I was quite upset with all this, not to mention the whole collaborative thing that we have in FOSS was actually letting me down as even though some do help me a bit I’d like to have more help. I was thinking on gave up on Apper and aptcc and instead just focusing on some other kind of software that I miss instead of fighting a non-ending fight, to be honest I was willing to even changing to Mac OSX that imo has a perfect mail client, perfect photo management and itunes do integrate really nice with Apple TV & friends.. At the end I brought a Magic Trackpad and won an Apple Keyboard…

Both are bluetooth devices battery operated which work very well but they didn’t report it’s batteries status… as you noted that I was upset with other stuff I decided I’d make these devices report the battery status.

Googling I found that some people had tried but didn’t managed to get this working, after talking to some of them I almost gave up as it seemed to be a hard task, talking to the guy who added the MagicTrackpad support he told me about an Apple tool to dump HCI events, so it was quite easy to know how the device reported the status. It simply asks the battery status and the device responds, and the device is even HID compliant which means that any device that follows the spec will get battery reports for free.

I always thought that coding on the kernel is hard, but once you start to understand how the device works it’s actually quite easy. Recently a guy sent a patch to add a power_supply support to the HID kernel module, but his code didn’t probe the devices so my change is now on top of his, for my Apple devices it works like a charm (using last upower version which was patched to work for devices that don’t know the energy fields).

root@acer:/sys/class/power_supply# cat hid-*/uevent
POWER_SUPPLY_NAME=hid-00:22:41:D9:18:E7-battery
POWER_SUPPLY_PRESENT=1
POWER_SUPPLY_ONLINE=1
POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY=66
POWER_SUPPLY_MODEL_NAME=MacAdmin’s keyboard
POWER_SUPPLY_STATUS=Discharging

POWER_SUPPLY_NAME=hid-70:CD:60:F5:FF:3F-battery
POWER_SUPPLY_PRESENT=1
POWER_SUPPLY_ONLINE=1
POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY=62
POWER_SUPPLY_MODEL_NAME=nexx’s Trackpad
POWER_SUPPLY_STATUS=Discharging

Next step is now change the KDE power module on system settings to show battery status as GNOME does: https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Power#Guidance

After that a patch in BlueDevil to show the battery status in each menu would be also very usefull for quickly knowing it.

At the end I think it’s needed once in a while to change the project you work on, having doing Apper for 3 years might upset, so I’m looking forward to write some new software…

But no this does not mean that I’ll gave up on Apper, actually I have a few changes in mind maybe for the end of this year, I just want to refresh my mind of this stupid fight where there are no winners.

Best.

after almost a year without a release Apper is finally out there , I have been very busy these days and it’s a bit hard to find some time to code this, I’ll keep improving Apper, which will gain some nice new additions to the next releases, but I can’t tell when that will be… (maybe you get a Christmas version)

The main changes are:

• Removal of the left pannel, so we have more free space
• Moved the summary of a package next to the package name
• Embed most of the dialogs into the main UI
• When you close Apper with some transaction running apper-sentinel starts a plasma job so you can keep an eye on your instalations
• Reworked all Session Interface dialogs so it looks like a wizard
• Made some changes to the code that check for updates (hopefully this will fix the bugs that some people had)
• Use libpackagekit-qt2 which is way faster and uses less resources
• Display repos while refreshing cache
• Show the package version and size by default on the updates UI
• Show the total updates size on the upates UI
• Fix most KPackageKit bugs, yes not all are fixed
• Display a nice message when your system is up to date, as before you aren’t sure if it hasn’t updates since the UI looked the same… (see below)

Apper has greatly improved since my last blog post, still some issues to fix before releasing but major changes are finished for now. I changed the UI a lot, and in this blog post I’m going to show what I had wanting to do a long time ago. Hope you all enjoy it.

PackageKit is a freedesktop.org project which includes a DBus session interface so that “non-package manager” applications can ask for package management operations. For example you click on an video file and dolphin opens, now GStreamer can’t handle that file because it misses codec for that kind of file, instead of worrying which package the GStreamer has to install in *each* distribution, it just says: Hey I need a codec for mpeg 4. The PackageKit helper that sits on your DBus session will listen to that and inform the user.

This feature was already included in KPackageKit, but as I coded this on hurry to make feature parity with gnome-packagekit this interface was a bit ugly, the main problem of the implementation was that it used KMessageBox for the questions thus making a lot of popups coming up, so you click search the message box hides, the transaction shows, it then finishes and hide, and another UI to review the changes show up and so on… Apper now has custom KDialog that show all the stuff inside it, so no more pop ups!

Now that you got the idea of how this works, let’s let the screen shots talk:

Gstreamer Instalation:

Old GStreamer Installer

New GStreamer Installer

Package Installation by Package Name:

Old Install Package by Name

New Install Package by Name

Install Package Catalog:

Old Catalog Installation

New Catalog Installation

Install Font Resources (I need to confirm if okular is using this afaik only a gnome doc viewer uses this):

Old Font Resource Installer

New Font Resource Installer

Install Package that provide some file:

Old Provides File Installer

New Provides File Installer

Mime Type Installer:

Old Mime Type Installer

New Mime Type Installer

My favorite! This is available in KDE 4.7, you go to K menu, right click on an application and select “Uninstall”, with Apper you can even drag more items from Kickoff and drop on the Apper Uninstaller!

Old Plain Boring Uninstaller

Cool new Uninstaller

After you click Continue on any of the above dialog the result was/is:

Old Query Transaction

New Query Transaction

Then you will see the confirmation dialog:

Old Review Changes

New Review Changes

Transaction installing/removing packages:

Old Transaction Installing / Removing Packages

New Transaction Installing / Removing Packages

And at the of an installation (be it by the package file or by any other means), you will have the confirmation and in case some application was installed you will be able to launch it right away (yes I need to add the K menu path…).

New Transaction Finished Dialog

As you can see the new dialog act like a wizard improving the user experience by providing a consistent look. And yes the blue title bar was inspired on K3B

Now in your app you need some resource or package the session interface is described in:

http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/PackageKit_Session_Interface

The doc is not very complete but should be able to get an idea of what is possible to do with that.

Hope you all liked these changes!

After what happened I moved back to my old job on Brazil, but even now my time is short as I developed a commercial app (apart from the job), so have to divide my time between family, job, sort of 2nd job and open source coding. This means that Apper development is slow, but progressing. Some of you probably also know that KPackageKit is not going to be part of the main CD of Kubuntu, the reason I trully dunno (I wasn’t even told about that – a friend showed some blog post). As I wasn’t aware of it I can’t do anything about it, I can’t even know what should I improve to change their minds, the sad part of the history is that KPackageKit could been improved instead of replaced. But don’t be too sad, we still have KPackageKit in Fedora, OpenSUSE – as default since 11.4 , Kubuntu (optionally), Debian almost has it and many others…

KPackageKit name is a bit geeky and some people didn’t like it, I personally didn’t have anything against it but K* names are often hard to pronounce, so thanks to sheytan KPackageKit got renamed to Apper.

But this blog is not about the renaming, it’s about what cool new stuff will you find in it.

First Apper is based on my rework of packagekit-qt which is called packagekit-qt2, and this rework makes Apper much faster than KPackageKit was, the inner details is that we don’t use the huge QSharedPointer for packages and don’t create a bunch of useless stuff unless the user asks, I didn’t measured the time but first time you run it you will surely notice. This also means Apper is more stable since packagekit-qt2 has a cleaner code and a nicer API.

Second Apper has several user interface changes and a much nicer integration with KDE.

The first thing you will notice is that I finally got rid of the useless left selector (Get and remove SW, Updates, Settings), they are all in the main view. This is great since we can have an UI which better fits small screens and packages summaries can be better displayed.

Before

After

The next and soo nice UI change is the package summary, it nows follow the package name with a less opaque font, this also makes better use of the screen and allowed me to make versions be shown by default.

Before

Package Listing - After

Notice the icon between Skype and "Br", yes that's the new Oxygen updater icon made for Apper

Now I’ve received many requests asking me to integrate the transaction icon into the Plasma Jobs notification. This was hard to accomplish because I didn’t want to bother the user with the final pop up “Task Finished”. So I finally had an idea to the problem: instead of showing the job there for every transaction it will only show the transaction there IF the application that issued it is not running anymore. In other words if you have Apper open and installing things, nothing will show up on the tray nor the plasma stuff, but if you close the window it will automatically start a plasma job so you can still track the progress there

Time has shown that people don’t like dialogs poping up all the time in your face, KPackageKit had many dialogs, especially one when installing that people didn’t like, so I decided to embed it into the main UI as well and show package details, but not only details, I’ve changed PackageKit spec so you will also see your repositories updating…

New installer UI

Refreshing Cache

The settings UI is horrible (ideas welcome ), but it worth notice the new features, Apper is a green app, it does not check or install updates while on battery, and it also does not check for updates while on mobile network connection. I’m planning to change the way we select the check interval as some have requested to be on mondays or at 21h…

Settings

What is left before Apper can be released?

• I’m changing the PackageKit Session Interface (the one that is called to install local files, search for codecs, search for printer drivers, search for Plasma Applets thanks to Kevin Kofler and others) which used to popup a bunch of dialogs, the plan is to make it look like a wizard.
• Display the size of the packages in the updater UI, so one can have an idea of how much will that cost.

Hope you all enjoyed the ideas, and if you have ideas, or even better time to help (as I don’t) please poke me

My daughter of 1 year and 4 months died a week ago in a tragic car accident, so this time I’m going to mix Apper (KPackageKit), packagekit-qt2, aptcc, print-manager and religious in one blog post. Sorry if you don’t like religious things, you can skip it if you want but I hope this might help someone passing through a situation like this. (BTW there is an Open Source projects tag so planet.kde.org can filter the next ones).

It’s been a while since my last post, since the end of the last year I’ve been preparing to move from Brazil to Argentina as my wife was studying there with our twins, and I was missing them a lot. As she got a job in the university we thought we would be able to pay the bills with that plus selling books on vacations.

The travel to Argentina was really disturbed, in short we decided to go by car instead of air plane so we could carry more things, our first try was frustrated by an small car accident where the front glass of the car got bitten and my wife broke her arm, the air conditioned was also with a few problems so my parents helped to change the Ford Fiesta to a Chevrolet Prisma, when the travel started again with the brand new car (0 KM) the air conditioned stopped working, we drove to an assistance but they could not find the problem, also compared to the old car the stability in the road was very poor, the suspension was too soft for me.

After 2600 km and 4 days travelling we finally got in our destination, my wife started her classes (giving and taking). On the next vacations we had planned to go and sell books to pay the bills but as we were getting stressed by the money going away we decided to sell the car. As the car was from Brazil we could only sell it there. The car assurance had expired so we went on Friday to renew it and our kids played a lot, had fun eating ice cream it was a really nice day.

The next day Saturday 9, we got up, packed things and started the travel, when we were close to the next city a white Megane in front of me started to reduce the speed, I was distant so I reduced just a little, as no car was coming in our direction (the road had a way to go and another to come) I thought that or the car would go left at once, or at right and wait for me to pass, but instead he stopped completely on the road. I hadn’t predicted such action and our speed was too hight to break so I went left and while passing it the car started to turn left. To avoid the collision I had to put the car on the roadside which was made by earth, the next moment I decided to put the car back on the road because I was a bit fast to go on an earthly made roadside, but when I did this the car started to drift and in a moment it crossed the road to the other side going down in a place with grass and hit the back part of a stopped truck, when it hit the truck the car turned right (the right doors where facing the ground).

My son and I where on the left side of the car, the side which hit the truck but we only had a few scratches, my wife and daughter where on the right side and the sock that the turn made did a good damage. My daughter had a head trauma and was taken to a terrible hospital (although my wife asked the cops to take her to the one on the city next to it), them another cop took me there too and thankfully they transfered us to a better one (but still completely inappropriate to a small child). An hour or so left the doctors were tired to reanimate her heart and she died.

Here is the link to the local news web site, the position is me driving at left with son back, and my wife front right with my daughter back, every one was using a safety belt, and the kid using those special chairs.

http://www.elobservadordellitoral.com/2011/04/10/crespo-fallecio-una-bebe-producto-de-un-accidente-de-transito-en-ruta-131-y-acceso-peron/

The future.

I had never experienced a death so close before, my grandfather died when I was 4 and my uncle and grand mother when I was older but I wasn’t close to them.

I can assure to you it’s really painful. Only a parent that passes through a situation like this can understand how hard is it, there are no words to express the anguish and the miss of someone so close, especially when they are so young. I have been a religious person since I was born, my mom and daddy where religious already and no other thing in the world had ever made doubt of what I read and believed.

This was the moment I really felt like being tested, having my faith being really tested. Did I really believe in what I said to others? About Jesus, His great power, miracles? This reminded the Job’s event where God let the Devil test him because God knew Job was faithful. I asked to myself am I really faithful?

Lots of people question Gob saying “Why did He let this happen? Isn’t He the almighty, why there is suffer with good and innocent people when there are so many criminals killing just for fun?”

God himself left many questions like these answered, some others not. But first you have to believe that the Bible is an inspired book, and the best way I my opinion is by reading it, and when it comes to prophesies  you see many of them coming true.

For the above question I have in my heart and according to the Bible that God is in control of everything, nothing happens that he is not aware, this being true why bad things happen? Well the Devil wants bad things to happen, Satan is the only one guilt for this, God allows us to suffer because he has a better plan for us, our place is not in this world anymore. It’s not God that made bad things He allows that because He knows that even in moments like these good things might happen.

“But those who die in the Lord will live; their bodies will rise again! Those who sleep in the earth will rise up and sing for joy! For your life-giving light will fall like dew on your people in the place of the dead!” (Isaiah 16:19 New Living Translation)

What a wonderful promise God leaves here! One who dies on the Lord will be risen again! Does this mean I shouldn’t cry for my little one? No, I am human, it’s not natural to not have our beloved ones taken from us, we miss her so much. In one moment we played hide an seek and in the other she is gone.

When this will happen? In the future, after a few more prophesies have being fulfilled:

“Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.” (Mathew 24:29-31 NIV)

and then

“… ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Revelation 24: 4-5).

Oh Jesus, come soon to wake up Geovanna!

Surely one will say: “I don’t believe in Bible, God and any kind of religious things. There is no proof of any such things”
You might deny but you have to have even more faith to believe that this is not real, that this is not true, because all human theories have huge gaps, one can’t calculate the probability of the protein being made on the age scientists give to the universe!

It’s sad that one prefer to believe in something just because it seems more scientific but still proof less. I don’t want to start arguing here, free will is given in many countries so believe in what you study and have true conviction of being true.

Think about what do I loose if am I wrong and you are right about God existence?
- I die and life goes on and nothing changes, you might be remembered in future that you were right, but still you won’t be there to receive a prize.
On the other hand:
- I die (or not), and I follow my life happy, with hope to see my little daughter and my whole family again, spending the eternity learning how God created the world, how Quantum Physics really works …

Really I don’t want to open a case with you. I just want you to take part of something good, pretty much as we do with Linux and Open Source stuff, we invite our friends to use and develop because we really like it, because it makes live better, sharing is something that God teach us too.

After this sad event I realized my live wasn’t being helpful to abbreviate Gods second coming, I fell like Jonas that flew from God and ended in a big fish stomach. I had thoughts to help God with my own talent but never did any thing. I must admit something, I’m a bit addicted to computers and this forbids me to spend more time studying Gods words and talking to others about Him.

My wife always wanted to marry a pastor, and I always said ‘no way’. And this came to my head and I said ‘why not’? Computers are a powerful tool nowadays and having another graduation is something important in this area. To be honest one of the things that always made me scared about being a pastor is the subjects, learning Hebrew, having to read lots of books, pretty much what I am not good at, I like math and was really bad at history on my school.

I do believe that God made people that do not have talent to have so I’m willing to learn something completely new, something I never thought I’d have to learn. I also will have to learn Spanish as I’m living in Argentina, I could go to Brazil but this way my wife can finish the Medicine school and I Theology.

The prays of a whole village of friends have given us strength to go on, I hope this sharing helps you is you are passing through something similar.

Geek stuff, well as you know I am the maintainer/author of Apper (KPackageKit), packagekit-qt2, aptcc and print-manager… and unfortunately won’t have all the time I had before, to be honest at first I decided to gave up on everything, but as I still want to use Linux (It’s not nice for a pastor to start getting angry when the computer freezes because of Windows) I decided to code it even slower…

But this is a calling for help.

Packagekit-qt2 is almost done (have to commit it still)

Apper is almost done too, but it needs to be ported to the above lib, which is similar but not so much.

Also I started to use plasma kjobs structure, BUT having to close the notification every time you do

a search or install something or refresh the cache is hassle so a patch in this is needed too.

aptcc needs to emit repos while refreshing the cache, install package files and emit downloadLeft()

packagekit needs to have downloadLeft() propertie

print-manager needs some C guy to get python code written in C so Gnome and Kde stuff can share code…

I have no idea of when will I have time for those, right now I need to learn Spanish and read the Bible in Spanish so I get used to the terminology, If someone is willing to take care of these stuff please ask and I tell and help in what is needed so that Apper can be finally released.

Thanks all, and yet if you didn’t like this post in planet kde please just ask then to filter the next ones by the tag used in this one and forgive me but I’m too busy to ask someone to do so (and it’s 1 am). Though I’m not sure I’ll blog much about geek stuff…

It turns out that before I started to code it I was thinking on how could I make KDE package management experience nicer. At that time I normally used KPackage to manage my packages, and I realized that I mostly never opened KPackage to remove my unused applications.

Removing applications is a hard task first you need to know which applications do you have, then you need to know which ones you don’t use, and at the end open the package manage browse for them and remove them.

But about what time do you remember an application is not used? When you see it’s icon right on your face! And when it’s that? When you open our lovely Kickoff

If you are still wondering what this has to do with laziness, I’ll tell you everything! If I wasn’t lazy enough to memorize the unused apps and go to the package manager I wouldn’t been writing KPackageKit on the first place!

So yes, as you can see from the screen shot below now we can uninstall applications from Kickoff!

The code went to review board, Aaron Seigo rapidly reviewed it, and now on KDE 4.7 you will have it available

Hope you all enjoy it

Thinking on that some distributors decided to create easier to use tools, PackageKit it self aimed that but still “Package” on it’s name , Ubuntu Software Center is one of the most known well succeed Application Installer cases. But it still Ubuntu specific tied to apt.

PackageKit on the other hand provides basic package management in a cross distro way supporting the most popular distros. So to build a cross distribution application manager what would be needed is application data available in a standard form. The Packagekit author created app-install which manages a database containing application data, like Name, Summary, Icon. App-Install is similar to app-install-data package but instead of containing lots of .desktop files it contains a pre built sqlite database.

Now the key piece of integrating Application Data vs Package Data is that one Package can contain 0 or many applications, while an Application is contained in one package. As KPackageKit is already capable of managing packages, reading that database and them matching Applications -> Package was quite simple, the only problem was that with more data we also need to optimize the classes otherwise it get very sloooow…

Thanks to Tomasz Dudzik and Nuno Pinheiro who helped me out on doing another big rework on the user interface KPackageKit got a new look, this new version should be named AppGet since it’s less geek than KPackageKit, doesn’t have the K prefix, and the so feared Package word but someone on IRC was better than I on googling and found an application with that name. Thanks again to Tomasz the next release will probably be renamed to Apper (hope google does not read this post ).

Right now KPackageKit 0.6.2 will only have the “Applications” feature on Kubuntu (and maybe on Debian when it gets packaged), since app-install is not available on other distros, there is an effort to bring this to Fedora soon, but it seems they are having some resistance.

KPackageKit revamp included a different group on the first page which is Categories instead of Groups, these categories is provided by an XML that contains the search parameters, and is again about applications so Games does not bring packages related to games, only the Applications.

When clicking on a Category (eg Games), it might contain sub-categories like Cards Games, Simulation, so for that a thin list at the top can be scrolled to refine the search. The old inline description view was also removed, it was nice but in reality the is no great benefit to see several packages description at once. Animations! Unfortunately screenshots are not videos if there were you would see the bottom growing up, and the text fading in, and when you switch packages it fades out and fade in again with the new text. Pretty cool

When you click on the screenshot thumbnail it will show a new window that loads the bigger screenshot.

Another cool feature is the Application Launcher, you know when you install a package and you think “What now?”, after and application is installed KPackageKit check it’s files and show you a (still ugly) dialog with the new installed app, clicking on it starts the application.

And of course if you miss this dialog you can always check for it’s menu path at the description bottom. Also if you do a text search you will still see packages, but applications comes first! You can get rid of them by clicking on Filter -> Hide Packages, just don’t forget to turn it on if you want packages.

The tray icon was also ported to the new systray, meaning cooler tooltips and bigger icons. The update view has no buttons now, the history moved to the main ui, and to refresh the list you can right click on it, Ah! and if you want to see versions you can right click on the list and check “Show Versions”.

Now let’s wait for more distributions to support app-install and hopefully increase our KDE users

Best.

For those who followed the long story lots of people got angry/mad or something like that, because PackageKit”s design was not to ask things while installing. Sadly no one of the angry ones put faith into “working around” this problem or even fixing. There were flame wars and lots of people who didn’t ever put a hand on the code that said that PackageKit was broken by design (this wording is very common these days.. ).

Anyways it was sad that a project with the importance it had, would leave so big distributions like Debian and Ubuntu out of it.  Indeed convincing the author of it to do some changes wasn’t easy but in the end I must agree that most API breaks I didn’t cause were actually good. The author of PackageKit although some people disagree is really easy to convince that he is wrong when he actually is. And by that I found out that is VERY easy to say that something is broken or wrong but it’s hard to propose something that is actually good.

Before I started coding a new backend in C++ for PK (because I know nothing about python nor do I like it and I had to understand APT API to do somthing), we had 3 big problems with PackageKit:

1. instalation/update could not remove packages and remove operations could not install/update packages.
2. Cdroms and Dvds where also not possible to change
3. Debconf support was not possible

These were the blockers we had, the first two required a lot of thinking on how to break PK API and let the author happy, I must admit I got frustrated some of time, and almost gave up cause when I thought I had the perfect idea Richard (PK) showed the problems it could bring or that it wasn’t good enough

But this story is about debconf isn’t it? So debconf problem was actually easier to solve than the first ones, the real problem was now to convince those who at first criticize PK to accept some solution. PK author said that a solution “out of band” (meaning something that didn’t change PackageKit but somehow uses another way of comunicating) was ok. So the first idea I had was to create a DBus frontend, this way we would not need PackageKit to make KPK and debconf talk, there is an old post here showing what happened (debconf devs didn’t like it), and after that I started thinking that if Software Center used debconf socket solution why would they be against it now? Talking to Michael Vogt (pretty nice guy) at UDS we decided that since debconf people didn’t bring any solution the easiest one would to use the socket frontend that Sw center uses too.

Sune once asked me why did I write that DBus frontend and a KDE client for it if Adept showed kde dialogs, he didn’t know how but I went to see it, yes today there is a perl+qt4 which allows us to have debconf+a qt interface. But he was right, Adept did have debconf kde4 dialogs because it actually implemented the debconf protocol (although not all of it). So the hard work was turn the code into a lib, get rid of non Qt code and to finish the debconf protocol implementation.

And that’s it now KPK has debconf support

How does it work? Well if you’re reading till here you probably want to know that It’s simple. KPackageKit creates a debconf-kde instance ( DebconfGui() ), which receives a path to create a socket on /tmp the path is then passed to PackageKit which pass to the aptcc backend which sets an env var that debconf uses to communicate to debconf-kde.

Hope you all enjoy it

KPackageKit 0.6.1 has received lots of love regarding it’s user interface,  last KPK (KPackageKit) was released 5 months ago, after that release I decided to work on things that were also upsetting me like printer-manager (my last post), well it was a good exercise although I couldn’t make printer-manager for KDE SC 4.5 (due not being able to add printers yet). And because of that KPK got abandoned for a while (my mailbox had more than 1000 of bug emails), this was definitely good.

Why? Well I think that when you are too close to a project you stop seeing it’s defects, using KPK was so natural to me (since I knew it all) that I didn’t see a point in changing much of it, although I had some bug wishes most of them were minor fixes. After leaving KPK I started to close more attention on people using it, and started to take note of everything.

For example, a dude that works with me was going to update his packages, on the update ui there was a button written “Refresh”, this is not too bad for english but could be made clearer, in Brazilian Portuguese “Refresh” can be translated as “Update” which is ok for those who knows that it updates the list, but my friend thought it would Update his packages…

Another annoying thing was the search line edit, in small screens it get too small to type because of a check box next to it, which was too wide, I didn’t want to loose vertical space since it’s good to don’t scroll to list to much, but after making each item on the list a bit smaller I could change the view to a tabbed view, which allowed me to make it even prettier.

The check box that used to had package groups (wasting horizontal space) rests in peace now, I took it’s model and set it on the first tab, right when you start KPK, so you see the groups like in system settings. But most users open KPK and want to search so above it there is the search line with much more free space, when you search the groups are hidden and the results are shown, if you want to go back there is a back button.

The biggest problem was actually the Delegate of the package view, it is really hard to represent a list packages that can receive different actions. For example: if I add a checkbox to the installer/remover list, what would mean check? Probably installed, but if I uncheck it how do I know that this item is going to be removed and isn’t simply a not installed item? The current view showed a down arrow (trying to mimic a download), and an X icon to remove, but NO user (I’ve seen) using KPK for the first time realized what that means, probably because no visual feedback was used.

After thinking on this problem a lot I decided that if I changed some stuff on the delegate I would have more space to add buttons inside the list. Now if you click on a button labeled Install/Remove it goes to Unmark, you are now probably thinking how do I know if the Unmark button hides an Installed or Available item? The answer to that question is that at the left of the list there is an small checked emblem for installed packages, it is at the left because if you had to move your eyes to the right while you are reading the list it would become uncomfortable.

The next tab has all your installed packages, that are only loaded when you click on it (because some backends are very slow), with this tab a wish I had for some time  could be completed, you can now export the package list to a PackageKit catalog that can be imported by clicking on the button next to it or even with gnome-packagekit. Yes, you can now make sure all your machines have the same set of packages or format your machine and have all your apps reinstalled again (Just make sure the file was correctly created before you want to kill me ).

And the last tab is the Pending Changes, which lists all the actions you are about to do. Unmarking items there make them go away. This makes reviewing changes easier.

I’ve  said check boxes aren’t good for packages list, but actually they are perfect for the updates view, the user looks and knows that a checked update will be updated, it also wan’t easy to Understand how to select all packages, so I decided to do like my Y! mail does, I added a check box in the header list. It wasn’t so clear that clicking on the update would expand it and show it’s description, the alternative is not very clear, but it’s more consistent with KDE apps, I’ve added an arrow pointing right that when clicked starts pointing down and the item is expanded.

There are no more package grouping in any view, the reason is that the code was hard to maintain, it is not good when you want to type ‘k’ and go to the package that starts with k, and it’s really hard to go group by group in the updates view trying to find if X package is going to be updated…

The Settings interface did changed a bit but noting drastical, it just have one more item on it and the origins list is sortable now.

But the coolest change to me was the transaction interface, the old one didn’t resize correctly (KDialog’s fault) and was actually weird when the backend didn’t send sub progress changes (the details progress bar stayed spinning). So instead of showing the package name now I only show the busy icon, text and the main progress bar, when you click Details a list is shown and there you have a progress bar for each package emited by the backend, the current status (downloading/installing…), the package name and it’s summary. Clicking on Details does not shrink the view anymore, and your preferences are all saved. In the future I’ll try to make aptcc emits the repository it’s downloading if this works I’ll enable for others backends.

And just yesterday I fixed PackageKit to allow backends to emit download speed so if you are downloading you will see something like “Downloading packages at 400KiB/s” (if your backend supports this).

The next release will be 0.6.1, including many fixes, I’ve closed 92 bugs last week which has put me on the 4th place at https://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summary.cgi

The pain of threads… My graduation project was an application called doKa that downloaded using threads, well it was a really nice project and working with threads there gave me lot’s of ground to start putting threads in printer-manager, but this time I had a really hard work . The problem is that when the authentication dialog comes up we need to do some event loop locking, as the thread needs to wait for the end of the dialog and the UI must only return when the user type it’s password. It worked when just one thing was done at time, but as the printers list has to be updated we got into a dead lock, all the calls to cups started a QEventLoop so we could call exit on it when the cups request was finished, but the first call to cups would only exit after the second call exited which never happens, even if we explicit called loop->exit(). Thiago Maciera helped a lot with some stuff I was doing wrong but after that the problem got intermittent :P

I was almost giving up… I had lots of ideas and lots of ways of how not to do it! But finally I had the async idea that solved every thing, now each request returns a request object that emits finished when it’s done so no more locking with QEventLoops and no more dead locks

Right, so now is just the Add Printers UI right?

Well yes, but no, Riddell invited me to go to UDS to talk about KPackageKit/aptcc and printer-manager stuff and being there one of the developers of the gnome printer applet showed to me what I’d need to do in the Add Printer UI which is not so simple stuff. There is lots of magic (logic) to find a good match to the printer driver, samba searches, queue searches… how to handle when a printer is plugged in. This was very important, since I was doing a simple http://localhost:631 replacement and then I saw that doing these things would be very important… So yes, no printer-manager in KDE SC 4.5.

But hey! Don’t be sad, today I and some oxygen friends made some UI improvements, and it’s looking really nice, pinheiro is also working on some more icons (fax, MFP…) so here you can see some progress, hopefully soon I’ll have the Add Printer doing some stuff, and maybe you distro can backport that

System Settings Module

Supply Levels

Print Queue

System Preferences

Chosing a PPD driver

Configure Printer Settings

Permissions

You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. Psalm 16:11 (NIV)