Qt

The good thing about this quiet holidays is that there is time to work on projects. I had a few nice changes of PDF Quirk laying around, and now finalized them to a new version. Please welcome PDF Quirk version 0.95! What is PDF Quirk? PDF Quirk is a little desktop utility to create PDF files from images, targeted to non nerdy desktop users. Sending PDFs is (still) often a requirement in offices where people are asked to transfer PDF files via email, or better by pushing them through their private ownCloud. ...

it could already be read somewhere that 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop :-D Fine with me. Just to support that, I did a little hackery over XMas to improve the support for ownClouds virtual file system on the Linux Desktop. What are Virtual Files? In professional usecases, users often have a huge amount of data stored in ownCloud. Syncing these completely to the desktop computer or laptop would be too much and costly in bandwidth and harddisk space. That is why most mature file sync solutions came up with the concept of virtual files. That means that users have the full structure with directories and files mirrored to their local machines, but have placeholder of the real files in the local file manager. The files, however, are not on the disk. They get downloaded on demand. ...

The authors are happy to announce the new release 0.95 of Kraft. Kraft is free desktop software for managing office documents like quotes and invoices in the small enterprise for the Linux desktop. Kraft Version 0.95 With version 0.95 we do a big step forward in the way of generating documents: Until now (more than fifteen years!) Kraft uses the ReportLab python library to create high quality PDF documents. While this has served us well, it has always been cumbersome to adopt the template for users needs. ReportLab uses a XML format as the template which has a bit of a steep learning curve and is not really easy with syntax. ...

How often have you scanned a letter, a certificate or whatever and looked for the right way to call $UTILITY to convert it to a PDF that can be shared via internet? For this very common use case I could not find a tool to make that really easy for the Linux desktop. Given my mission to help making the Linux desktop more common in the small business world (do you know Kraft?) I spent some time starting this little project. ...

This November was very exciting for me so far, as I was starting a new job at a company called Heidolph. I left SUSE after working there for another two years. My role there that was pretty far away from interesting technical work, which I missed more and more, so I decided to grab the opportunity to join in a new adventure. Heidolph is a mature German engineering company building premium laboratory equipment. It is based in Schwabach, Germany. For me it is the first time that I am working in company that doesn’t do only software. At Heidolph, software is just one building block besides mechanical and electronic parts and tons of special know how. That is a very different situation and a lot to learn for me, but in a small, co-located team of great engineers, I am able to catch up fast in this interesting area. ...

I am happy to announce the release of the stable Kraft version 0.80 (Changelog). Kraft is desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well choosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. After more than a dozen years of life time, Kraft is now reaching a new level: It is now completely ported to Qt5 / KDE Frameworks 5 and with that, it is compatible with all modern Linux distributions again. ...

Following my last blog about Krafts upcoming release 0.80 I got a lot of positive reactions. There was one reaction however, that puzzles me a bit and I want to share my thoughts here. It is about a comment about my announcement that I prefer to continue to develop Kraft on Github. The commenter reminded my friendly that there is still Kraft code on KDE infrastructure, and that switching to a different repository might waste peoples time when they work with the KDE repo. ...

Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking! I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V. 0.80, the first Kraft version that is based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.x. ...

It’s release day today: This morning, ownCloud 4 was released! With a very cool set of features it’s even more useful and again more fun to use. Along with that I am happy to let you know that we also released the ownCloud Desktop Client in version 1.0.2. It is a maintenance release with a couple of important bugfixes, such as the cross platform filename encoding problem I was already talking about. Apart from that big blocker a couple of smaller, but annoying problems were fixed. Also the GUI was polished, text changes here and there and a new icon set that looks more cool and more like ownCloud. ...

Writing cross platform code is easy nowadays. You use Qt, implement stuff, and it compiles and runs almost everywhere. I also enjoy that in my work on the ownCloud desktop client. But, as you know, there is the other part in the client called csync. Its the syncing engine underneath. And that does not build up on Qt, but is plain C. Adventure starts here. This bug took me on an interesting (well…) journey into what cross platform really means.It is about a complex thing like filenames containing special characters, my favorite example is the directory “Übergröße”. Directories and files like this could not successfully be synced with the latest client. ...