KDE Mobile/Sprints/November2010-Results

From KDE Community Wiki
  • Date: 18th-21st of November
  • Place: KDAB's Office - Berlin, Germany


Overview (Quarterly)

The first KDE mobile sprint had some important discussions regarding the future of KDE on the mobile devices spectrum. Most of the participants just came directly from MeeGo Conference where they received a netbook/tablet and that was the first target of the sprint: put KDE to run on the device with a nice tablet interface.

After some hours of hacking that's pretty much what was achieved: a nice and elegant user experience of KDE running on top of MeeGo on a tablet device. This showed (again) KDE's potential to run on several platforms with a great user experience. The developers also started communicating with MeeGo community to create a KDE space on OBS, so we can easily provide KDE packages.

During the sprint several discussions came up like how we could provide to all our applications that want to use QML, a simple way to use all the infrastructure we have for i18n, config files and so on. We also discussed how we could have QML components so it would be easier to build our applications. These discussions were brought to the project's mailing lists and some work have been already done: Plasma will lead this QML front while some other core changes will be discussed in a future Platform Sprint.

KDEGames got some improvements too and we could see it running on the tablet. Meanwhile, project Tagaro got some work in the direction of helping game developers to start using QML too.

This sprint was kindly hosted by KDAB's Berlin office.

Blogs

Media

Press

Achievements

  • Show off KDE running on ideaPad S10-3t (Plasma Mobile and Kontact Touch). Youtube videos are being spread.
  • Discussion about how to make it easier for applications that will use QML to have the KDE conveniences classes (i18n, KICon, KConfig, etc.). Plasma is already using that and Marco sent emails to the interested mailing lists listing several approaches that could be taken. Getting feedback on that matter right now.
  • The future of mobile UI is QML for sure. That said, how can we provide QML widgets for the desktop too? It was decided that Plasma will take the leadership on this and try out creating components and after that the rest of KDE will take a look and make a decision. This is one topic to be discussed during the proposed Platform Sprint .
  • Started talk with lbt (David Greaves) from MeeGo about a real KDE space in OBS. Right now we have accounts and Mek created a KDE project where we all can play with it. The ideal would be to have a KDE "umbrella" under OBS.
  • Packages for MeeGo were created using OBS (kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs). We were stuck with kdebase because it setup +x and +s on some files and this is considered as a security issue by OBS. Thus, our packages are generated in our chroot environment but we are not able to generate the packages in OBS.
  • KDE specs will be maintained in this KDE space (right now Mek's KDE space), using openSUSE as upstream when it's possible.
  • Work has been started as part of Project Tagaro towards a framework that chooses at runtime between QWidgets, Plasma widgets, QML elements or whatever for displaying declarative user interfaces.
  • Getting more people into packaging of KDE software on MeeGo OBS and making it compatible to the Mobile profile

Future tasks

  • UX
    • how do we make the image?
    • what exactly will the image contain?
    • what will the plasma shell be like?
    • style guide??
    • how do we promote this? (don't be smeegol)
    • will we have different KDE libs spins for the three profiles on OBS?
    • maintainability: how we create momentum and a community of good packagers that maintain it?
  • General
    • make qml widgets (first QML only then using QtComponents api)
    • export KDE convenience methods to QML (integrate QML into KDE, seaparate library depending just from kdecode)
  • Other team's sprints
    • Check that our "discoveries" get into another sprints
    • UX MeeGo (KDE / distributions) sprint
    • Design and interactions sprint (talk to seele and pinheiro)
    • Plasma sprint (Tokamak)
    • KDE platform sprint

Participants

Name Email Work
Artur Souza [email protected] Plasma/Qt-Components
Stefan Majewsky [email protected] Project Tagaro
Marco Martin [email protected] Plasma/QML/QtComponents
Volker Krause [email protected] Kontact Mobile
Till Adam [email protected] Kontact Mobile
Friedrich Kossebau [email protected] Kasten
Anselmo Melo [email protected] Plasma/Qt-Components
Stephen Kelly (partial) [email protected]
Chani [email protected] Plasma
Boud [email protected] KOffice mobile
Marijn Kruisselbrink [email protected] KOffice mobile

Feedback

Please, provide feedback sending e-mails to the project's official mailing list: [email protected]