Well, I have not blogged anything in quite a while. Now I'm a fully-fledged university student so I have a plenty of time (apparently). This means two things: partying and working on Kubuntu. I believe the former does not require any explanation so I will allow myself to jump to the latter part. Now that Quantal is done and released there is nothing else to do than fully focus on the development of the Raring Ringtail!
The Developer Summit over at Bella Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark was a very productive one. The whole Kubuntu Team made many decisions which set the path we are going to walk for the upcoming 6 months of development. But before I introduce you to all the awesome features we are aiming to get into Kubuntu 13.04 I am going to indulge myself in writing down all the smaller and bigger thing which made this Summit another unforgettable experience. I would lie of I said I had no interest in Valve plenary because the gamer inside me screamed: "Go there you bloody idiot!". Steam for Linux is a unique thing that will bring many popular games to the Linux world. The Nexus 7 Q&A session was pretty amazing as well, I was really impressed by the progress ogra and his team made to bring Ubuntu to the tablet world, once again, good job. I also found myself one way or another sitting in the new Packaging Manual session which aimed to improved the documentation for new developers, many great points were made and a wide variety of subjects were suggested to be explained in the guide. The videos will also see some improvements, namely new topics and more translations. I also had fun (fixing typo in binary package description - sudden nostalgia attack) during the Packaging Guide Testing session and Introduction to Ubuntu Development where we got a huge amount of feedback from people using the guide. It is not possible to skip the social side of the event -this UDS I did not have the opportunity to chat with as many people as I did in Budapest however I still got to learn many new things. There is nothing more surprising than having Daniel Holbach greet you with perfectly pronounced "Dzień dobry"! UDS is also a good time to talk with upstream developers, in my case it was mostly KDE developers - many thanks to Sune Vuorela and Albert Astrales Cid for feedback on Project Neon. It was also the first time I met Rohan Garg (a.k.a shadeslayer-y-u-break-everything) and Steve Riley in person. Steve is not only Master Overlord of the Kubuntu Forums but also a pretty interesting American guy, we've been exchaning friendly jabs back and forth however I have to admit that he won exchanges most of the times, though I managed to get back at him few times. It goes without saying that meeting the rest of the Kubuntu Team was fun. Here is a photo of the Kubuntu Team:
Well then, setting my babbling aside time for some exciting new about our plans for the upcoming release of Kubuntu!
First and foremost come the Qt 5!
Qt 5.0 will be the foundation for a new way of developing applications, where Qt Quick is in the center of Qt. Qt 5 continues to offer all of the power of native Qt C++. Qt 5 also aims not to be disruptive for existing code developed for Qt 4. Harnessing the full capabilities of OpenGL/OpenGL ES graphics acceleration Qt 5 will offer very sophisticated and elaborate user experience. Do look forward to it! For more information about Qt 5 you can go to Qt Project Wiki
Next, and not less important is Plasma Active Three!
Plasma Active is an interface designed for all types of tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices. Designed for personalized productivity, a complete mobile experience right from the first start-up. The Activities function gives users a natural way to organize and access applications, files and information. Compared to previous versions, Plasma Active Three provides a noticeably better experience with its enhanced and expanded set of apps, improved performance and a new virtual keyboard - Maliit. For more information and a demo you can visit project's webpage or read an excellent post by Aaron Seigo - one of the Plasma Active project founding members.
Followed by, Nexus 7 images!
See this smooth guy? I'm pretty sure you find him cool. We also think he is cool, but we think he could be much more cooler running Plasma Active. That said Kubuntu 13.04 will provide images targeted at Nexus 7. Those images will, of course, include the aforementioned Plasma Active so you can try the awesome on your own device! Stay tuned for more information as the work is still in progress.
Of course apart from obvious focus on the mobile world we will also provide latest version of KDE aiming to give you the purest, rock-solid KDE experience on your desktops, laptops, netbooks and whatnot. It is also worth mentioning that Steve Riley bravely volunteered to bring our documentation up to date. That's of course not everything, we also have plans for many different smaller features and fixes such as improved input methods, MTP support, Plasma Media Center and voice recognition (powered by simon-listens).
That's all from me, time to get my tools, set up some pbuilders, get some Dr. Pepper and get to work!