November 2010 wrap-up

written on Sunday, November 28, 2010

About one month ago I announced I would be reducing my working days to four in order to spend more time on the projects which interested me. I explained I would be asking for donations in order to compensate part of the income reduction. A common request I received from people who seemed to be interested in donating was to know what I would be working on. This makes sense to me: you want to know what you pay for. Therefore I decided to start a monthly wrap-up post, summarizing what I did in the last month and announcing what I plan to do in the next one. Note that I reserve the right to do something different from what I announced if I find something more interesting/important or if I simply run out of time. I will however try to stick with what I announced as much as possible. Think of these announcements as "development forecasts"...

Here is what I did in November:

• Some work on Gwenview:
  • Implemented a "share" button
  • Fixed bug #251946 "Crash on close"
  • Fixed bug #236577 "Using two time save as, overwrites original file". That one was really nasty. The fix has been backported to 4.5.
  • Fixed wrong name in sidebar after save as
  • Brought back the "rating indicator": a tiny overlay displayed over the image when you adjust its rate in view mode and the sidebar is hidden. Quite handy in full-screen mode.
• Consistency cleanup: ensure applications which provide menu items to show/hide UI elements always use checkable items and do not alter the text (ie: when checking the "Show Foo" item, do not turn its text into "Hide Foo"):
  • Fixed text of checkable menu items getting altered in Konqueror, KNode, Umbrello and KUser
  • Fixed KLettres and KMag to use generic kdelibs code to toggle menubars and toolbars instead of their own implementation (less code, more consistency and no show/hide text problem)
• Reworked the audio preview in the file dialog

What I plan for December:

• Continue bug fixing in Gwenview
• Some UI polish on kdepim (Even if it is going to be a bit limited because we passed string freeze for KDE SC 4.6)
• Fix blurriness of the progress pie-chart in the networkmanagement Plasma applet
• Start a series of blog posts about common UI mistakes in KDE applications

If you like what happened this month or are interested in what is planned for the next one, consider supporting my work.