The Road to KDE Devland – step 3

Project Setup

This time I’ll just tell you about my project setup. You already know which books I read, but what other tools do I use to reach my goal?
First, however, I want to give attention to the following blog posts:

• thinkMoult -  The Road to KDE Devland (Moult Edition) #0
• veracity – The Road to KDE and Qt Development

It’s nice to hear about other people who walk towards the same goal, but not necessary the same road. Looking forward to hearing more from them, and I also hope to see more “The Road to …” series emerging.

KWin configuration for my netbook

As requested, here are my Window-Specific KWin settings for my netbook:

The most important items are the ones that start with “netbook”. I don’t remember why I made two items instead of one, but let’s take a look at the “maximize” setting.

Plasma – A nice weather “plasmoid” in 4 easy steps

Some time ago, a person on identi.ca asked in the KDE group which weather plasmoid people preferred. He seemed to like my suggestion, so I figured, why not share it here too?

The end result will look like this:

(but hopefully with less rain…)

As you can see, it’s an hourly forecast. It reports the weather, temperature, wind speed and direction and – most important for me – precipitation.

The Road to KDE Devland – step 2

Can anyone give me some pointers?

After one week with Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days, it feels like I have the basics of C++ down: constants and variables, functions, some operators, loops, if and switch statements etc. Object oriented programming was introduced surprisingly early (Day 6), and the memory discussion at the end of Day 5 took some time to digest, but other than that everything went smoothly.

In the second week, the book takes up a topic that I’ve found pretty hard: pointers and references. In this step, I’ll write about some of the things about pointers and references that confused me. It’s assumed that you already know the basics of pointers/references.

The Road to KDE Devland – step 1

In case you’ve missed it, the series starts with step 0.

Preparations

When I became interested in KDE development some years ago, it wasn’t very easy to find out how to start. I found a KDevelop tutorial and learned a little about C++, but that’s pretty much it. Soon other things in life took over, and I returned to just watch KDE’s progress through the Dot and Planet KDE.

This summer, when I finally have a lot of free time, I want to start over. This means that “The Road to KDE Devland” series should suit you even if you don’t have any prior knowledge about C++ or programming in general.

The Road to KDE Devland – step 0

Introduction

Want to start to develop for KDE? Sure do. But how, and where do I start? Is it even possible for me to do something this complicated? The question are many, but it’s not always easy to find the answers.

I’m just another person who wants to walk the path to “KDE Devland” – but I also want to leave something behind. Footsteps. Footsteps that other hikers can follow if they want, footsteps to show that anyone who’s motivated enough can walk this road.

Hello worl… err, Planet!

As this is my first post my first post on planet KDE (not entirely true), I figured I should introduce myself.

I’m Hans Chen, a 21-year-old long-term KDE user from Sweden. I’ve been a physics student for two years at Stockholm University but will move on to meteorology after the summer.

My interest for KDE began after finding the Commit-Digests on the Dot. Not long after I stumbled upon planet KDE, and since then I’ve been hooked – this was a project I wanted to contribute to and be a part of.

Nowadays I help out with the KDE Community Forums. Since I’m interested in programming, I currently study C++ and Qt in hope of becoming a full-fledged KDE developer someday. If you share the same wish, stay tuned – I’ll blog about my progress soon when I find the time and motivation.

You can find me on various places as Mogger (IRC, identica, openDesktop) or simply Hans (KDE Forums, Dot).