Bits from Plasma Active Sprint and future events

Hello there. New blog post just to catch up with some happenings in the last days and future events. Never been very good at introductions, so:

Plasma Active Sprint

As you might have read already, I have been joining the Plasma Active sprint in Darmstadt. Besides having seen lots of old friends and meeting new ones, we’ve had very productive discussions over the future of Plasma Active and KDE in general. Me and Martin in particular have been thinking and working a bit on the concept of Account management and Metacontacts (a very old discussion we have had in KDE Telepathy multiple times).

One thing which became clear from these discussions was that we want to foster the usage of Akonadi and Nepomuk as much as possible, to avoid reinventing several wheels especially when having to store or cache data. Martin will probably propose a GSoC me and (hopefully) somebody else will mentor about all of this. We want to make KDE a desktop/mobile shell deeply integrated with internet services and this is just the first of many steps we will take. Surely interesting times are ahead of us if you are excited about this.

There have been also several other topics of discussion which are too long (and some maybe uninteresting) to be summarized in a blog post, but one thing is sure: KDE is much more alive and kicking than ever, and the future seems really something to look forward to.

Akademy Pre-Event

From the 26th of March I will be in Tallin, Estonia, with Claudia and the local organizers to have a brief pre-event of Akademy 2012. For the occasion, I will be holding a lesson/workshop on KDE/Qt development at the Estonian IT College, which is also going to be the venue of the event. Needless to say that if you happen to be there, try not to miss it! We will also take care of studying the venue to make sure Akademy 2012 will be among the best ever!

Google Summer of Code is on!

Teo already blogged about this – KDE has been (again) accepted as an organization for GSoC for 2012! For me it is a time I am always looking forward to – this year I have not one but two awesome potential students with great skills and great ideas, ready to make KDE rock even more. Do you think you got what it takes to be part of the great number of students that every year join KDE in submitting a proposal? Then look no further: we have a huge set of ideas, and we are more than happy to welcome yours (we know a lot of people with great ideas out there, and you are probably one of them. Don’t be shy 🙂 ).

If you are serious about your application, learn from your fellow students! Every year we get an incredible amount of outstanding proposals – and they’re so many sometimes we even have to reject them. So you want to be up to the challenge. The amazing Teo cooked up a great (and funny) blog post covering everything you need to write a kick-ass proposal. I consider it as a must-read for any student who is really committed to having his project accepted in KDE.

The application period will start in a week  – get ready!

Software

There’s amazing things coming up in our software as well. I’ll write about them briefly as they deserve their own post, when time will come:

• David blogged about KDE Telepathy 0.4. It’s going to be awesome.
• I have been through some modifications of KAuth for frameworks. Some changes are slightly intrusive, but guarantee some fixes and a much improved workflow. I will tell you more in a separate blog post in the next days.
• We are trying to get serious on the Accounts thing (see Plasma Active Sprint), and hopefully we’ll be showing some results soon
• And we are trying to cook up something for artist and designers who happen to use or like KDE. Stay tuned for that, news very soon.

Hopefully that’s enough for you to look forward to further updates 🙂

~ by Dario on 17 March, 2012.