Last week I took a train to Berlin for the KDE Frameworks 6 kickoff sprint. A lot has been said about it by my fellow attendees already, so I won’t go into detail much.

Work on Qt 6 has begun and with Qt 6 a version 6 of the KDE Frameworks is due. This will gives us the opportunity to clean up and redesign some of our API.

Main goal for the sprint was to discuss the major design principles for KF6. I personally focussed on two aspects. First, we want to better separate logic from the user interface to allow different UI implementations for desktop and mobile uses. Futhermore, we want to reduce the amount of dependencies our libraries have. While we are doing fine for a lot of frameworks some have very ugly dependency structures. Probably our worst offender here is KIO, the framework that powers Dolphin and many more KDE applications.

As most of you know KDE Connect has recently been removed from Google Play due to a policy violation with regard to our SMS and telephony features. While the public outcry helped to get it back in with all features remaining this is just yet another example of how new Android policies make it harder for us to maintain the level of quality and features you expect from KDE Connect. Android Oreo forced us to drop support for older Android versions and imposed restrictions on background services which force us to have an annoying persistent notification. It is to be expected that Google will further restrict background services which will impose more problems for us. With each new Android versions new restrictions and problems arise which we have to work around, if possible. For example, the upcoming Android Q imposes restrictions on accessing the phone’s clipboard. It is unclear whether the clipboard sync in it’s current form is feasible on Android Q. Those are just examples of the problems with the direction Android is moving towards.

My last post shows how to create a stub Python/Kirigami app that doesn’t do anything. Time to change that! In this post we’re filling the screen with some controls.

Kirigami Pages

Kirigami apps are typically organized in Pages. Those are the different ‘Screens’ of an app. If you come from the Android world you can think of them as the view part of activities. In our case we want to have an initial page that offers to enter a stop or a destination and opens a new page that shows a list of possible routes. Clicking on one of the list items opens a new page with a detailed view about the connections.

KDE is happy to announce that we will be part of Google Summer of Code 2019. GSoC is a program where students recieve stipends to work on free software for 3 months. Getting paid for open source work, that’s the dream, right?

KDE Connect is participating with 3 interesting projects that also involve other areas of KDE

1. Improving KDE Connect on Windows

KDE Connect builds and runs on Windows, but there are a lot of things that can be improved. This mostly involves the functionality that makes use of notifications. A large part of this task is about improving KNotifications on Windows.

From February 4th until February 9th I attended a Plasma Mobile sprint in Berlin, Germany. I met a lot of people that share the vision of an open, privacy-friendly mobile platform. However, we all agree that such a platform can only succeed if there are enough people sharing that vision creating suitable apps for it. There already is a nice amount of mobile-friendly Linux apps, many of them created by the KDE Community, but of course we need more :)

Today we released version 1.10 of the KDE Connect Android app. Therefore it’s time again to share what we’ve been working on.

Targeting Android Oreo

As of this month app updates uploaded to Google Play need to target Android 8. This has several implications. Targeting Oreo comes with an updated Support Library, which forces us to drop support for Android 4.0 and below. According to our Google Play data this will affect approximately 400 users. We are very sorry about that, but these users won’t receive further updates. Furthermore, Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.

Since a few months KDE Connect has a Telegram group to discuss development. Since the over 100 people joined. I did not expect such an interest in it. Few people asked to have this group bridged to an IRC channel since they prefer IRC over Telegram. I’m happy to announce that we finally made this happen. Let’s celebrate the birth of #kdeconnect on Freenode. You can also access it from matrix.org (#freenode_#kdeconnect:matrix.org). The rest is up to you! If you are interested in contributing to KDE Connect go and share your ideas with us and ask any question you have!

It’s time for another feature update for KDE Connect! You can now run commands on connected devices from the Plasmoid.

The Dolphin context menu entry for sending files to a connected device has been dropped in favour of a Purpose plugin, which groups nicely with other Share features and supports more apps such as Okular and Spectacle. Albert Vaka added a presentation mode to Android which allows you to control slideshows from your phone. Aleix Pol added the same to the Kirigami app.   As I’ve mentioned before it is quite hard to find the settings where you can define your commands for the Run Command feature.  The command list on Android now has a button that opens the appropriate settings on the desktop. Ivan Čukić added a few useful command suggestions to the menu. Friedrich Kossebau added support for a “Find my PC” plugin. You might wonder now how often he loses his PC, but it also helps finding other devices that run the C++ version of KDE Connect, such as Plasma Mobile and SailfishOS devices. I added support for triggering it on the Android side. Following a request on Reddit I added a dedicated Stop button to the media controller. Chansol Yang made sure that the pointer speed when controlling the mouse from the phone is the same across Android devices with various DPIs. Philip Cohn-Cort added the much requested dark theme option to Android. You can now use special URLs to trigger commands on connected devices. The urls have the form kdeconnect://runcommand//. As those are quite complex I added a helper for it. You can copy an URL to the clipboard by long-pressing a command in the command list. You can write those URLs into a NFC tag to trigger the command when your phone reads the tag or use it to integrate with services such as Tasker. The system volume patches have been merged. To make use of it you will need the latest KDE Connect from master for Desktop and Android and pulseaudio-qt installed. You can get pulseaudio-qt from git. We will to an initial 0.1 release soon and hope that distros will ship it soon. Besides these features we also fixed some bugs and polished the UI a little. Bluetooth support is progressing slowly. Matthijs Tijnk and Qt 5.11 fixed some issues. However, it is still not ready for the public. We also improved our device support: Aleix and I improved the Kirigami app. We improved the basic pairing workflow and  you can now run commands and control media sessions. Bart Ribbers fixed an issue that was blocking KDE Connect from building it for postmarketOS. I hope to see KDE Connect there as well! Adam Pigg made a huge step towards bringing KDE Connect to Sailfish OS. We like to see KDE Connect on as many platforms as possible, and we need your help for it! Our workboard contains lots of ideas for new people to get started. You can ask for any assistance in our Telegram group. Thanks to all contributors!

Hi, For once this is not a post about KDE Connect (at least not directly). Besides KDE Connect I also work on several other KDE projects, one of them being the awesome Purpose framework created by Aleix Pol. After Nate highlighted my latest work on Purpose (the new share menu in Dolphin) in his blog post I received quite some feedback. I’m glad that many people like the idea, but I also received some criticism/suggestions for improvements. This is always welcome as long as it is fair and objective. This was true for most comments, but unfortunately not all of them. I won’t even bother to reply to unfair and personal attacks for a useful feature, but rather like to respond to appropriate criticism and inform you about my future plans for Purpose. First of all, for those who don’t know what Purpose is, it is an extensible framework to fulfill the developer’s purpose while providing an abstraction. Right now the only use-case is exporting/sharing a file, but more could be added in the future. It is used by Dolphin, Spectacle, Okular and other KDE applications and can export files to Email, Telepathy, KDE Connect, Nextcloud, Telegram (I did that one myself), Twitter, Imgur and many more. For the share menu in Dolphin’s I received some critisism/suggestions for improvements:

The digital world has changed over the last 10 years. The usage of mobile devices skyrocketed whereas the desktop market is stagnating. The trend is also going towards smaller and convertible devices. The mobile market is controlled by two major corporations. One of them is religiously cutting down your personal freedom and aiming towards a walled garden proprietary ecosystem, the other one is disrespecting your privacy enormously. With Plasma Mobile the KDE community is envisioning a mobile experience that is giving you maximal freedom while ensuring your privacy. It seems like a bold venture, but we have to at least try, right? Plasma Mobile would not be a true KDE project without the same degree of integration with the desktop as we already have with Android devices. Therefore we aim to make Plasma Mobile a first-class citizen of KDE Connect.