blog.daniel-laidig.de

Update: The title of this post was supposed to be ‘kDebug() << “Hello Planet KDE.”;’, but apparently that’s to geeky for Wordpress.

While enjoying the last few days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, which has been really awesome so far, I thought that it would be a good idea to finally start blogging. So here I am. My name is Daniel Laidig (dani_l on IRC) and I’m working on Parley (the vocabulary app) and KCharSelect (the widget and application displaying stuff about characters and unicode).

I’m not gonna blog that much about GCDS. Lots of other people are doing that (my attempt to keep up with Planet KDE while I’m here has failed, by the way), so you’re already informed. However, I should note that I’m pretty happy with the hotel I’m in. It’s quite cheap and currently a noisy construction site, but it’s also the hotel where all the cool people are meeting up at the infamous penthouse suite every evening.

I haven’t really been productive in terms of coding, but that’s not really what I’m here for anyway. However, I got other people to fix bugs that really annoyed me. Thanks to Sebastian Sauer and Thomas McGuire for that.

You should also keep an eye on something about the Bug Squad song appearing on the planet in hopefully a few days. I can guarantee that it will be interesting and fun. If nothing’s happening soon, you should probably blame Alex (blauzahl) for refusing to sing.

If you continued reading until that point, that’s good. If you are interested in learning languages, that’s even better, because now I would like to collect some feedback about Parley, the vocabulary trainer.

At the moment, we are not really happy with the practice part of Parley. It’s looking quite boring and is also quite hard to maintain. That is why we had a summer of code last year to rewrite that whole part, but unfortunately at the end it wasn’t complete and stable enough to be released. After that, nothing much has happened.

That’s why Frederik and me will probably sit together for some time and discuss how practicing vocabulary should be done properly. Then I’ll see whether the existing code can be refactored or if it’s better to start from scratch (again).

Now is the point where you get in. What exactly do you want when practicing vocabulary? Which training modes should we support and how should they behave? Please tell me your good ideas, so that we can keep them in mind right from the beginning.

I’m looking forward to your comments.