KDE.news

KDE e.V. Joins Open Invention Network

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

KDE e.V. is pleased to announce that we have joined the Open Invention Network community as a licensee.

Open Invention Network was founded as a way to help defend the Linux ecosystem, and by extension much of the Free and Open Source software world, from the risks associated with software patents. Patents owned by Open Invention Network are available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System, creating an umbrella of protection for its members.

“We view an OIN license as one of the key methods through which open source innovators can deter patent aggression,” said Adriaan de Groot, vice president of KDE. “We are committed to freedom of action in Linux, and in taking a license we help to address the threat from companies that support proprietary platforms to the exclusion of open source initiatives, and whose behaviors reflect a disdain for inventiveness and collaboration.”

“Given its leadership in creating a user-friendly computing experience, including its advanced graphical desktop for the Linux community, we are pleased to have KDE become a licensee,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network. “By doing so, KDE affirms its continued support for open source. We applaud their foresight in taking this step to support both itself and the open source community broadly.”

While KDE maintains our position against software patents, this development provides an additional safety net for KDE when it comes to the risks Free Software is facing from such patents today.

2010 Plasma Javascript Jam Session Winners Announced

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Submissions for the Plasma Javascript Jam Session closed at the end of March and the judging commenced, with the community joining the judging panel as a collective "5th member". Every Plasmoid that was submitted was a success and a joy to try out: congratulations to all of those who participated.

It was a competition with prizes up for grabs, however, so we had to make the required tough calls and declare some winners. Without further ado, here are your 2010 Javascript Jam Session competition crown bearers!

Top 2010 Javascript Jammer: Ontje Lünsdorf with Aquarium

Combining clean code, good design and a fun idea, Ontje's Aquarium claimed the top spot on the podium. Maybe it was how it drove us to feed our fish hoping to breed the more elusive species or the nice implementation of the Boid algorithm that did the trick, but Ontje will be receiving a brand new Nokia N900, an invite including airfare and lodging to a KDE event and a KDE T-Shirt for his efforts.

1st Runner Up: Nikita Melnichenko for Make Progress!

This clever Plasmoid is a technically solid, highly intuitive and very useful creation. The judges found it easy to figure out how to use and the looks were outstanding. Nikita will also be making progress of his own to a KDE event (airfare and lodging included) with his new KDE T-Shirt as a result!

2nd Runner Up: Manuel Unglaub's Shortlog

A simple and fresh approach to storing (and finding!) those little snippets, notes and jewels, Shortlog shot Manuel into the 2nd runner up spot. As with Make Progress!, this Plasmoid captured attention for its easy of use and high utility. Hopefully Manuel, inspired by the KDE T-Shirt he'll be receiving for his efforts, will continue to explore the possibilities of his Plasmoid concept pushing it to new heights.

The Bragging Rights Titles

There were also three titles up for grabs that will entitle the creators of those Plasmoids bragging rights for 2010.

The Beauty Queen title was reserved for the most stunning Plasmoid in form and function and was claimed by Petri Damstén for his Plasma Dice creation. Petri demonstrated his artistic chops and a command of the animation framework to rise above the rest in this metric.

The first place winner, Aquarium, also earned Ontje the title of Technical Giant while the Creative Genius crown has been placed on Nikita's brow for Make Progress!

All three of the bragging rights titles were close races, with Andrew Stromme's Guitar Tuner and Shortlog coming in second more than once!

Kudos To All, And To All .. Start Thinking of Next Year?

Each and every one of the contestents is a winner for participating and sharing the fruits of their passion and creativity with all of us. We have a number of excellent new tools and toys to keep us busy and amuse us and the Plasma Javascript support has grown and improved as a result as well.

This year's event was so successful that we are already seriously considering running another such competition next year, perhaps even extending it to runner plugins and DataEngines written in Javascript. So keep your thinking caps nearby, those fingers dripping with Plasma and Javascript and hopefully we'll see even more excellent submissions in 2011!

You Be The Judge: Plasma Javascript Jam Session

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Plasma Javascript Jam Session is a friendly competition that aims to reward creators of original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition. The competion concluded on March 31st with 11 successful submissions making the deadline. Judging has commenced, and it will not be easy: many excellent submissions were sent in ranging from the entertaining to the highly useful. Ranging in size from a few dozen lines to a few thousand lines of Javascript code, the submissions showcase a variety of ideas and possibilities.

.. and the nominees are

Here, along with a description by the authors, are the competing Plasmoids in alphabetical order:

Alarm Clock, by Drake Justice

An alarm clock widget with configurable alarms and a snooze function.

Aquarium, by Ontje Lünsdorf

This applet tries to simulate the behavior of fish swarms. It's based on the Boid algorithm from Craig Reynolds. The algorithm has been enhanced with feeding and mating behaviors. A very simple form of evolution is also modelled. So feed your fishes properly and see what the sea holds in store for you! Who knows, maybe you will even spot the famous jaguar shark!

Dice, by Petri Damstén

A Plasmoid that lets you roll dice, toss a coin, etc. Basically any simple random thing you can make an SVG for.

Filtered Reddit, by Petras Zdanavičius

A Plasmoid for Reddit lurkers. It lets you re-filer Reddits even more:

Listing Order
Min score required for link
One plasmoid for each reddit
To show or not to show self.reddit kind of links

Googly Eyes, by Jaldhar H. Vyas

This is a port of the eyesapplet which was in kdetoys in KDE 3.x but sadly never made it to 4.x. You can change the color of the eyeballs.

Guitar Tuner, by Andrew Stromme

A Plasmoid to tune your guitar with!

"Heroes of Newerth" Stats, by Henning Fleddermann

A Plasmoid that retrieves and displays statistics of Heroes of Newerth players, including the online-status. Its purpose is to always know when your (HoN-)friends are online and ready for a little game, and to show you yours and you friend's statistics, so you know who's the best, what you need to improve on, and so on.

Instant CSI, by Matej Repinc

The Instant CSI Plasmoid: because sometimes, you just want to go out with a bang. It's not too complicated, but it shows the power of Plasma's Javascript API, and how awesome things you can do with a little amount of code.

Keystate, by Martin

A plasmoid that displays the status of some keys (for example 'Num Lock' and/or 'Meta pressed'). It is highly configurable:

you can choose between 4 different layouts
it can display the status of 9 keys
you can configure a color for each key
you can set the font for the text
you can enable the advanced layout settings which give you even more control over the layout of the plasmoid

The code is quite heavy as the total lines count is at 1379 (in 19 files - which makes ~73 lines per file)

Make Progress!, by Nikita Melnichenko

Track your progress in various tasks with this powerful and flexible Plasmoid. The Make Progress DataEngine, written in Python, is an optional though recommended add-on for this Plasmoid.

Shortlog, by Manuel Unglaub

Shortlog saves small information snippets for quick retrieval later on. The information snippets or notes get a timestamp to make it easier to find them again. The idea is to store information you have no good place for or might not need again in a simple way. But if you need them again, you can simply look them up.

How to use it:

Add a new note: insert it and hit "enter" or click "OK"
Search for a note: the first character needs to be "/", then just input your search pattern (regex possible) and click "OK"
Delete something: search for it and then click "Delete Selected" to delete all search results

More Than Just A Competition

The Plasma Javascript Jam Session has been more than just a simple competition: it has also been instrumental in helping to discover the strengths and weaknesses in the Javascript Plasmoid system and introduce new faces to the KDE community. Each of the Jam Session participants became real-life test cases for Javascript Plasmoid creation, and via the IRC channel and the Plasma development mailing list they were able to offer extremely valuable input over the course of the Jam Session. This in turn resulted in a number of bug fixes, documentation improvements, feature additions and even helped to shape the feature goals for version 2 of the Javascript Plasmoid API which will be released this summer as part of the KDE Software Compilation version 4.5.

The Jam Session was also a great way for several people who had never had the opportunity to participate in KDE at the code level to do just that. The low barrier to entry of Javascript Plasmoids and the excitement of some very cool prizes both helped. We hope that this is just the start of an energetic, lively Javascript development community within KDE that can grow and flourish in the months and years to come. This is only the beginning, not the end!

So a big "thank-you" and "congratulations on your efforts" to all of the submitting authors for making the (first?) Plasma Javascript Jam Session a great success and an immensley enjoyable experience for the Plasma development team as well!

You Be The Judge

There is one last detail to sort out: the competition part of the Plasma Javascript Jam Session. With the submissions in the queue, it is now time to crown the stand-out submissions. One lucky winner will receive a brand new Nokia N900. The grand prize winner and the first runner up will both receive an invitation including transportation and lodging, to a KDE event, while the top three submissions will also earn a KDE t-shirt. We have a panel of four judges who will scoring all of the submissions based on usefulness or entertainment value, orginality, beauty and technical merit. In addition to the overal winners, the judges will be handing out the Beauty Queen, Technical Giant and Creative Genius bragging-rights awards

But wait! There's room for one more on that panel: you! To participate as a member of the "Fifth Judge" and help select the winners, head on over to the Javascript Jam thread on the KDE Forums to try out the Plasmoids (instructions are included in the first post on the thread) and vote up your favourites. You have until April 8th to register your preferences!

Plasma Javascript Jam Session Contest

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce the Plasma Javascript Jam Session. This friendly competition will reward creators of the most original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets (Plasmoids) written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition.

Anyone (except members of the judging panel) may participate in this open challenge that starts on Friday February 12th, 2010. The rules are simple:

Only Plasmoids written using the Simplified Javascript Plasmoid API may be entered.
All submissions must be released under a Free software license in compliance with the KDE Licensing Policy.
All submissions must be the original work of the contestants. Third party Javascript libraries, DataEngines, etc. may be used, but the actual Plasmoid itself must be the work of the contestant.
Each contestant may submit one, and only one, Plasmoid for judging. Contestants may work in teams (an artist and a programmer is a common pairing in Plasmoid development, for instance) but only one prize per submission will be offered regardless of team size and contestants may not be a member of more than one submitting team.
Final submissions must be in the form of an installable .plasmoid file submitted to javascriptjam@kde.org by midnight (UTC) on March 31^st 2010.

Plasmoids will be judged based on the following criteria:

Usefulness / Entertainment Quality (40%): accounting for a full 40% of the final score, this metric reflects how indispensable, fun and "recommend it to my friends"-worthy the Plasmoid is.
Originality (20%): the more unique the Plasmoid, the better it will do in this category.
Beauty (20%): for Plasmoids that inspire desire, these points go higher!
Technical (20%): code poetry and Plasmoids that expose the full power of Plasma will rack up technical proficiency points.

The prizes up for grabs are really exciting:

Grand Prize: A brand new Nokia N900, a trip to join us at a KDE developer event, such as Akademy or Camp KDE, and a KDE t-shirt
1st Runner Up Prize: A trip to join us at a KDE developer event, such as Akademy or Camp KDE, and a KDE t-shirt
3 Honorable Mention Prizes: A KDE t-shirt

In addition to these over-all prizes, three bragging-rights titles are up for grabs:

Beauty Queen: this crown is reserved for the most stunning Plasmoid in form and function
Technical Giant: the Plasmoid that embodies the peak of technical excellence will walk away with this badge of honor
Creative Genius: the Plasmoid with the most interesting and original concept will claim this title

Additionally, everyone who submits a working Javascript Plasmoid that meets the contest requirements will receive a personalized certificate of participation by email. All submissions will be published for download on kde-look.org after the results are announced on April 9th.

Contestants will also be able to take advantage of training and support from the KDE Plasma team! Training sessions will be held on Friday the 12th, Saturday the 13th and Sunday the 14th of February at 16:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #plasma-training channel. Each session, led by Plasma developers, will cover the Simplified Javascript Plasmoid API in detail along with Plasmoid development tips and tricks.

In addition, contestants are welcome to ask questions and solicit development advice on #plasma on irc.freenode.net and plasma-devel@kde.org, the official Plasma development mailing list, during the competition. We won't write your Plasmoid for you, but each contestant will have access to the same level of Q&A support that all Plasmoid developers normally have. Helpful reference materials can also be found in the Plasma tutorials section on Techbase as well as in the KDE Examples module.

The judging panel will be comprised of:

Aaron Seigo, Persona Plasma
Marco Martin, Plasma Zen Master
Nuno Pinheiro, Graphics Design Machine
Richard Moore, Javascript Bindings Artiste
KDE Community: Yes, that's you! A poll hosted on the KDE Community Forums will allow everyone in the KDE community to have a say in who wins.

Panel members will rate each entry individually in each of the four categories. The scores from the five judges will then be added up to create the final results.

The contest timeline is as follows:

February 12^th: The Javascript Jam begins!
February 12^th and 13^th: Online training sessions at 18:00 UTC in #plasma-training on irc.freenode.net
March 24^th: Contest entries can be submitted for inclusion by sending them to javascriptjam@kde.org
March 31^st: The Javascript Jam is finished, no more entries may be made after this date!
April 2^nd: All valid entries are published on the contest website and on KDE-Look.org
April 9^th: Winners announced

Finally: a huge round of "Thank-You!"s to Nokia for donating the N900, KDE e.V. whose support makes this event possible and Nuno Pinheiro and Sean Wilson for artwork.

More information along with the official rules can be found on the Plasma website which is is devoted to the Javascript Jam for the duration of the contest. After the Javascript Jam concludes, the Plasma website will relaunch with new content and an updated design.