You might have seen my previous posts about Plasma HowTos in form of short screencasts. I’m happy to announce that all screencasts are recorded now and uploaded to UserBase. The full article can be found under Plasma/FAQ/HowTo.

If you don’t know what this is all about, here’s a small taste:

How to unlock your widgets

Obviously you can watch the HowTos to learn more about Plasma, but that’s not all: they can also be used to easily answer beginners’ questions in an easy-to-understand and nice-looking way. In forums, for example, you can use the same thumbnail as the one above to link to a HowTo.

Now, let’s spread the screencasts and make Plasma more comprehensible to new users!

Due to the positive feedback I received in my last post, I decided to take the experiment one step further. A page that listed all Plasma HOWTO screencasts – doesn’t that sound good?

My initial idea was to do it on my blog and eventually move it to UserBase if it was well received by the community. However, some people on IRC already voiced interest for such an article on the wiki, so here it is:

Plasma/HOWTO

Currently it’s on my own page, but the plan is to move it to Plasma/HOWTO when more screencasts have been done. As you can see, I’ve only done the first section (Widgets).

Dear KDE community, now I need your help. Are the sections strange? Do you miss a HOWTO? Should something be rearranged? Please help to improve the article! It’s a wiki, so feel free to edit it. However, if it’s something major, I would appreciate if you wrote a note under Discussion first.

Thanks everyone who commented my last post, you motivated me to continue this experiment.

Being an active member in the KDE Community Forums, I regularly see users asking how to do this and that in Plasma. My usual answer is something like “Click on cashew -> [Unlock Widgets] -> Add Widgets… -> drag widgets from the “Add Widgets” dialog to desktop/panel”. Sometimes I also refer to the Plasma FAQ.

This works, but I’ve been thinking about a more… amusing way to give the answer (in lack for a better word). Inspired by the Plasma screencasts on blip.tv, I decided to make a few screencasts. In contrast to those on blip.tv, mine are very short, direct and without any text – they’re meant to simply answer one question.

Read the rest of this entry »

For people following my The Road to KDE Devland series, I just wanted to let you know about the current status of the project. Summer holidays are almost over, and I have an exam coming up soon, which means that I haven’t had much time to study Qt or blogging recently. After the exam next week I’ll write step 4 about what I’ve accomplished in Qt – nothing big, but I promised screenshots didn’t I?

Next step is by no means the final one, but when the semester starts I’ll most likely be busy with Real Life™ again. Of course I’ll continue to give you updates of my progress, but be prepared that the time between each step will be much longer.

The interest in the series was much higher than expected. If you’re also working on becoming a KDE developer, I strongly encourage you to share your progress. If you already do, please post a link in the comments and I’ll include it in the next step. Yay.

If you’ve visited KDE Brainstorm, you might have wondered what all categories are for, or how an idea is processed when it’s been posted. So I decided to make a chart that hopefully will answer your questions:

From idea to reality

The Forum Team is constantely working on improving Brainstorm – if you have any suggestions, don’t forget to post a topic in Feedback & Questions; or, if it’s a feature request, why not post it in Brainstorm? Just don’t forget to add the tag “kde brainstorm” to make it easy for the Team to find your idea.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the chart, post a comment below.

Update September 29, 2009: The updated chart can be found in Brainstorm FAQ. Click on “Take a tour“.