collect.kde.org

I am about to leave Berlin to go back home for almost an entire week before heading off agian to Taiwan. While visiting wiht my good friends Marco and Sebas over beer I finished installing Synchrotron on the server the amazing (and award winning!) KDE sys admin team allocated it for.

Synchrotron is a simple way to offer Open Collaboration Services on top of a git repository. You commit to the git repository and in a few minutes time (configurable) Synchrotron will add it to the OCS service. Plasma will be using this to ensure that we can update Javascript addons on the fly. This is most important when online services change, such as how the BBC UK Met weather service changes the other year. KDevelop will be using it to offer single click downloads of API documentation.

There is a lot of ways that Synchrotron could be made even beter, such as internationalization based on HTTP requests or supporting multiple git repositories for the sources.

In any case, for KDE software: if you have an application that could use a way to push new or updated data or content (Javascript, documents, data, etc.) you can put your data into the synchrotron-sources repository and they will magically show up via OCS ready for integration with your application's GUI using the KNewStuff library. Let me know if you need any help getting started. :)

This is a very nice way to end my time here at the amazingly productive Berlin Desktop Summit. I'm leaving with a smile on my face.

Oh, and did I mention that we fixed (or at least we're 99% sure it's fixed) the bug in the taskbar which causes blank spaces to show up when using "Only show windows on the current desktop"? Turns out it was also possible to duplicate with other similar "Only show ..." features. Thanks to Alex Fiestas for pushing on me to fix it. It's one of the half dozen or so annoyances that I fixed, added to the innumerable ones others fixed, in KDE software while here at Berlin Desktop Summit.

All while we move forward with Frameworks 5.0. All while Plasma Active is looking better than ever on hardware like the ExoPC Intel gave out the other day: it took one evening to install it and work out kinks to get it to an easily usable and demoable state.

This is an amazingly exciting moment in our community. 2012 here we come!