This month in KMyMoney

The last month has seen the release of KMyMoney 1.0.2, still for KDE3, plus a few fixes here and there, nothing really big, though. On the KDE4 front, however, there has been a lot of work. And Pallavi, our usability designer is back.

Cristian has merged his plugins into the main code, so the reconciliation report and calendar plugins are now in there. As usual, he has been all over the place, cleaning up here and there (specially after me, lol). He has also continued to work hard on the transaction ledger. There are still some problems there, but if we solve the remaining crashes, I hope we can open KMM4 for beta testing. If we can squeeze the last crashes out, we can then focus on a full port of the remaining Qt3support code.

Pallavi contacted us a couple of weeks ago. She will have a course on usability, and KMyMoney is going to be used as example. Per our request, she will focus on the ledger and budget. I hope we can include her findings in the new version. I know there is a lot of room for improvement in that area. For those who don't know, Pallavi Damera has already done some work on KMyMoney a year ago. At that time, she helped us find and fix annoyances on the home page, ledgers and the accounts view.

Thanks to our Ubuntu users, there was an exception to include KMM in Karmic Koala, even after the hard freeze, so the Karmic Koala users will be able to have the latest and brightest of KMyMoney this week from the official repository. I only hope they got the package right this time. We have had to provide a PPA for the last two releases due to bugs in the official package.

I have continued to work on the charts. Thanks to Laurent, I got in touch with Sebastian from KDAB, who helped me get a grip on the new version of KDChart, the library we use for charts. I also found a couple of manuals about it, which made the migration easier. In the end, I ended up doing a big refactor of the code, and now it makes a lot more sense, with all the chart-related code in a class, instead of being intertangled within the report class. There are still some quirks here and there, but most of the existing functionality is there again. Along the way, I have found a couple of bugs in KHTML. One in the color handling of the css, the other in that KHTML_Part does not seem to respond to the hide method.

Fernando and Tony have been working hard on the database front, which I think is working now. That's one of the areas that had changed a lot, so they had a rough time making it work again. Thomas is working on the GPG encryption, and I think he is almost done with it, at least to get the encryption working again.

Last week I got an email from Michaël, who is working on an Akonadi resource for KMM. With a little help from Cristian he got it working, and I guess in the future we can use it so that other applications can access KMM files and create calendar entries based on the payment schedules. There are some fixes we'll have to do in our code so that it is easier to access Akonadi, but it's a good start. My interest is that it could be used to create a plasmoid, or to share data with other applications (FinanceStack). For the moment, we have to refactor the file code, to separate that more from the GUI code.

We have also worked with Guilleaume, from Skrooge, to agree on a common set of icons. We almost got it, pending a few choices here and there where we have overlapping icons, but that's almost done. With that, we can offer the user a common set of icons, to make it easier for users to use this or that applications. Also, we will request the remaining icons to the Oxygen as a team. All in all, keeping up the competition where it makes sense and sharing work also where it makes sense.

Also, I have finished reinstalling my PC and migrated to Arch with Kdemod. It's been wild having to learn a lot of how it works, but I'm pleased with the new system. There are some quirks here and there, but so far I like it a lot. Translations are working, and the system is snappier. I have only 2 problems so far, the ssh-agent does not seem to work very well, and my Xubuntu laptop is not able to connect to the NFS shares. All in all, I'm happy with the change, though I will miss the release party of my previous distro this thursday.