ChEeTaH's - KidDraw

Where have you been?

ChEeTaH — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:57:35 +0000

It's been a long time again, very long. A lot has changed too, so here goes...

First of all: I got a job in February. It's not the greatest thing, but getting something really nice is hard right now. At least it relieves us a bit from the huge financial burden we'd otherwise have. Another small job at my university, where I worked for only 4 hours each week, is ending this month. I'll have my last paycheck from there soon, unfortunately.

I've also prepared the tContact Drupal module for release. The code has been slightly improved, which is always good. There's also another mini-module for Drupal which allows you to add CSS classes to menu links. This makes it easier for a theme to turn a menu into a series of buttons, similar to the menu at the top of this site (Home/About/Contact). Right now this site uses the menu item's ID number, which is somewhat random. With this module such menus are just a little harder to break :) I hope both modules will land on Drupal.org soon.

What else? KidDraw of course. A few months ago already, I've cleaned up a lot of code, made it a little bit themeable (which resulted in removing a whole lot of code). I've also changed the file loading/saving structures around so that the files KidDraw produces are nice straightforward XML files. They're compressed to save some disk space, but it means that compatibility with future and past versions is much easier. Still, a release is not in sight right now, and I'll stop predicting/hoping anything right now. First I've got some other stuff to finish and wrap up, before I can focus on KidDraw a little more again.

I'm also working on some supersecret projects with Rosana, which has taken some time off of other projects. It has inspired me to write the menu CSS classes module mentioned above though.

Another technical bit I worked on this past weekend is merging all the (5) Drupal installations on this webserver to a single centralized installation. Before, a new version of Drupal would mean updating each site separately: putting the site in maintenance mode, uploading files, updating the database and turning the site back online. Times 5. Right now: Put all sites in maintenance mode, upload files, update all databases, put them all back online. I've set up bookmark folders in Firefox so I can put all sites into maintenance mode with just a few clicks. Same goes for updating and bringing them back online. A similar amount of effort is saved for updates of common modules among various sites. All in all: maintaining the sites is less painful - especially as the amount of Drupal sites we're running will soon grow.

That does mean that if you spot any errors (missing/broken images, links, etc): please contact me! I think I've most of them covered though.

And then there's University of course. It's taking a lot of my time right now, with this year's last set of exams just around the corner. Together with some more deadlines, it's a busy time right now.

The Sims 3 is also out, I've been playing it for a bit. Not much yet - too little time. The (Collector's Edition) box is shiny though.

Spore Galactic Adventures, the first real expansion for Spore, is due next week, and Thursday (18th) me and Rosana will be checking it out at EA Netherlands. A bit late for a preview, but it may just be early enough to get me excited about the game once again. I don't know all too much about it right now, so Wednesday evening I'll have to do some reading to catch up on it.

Finally: I'll be getting a new laptop this summer. After saving up for a long time, the €1000 offer from university (for a HP Elitebook 8530w) is in. I've filled in the form saying I want it, I'll have to pay up soon. I should be getting it around August. My current laptop (6 years old) just doesn't cut it anymore...

That's it for this rough summary of the past couple of months (project/work wise anyway). Until next time!

Happy New Year

ChEeTaH — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:49:14 +0000

Boy, it's been a while. Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Better late than never :P I've been really busy, and I'm wrapping up a too busy semester with finals now. Time for some plans.

I'll follow up my last post with some sad news: KidDraw didn't make it to KDE 4.2. The reason: time. As I said: busy semester, but also plenty of other things to work on which left KDE a bit too much on the side.

However things are more stable in KDE land now: KDevelop4 is coming along great making it actually usable for me. I also don't have Akregator (my feed reader) crashing on me all the time anymore. Now KDE 4.2 is just around the corner and I've decided to stick to that branch now, rather than running trunk all the time as I've done the past year.

Running such an unstable version of my favorite desktop is nice: you constantly get all the new features that everybody implements. However, it occasionally led to a broken desktop with crashes all over the place. I'm opting for better stability and more productivity this new year. I now run a KDE version from trunk, just before RC1, and will switch to KDE 4.2 once it's out.

I will be getting new computer parts too, and with 4Gb of memory I think it's also the time to switch to a 64bit OS (I still run Gentoo 32 bit now). That means a complete reinstall of everything I have, which is exactly what I'll be doing soon. With KDE 4.2.

So, I hope I can do more this semester so KidDraw will make it to KDE 4.3 in about 6 months. I've also got a few Drupal modules planned, one of which I wrote last night and mostly needs cleaning up before I'll throw it up here: a multilingual site-wide contact form. I'll also apply to get it on Drupal.org soon.

There you have it. A few of my plans for 2009. I hope I'll be able to get it all done.

KidDraw Progress

ChEeTaH — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:20:45 +0000

For the past couple of days I've spent a bit of time getting KidDraw into shape. It's not there yet, not at all, but with the foundations in place I should be able to get a nice version in KDE 4.2 (January). Screens inside!

First let's take a look at the old Windows version, made in Delphi:

Now what you see is a fully working version. You can pick a color and line width (no need to click for those), load up to 5 images you made before, clear the current canvas and stop the program. Oh, and you can draw, of course.

Enter the new KDE/Qt version: It's largely the same. Except that it's cross platform. And that it supports multiple color palettes. And that it isn't finished yet. But: progress is there!

Painting was already possible somewhere around last year, well before I got it into KDE. This week or so I've done some housecleaning, made saving and reloading of drawings possible - in a straightforward self-made binary format, to keep the files of reasonable size. I might still change to XML though, probably compressed, so extending the format is more flexible.

Another thing I'm happy with is the palette support. I'm planning options to download and install new palettes, but I'm not that far yet. The most important stuff already exists though. The next screenshots all show the same image, but with different palettes. You can cycle through them and you'll see the image change colors.

The amount of colors in the palette doesn't matter. KidDraw keeps the original information so when you go back to the original palette, all colors will still be there.

As for the big gray area on top: that's where you'll be able to open/save images to in the future... but that's for another update.

All this currently lives on the SVN server of KDE, in Playground/edu. If you want to try it out, you'll most likely need to build it yourself.

Joining KDE

ChEeTaH — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:50:04 +0000

Although I originally applied for the Google Summer of Code this year, unfortunately I was not accepted. There obviously are many great entries this year, and although I'll never know how great the people of KDE found mine, it can't be half bad, really. After all, I was asked to do what I had planned anyway, just outside the Summer of Code.

So what was it all about? Well, it currently is not online here as I'm waiting for some Drupal Modules to be ported to Drupal 6.x (specifically Project*). That means I do not have all the facilities to properly promote my projects here just yet. But those who do know this site from before, may also know that I had a program called KidDraw here once.

Last year I started rewriting KidDraw in C++ using the Qt toolkit. I got quite far, but it still needs lots of work too. Part of what I want to do is change it into a KDE app. Not all too much work, and eventually it should become part of KDE Edu.

Due to college and all I haven't been able to do a whole lot yet, but I have officially joined KDE as a developer now. KidDraw sits in Playground/edu now where it will remain until it's ready for review and then hopefully inclusion in the real KDE Edu module. It won't be in time for KDE 4.1, which is due out this July, but with a bit of luck I can have KidDraw join KDE in 4.2, out in December/January.

So now I've gotta find a summer job to get some much-needed money. Wish me luck!