My KDE’s priorities (for the next 6 months)
Hi there !
Once again it is time for me to organize my priorities within KDE for the next 6 months, I have had to drop a few things from the list since I'm not sure how much time Solid community and KDE-España are going to take from me since the work I will be doing there is rather not technical.
So, this is my list of priorities:
Downstream:
Downstream people are those who use our stuff to produce something else, for example: distributions, developers using our libraries, designers using our icons...
A few months ago, motivated with the need of giving a better support of how BlueDevil should be packaged I started to interact a lot with people working on different distributions. Because of that I was sponsored to go to the UDS and there I finally could understand more or less how a distribution works, how Kubuntu team works/thinks etc.
So, in the next 6 months I will continue working with "downstream" focusing my efforts in organize a meeting with people from all distributions so at least we can be synchronized in the lowest common denominator.
Solid:
Solid is now the sub-community within KDE that cares about hardware. We work in quite a few areas right now like Network/Power Management, irda ...
I have to say that since last November we've pretty much catch up with other workspaces for example now people assume that KDE NetworkManager interface should work, and you know what? it does! Also our UDisk/UPower/UDev support is in my humble opinion excelkenet.
So, in the next 6 months, I want to see the Solid community growing and getting more projects into it, for example Printing or Input would be perfect candidates.
Kamoso:
Kamoso is a webcam application to take pictures and videos from cameras, this is what I call my "Pet Project". The status of Kamoso is quite good right now, we've reach the 2.0 version which is demonstrating to be a really rock solid release.
Now that he project is providing the basics (it is stable and you can take pictures/videos) is time for us to move to the next step. which can be summarize in one word: effects. To get there we've defined this abstracted roadmap:
- Kamoso 2.5: Kamoso ported to use camerabin2 (technicall stuff)
- Kamoso 3.0: Effects and maybe some QML magic :)
BlueDevil:
BlueDevil is the codename of the KDE's Bluetooth integration on which we've been working for a year now. Though the project may seem complete since it is fulfilling all the Bluetooth needs a normal user could have it is not perfect, or putting it in another word it is not excellent. So the target for the next 6 month will be reaching excellence.
- 1.0.5: i18n will be improved and a few bugs fixed.
- 1.1.1: i18n will be hugely improve, and bug fixing.
- 1.2: Most changes will be on the KIO's, also the wizard will be further improved.
- 1.3: Port the project totally to obexd, deprecating the support for obex-data-server.
Finally, between this versions we may work on plasma-active support, which basically means write QML interfaces around.
Project Silk:
From my humble point of view, the laptop/pc is becoming a complement of two things: Our gadgets (cell phones, tablets..) and the so called "Cloud". It is quite obvious that a computer without internet is only useful for those whom want to do some work on it, but for the rest of the users it would be useless. Because of that we've to accept our new role as a complement of something else and stop thinking that we're the central piece of software or that even the user care about us.
KDE's projects are doing quite a fine job integrating with the cloud, for example:
- Akonadi supports exchange servers and of course Google
- KDE-Telepathy is near the corner bringing to the table IM integration
- Kipi-Plugins supporting facebook/picasa/...
- Kamoso supporting youtube
- Choqok and Plasma on microblogging...
Despite all that, we're still failing on truly integrating these services into the desktop. To start fixing it here comes my proposal:
We need a central place (maybe a KCM) where the user can configure her/his online accounts and we will do the rest, for example:
When I add my Google account, the KCM should offer me to auto-configure my account in: Telepathy (Chat), Akonadi (synchronize calendar, contact, rss, todo's...), Choqok (microblogging)... Also some applications like Kamoso should be able to access to that account and use it for example to upload videos to Youtube.
Also, some good integration with Rekonq would be awesome.
I don't have concrete plans of when or how I will do this but almost sure it will start just as a proof of concept (I don't have time to do more).
XRandR:
Last but not least here comes my new obsession: fix the overall kde-workspace XRandR support. Right now our workspace supports XRandR more or less well but it is far from being good enough for me. I will publish an entire blogspot about my plans here but bottom line: I will try to fix everything for 4.8.
Well this is it, let's see how much I can finally accomplish and see you by the end of the year.