Most of the time programmers do not write new code. Instead, they read, try to understand, extend, and fix bugs in existing code. While some parts of KDE are pretty new and follow modern standards, many parts are more then two decades old -- following obsolete coding principles, using outdated ways of solving problems, and having additions from several persons with different styles. Often when we read code, we immediately spot things we could improve. Kent Beck's approach is applying a series of small tidyings that leads to structural change and an overall better software design. In his new book Tidy First? he describes his idea in three parts: Tidyings, how to manage tidyings, and software design theory. In the first part the author introduces generic tidyings like dead code removal, moving declaration and initialization together, introducing new interfaces, or explicit parameters. Most proposals are not new, but it is a good reminder to follow them and fix these things whereve...
Today marks the release of KDE Stopmotion 0.8.7 ! About Stopmotion Stopmotion is a Free Open Source application to create stop-motion animations. It helps you capture and edit the frames of your animation and export them as a single file. Direct capture from webcams, MiniDV cameras, and DSLR cameras. It offers onion-skinning, import images from disk, and time lapse photography. Stopmotion supports multiple scenes, frame editing, basic sound track, animation playback at different frame rates, and GIMP integration for image. Movies can be exported to a file and to Cinelerra frame lists. Technically, it is a C++ / Qt application with optional dependencies to camera capture libraries. Changes in release 0.8.7 This release comes with no new features, but improvements to the project itself. Changes The project is now officially called to KDE Stopmotion. The former name Linux Stopmotion is no longer used. Support for qmake has been removed. Use CMake instead. Features Port serial...
