Collaboration

I am pleasantly surprised to hear from Aaron Seigo and others that there has been more collaboration going on that most people might not know about. Learning that Qt 4.x now can use the Glib event loop gives us a lot of abilities to create glue between KDE and GNOME interfaces which is really encouraging.

It's been a little while since I've last posted an entry. My own personal life has been busy and hasn't given me much time to work on code. That will change soon though

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You know, it's just in my nature. When someone falls, you help them up. When someone needs help you provide assistance. Well, the same goes in the online world. You see, ever since Aaron Seigo and Siraj Razick wrote up the CIA.vc applet, I sort of had a small crush for it. After watching it bitrot, stumble and cry for help. I thought it was time to make it smile and feel loved once again.

Well, the homestretch is near, I've had to dropped some functionality to get this finished for KDE 4.0.0. So, no Icons for this version. But, you can see It should replace most of the functionality kweather did. This applet does not support dropping onto the panel or If it does, it might not render correctly.

* Update: Since this will not go into extragear, you will need to build it from the playground. Given the changes coming for KDE 4.1, it makes little sense to maintain two different versions which will diverge.

Given the time constraints for KDE 4.0, I have decided to downgrade the functionality for the weather applet. In this release, my aim is to replace kweather functionality completely. This should be feesable to do for the 1.0 release.

Given that Plasma will likely have changes for KDE 4.1, It would make sense to hold off until more of the plumbing has settled down then all the eyecandy can be added in.

Ontario Linux Fest 2007

I had a good time at Ontario Linux Fest 2007. This being the inaugural event there were some small annoyances like lack of plugs for laptops. They did have free WiFi and there was time for me to hack on the weatherengine while there. This conference has a mix of corporate and geek culture and slightly differs from OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) but it's likely to grow and evolve over time.

While the Plasma APIs have been in flux (and is beginning to settle down now). I went about implement displaying the wind speed in metres per second as requested by a KDE person. It converts mph to m/s or km/h to m/s. This will become a configuration option once the applet code is started.

I haven't been able provide that screenshot of the applets yet as mentioned above, things in Plasma have been going all over the place. There's a lot of regressions that are being worked out so I'm just focusing on the ions for now.

We had a Plasma meeting yesterday. One of the things discussed was to move the weather engine bits into KDE trunk. This is now done.

Richard Moore is planning on taking a look at a bug in the UKMET BBC datasource. Once that issue is fixed. I plan on finishing the ion. I will be adding to the Techbase Wiki information on how the dataengine works, how the data formatting should be done so that each ion can be used by anyone's own weather applets.

Seems like I'm not the only one taking the KDE 'holiday' vacation days. Usually the last two weeks of August are typically quiet. I did hack up the testapplet locally to connect to the WeatherEngine, so far, it returns a list of available datasources (Ions) in a kDebug() .

As I'm new to how Qt/KDE drawing / widgets work, I hope to design a dialog that will test out the dataengine fully so I can make sure there's no API issues with the Ion interface. Otherwise most of the time I've been reading other people's blogs and watching the commit changelogs on Plasma.

Thanks to Chris Lee for adding me to the Planet!

First, an introduction. Hello, I'm Shawn Starr, I've been busily working on the weather engine for Plasma. The plan is to begin working on an applet as soon as some javascript bindings for the dataengine are ready to use.

Currently, You can get weather data from Environment Canada (conditions + 5 day forecast and more) and NOAA's National Weather Service (conditions only). Work is underway with the BBC/UK MET Office ion.

You may have seen aseigo's screencast demoing the weather dataengine.