Swheeler 

Just following the recent World Usability Day and a few months past the third birthday of OpenUsability I took some time to talk to Jan Mühlig, one of the OpenUsability founders and to get an inside look at some of the history of the project, how it works from the inside and some of the current direction. Read More

For the German speakers in the KDE community, last night Ellen Reitmayr, of OpenUsability.org, who was involved in the recently covered KDE PIM Usability Review was a guest for the most recent episode of the Chaos Computer Club's Chaos Radio for which the topic was user interfaces. Roughly 110 minutes in KDE developer Daniel Molkentin also called. Ellen was a guest for the entire duration of the somewhat, well, chaotic three hour program. Read More

During recent conversations with some of the members of the OpenUsability project, some of the usability work on one of the more exciting applications in KDE, KPDF, was brought to my attention. I managed to catch up with Florian, from OpenUsability, and Albert, one of the KPDF maintainers to talk a little about themselves and their work and about the usability review and followup in KPDF. Read More

The folks from Newsforge are covering some of the recent cooperation between the usability folks from OpenUsability and the KDE PIM developers. PIM developers Cornelius Schumacher and Till Adam along with Ellen Reitmayr from OpenUsability talked about some of the usability that stemmed from the KDE PIM usability review which started at aKademy last year. Many of these changes are already visible in KDE 3.4. They also discuss some of the challenges that had to be overcome to make it possible for the teams to cooperate and some of the things that the future has in store for usability work inside of KDE. Read More

Scott Wheeler and Sirtaj Singh Kang with much appreciated help from Kabir Husain represented KDE at this year's Linux Bangalore, India's largest Linux and Open Source event. Many of the 2800 visitors stopped by the KDE booth where KDE 3.3, a Knoppix desktop and KDE CVS (on Scott's laptop) were demonstrated or dropped into one of the two talks. Read More

Sirtaj Singh Kang and I will be presenting talks at this year's Linux Bangalore conference at the Indian Institute for Science. The fair runs December 1 - 3 and will feature tracks on various topics including Linux on the desktop. I'll be doing a talk on searching and contextual linkage and Taj will be presenting a roadmap for KDE's future. Read More

As reported at CNet Asia, China has announced a new policy mandating homegrown software solutions throughout government agencies. Redflag Linux, a Linux distribution backed by the Chinese government, seems to be well situated to to fill their OS needs. And along with Redflag Linux Desktop 3.2 comes none other than our favorite desktop. Read More

There are a lot of KDE developers out there that are students, inbetween jobs or otherwise deprived of monetary resources. Many of these folks overwork their underpowered computing setups to help bring you an outstanding Open Source desktop. There are also appreciative users that are willing to donate obsolete hardware to help the KDE project. In order to bring both parties together and thereby increase the productivity of these KDE developers, I have started the KDE Adopt-a-Geek program. If this sounds interesting to you -- either as a developer or donor -- don't hesitate to contact me. Read More