I started to follow the development of KDE sometime around the first alphas of 2.0. I fell thoroughly in love with the potential of what I saw being built before my eyes in CVS. It wasn't long before I was putting my own efforts into KDE as a member of the large and dynamic KDE community.

These days I am sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE fulltime and am involved in usability, the Appeal Desktop Project and general hacking in KDE. You'll find bits and pieces of my code throughout the KDE codebase.

Oddly, I never actually added a new application to KDE. With a codebase that currently numbers in the millions of lines, I found lots to keep me busy just working on the set of applications and libraries that was already there. There are lots of other people who are into creating new applications, so that side of things seemed to be well covered.

However, with recent events this seems likely to change. I'm working as a member of a small team of people creating a number of new and exciting applications.

Effort de Jour

Currently I am working on the following things:

• Plasma: the desktop, panels and desktop widgets for KDE4. A very exciting project.
• Open Source Desktop Workshops: educational events for developers to learn how to develop for the open source desktop
• kicker: the KDE panel that contains the application menu, launchers and applets
• kscd: the cd player that even manages to plays CDs sometimes ;-)
• a few classes in and around kdelibs

• Tenor: a contextual linkage engine that pushes the state of the art for real world desktop search engines.
• Appeal: a focused KDE development group that brings together artists, usability expererts and developers.
• The KDE Guidelines: updated versions of the KDE human interface guidelines, in coordination with the accessibility and corporate/community identity guideline efforts.
• The KDE Usability Project
• Tenor: a "web of context" technology targeted for KDE4 that provides new possibilities for storing, finding and relating information on the desktop.
• kNX: an Open Source NX protocol remote desktop client. Part of the FreeNX project

Things I have been involved with in KDE include:

• kjots: a little note taker utility
• servicemenus: dynamic actions specific to mimetypes, as seen in the Action menu in Konqueror

KDE Traffic

I used to be the editor and primary author of the KDE Kernel Cousin which I started up as a way to get to know the KDE community. It's currently not published anymore, though it would be nice or someone else to pick it up.

Along a similar vein, Derek Kite's KDE CVS Digest is pretty kick ass! Interestingly (or not?), Derek is a fellow Canadian.