Next week KDE will be present at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) in Hamburg, Germany.

37C3 Unlocked

36C3

It’s been 4 years since 36C3, back when COVID still seemed like an isolated problem on the other side of the world. A lot has come out of 36C3 over the following years.

The Umweltbundesamt presented their work on eco-certifying software there, which ended up kick-starting KDE Eco and resulted in Okular being the first ever software application awarded the “Blauer Engel” eco label for sustainable software.

I met people there that got me involved with the German Open Transport Meetup, which resulted in collaborations like the Transport API Respository and got us access to realtime elevator data for Itinerary.

36C3 was also the first time you could see the integration of our travel document extractor in Nextcloud Mail publicly in action.

37C3

Following 36C3 I had suggested a bigger presence of KDE next time. And that we’ll have. There are at least 6 KDE people attending, and there will be a KDE assembly for the first time as well. Looking forward to meet you there!

There will also be a talk by Joseph on Software Licensing For A Circular Economy covering the KDE Eco work.

A special thanks goes to the nice people at CCC-P and WMDE who helped us get tickets!

KDE Itinerary

Just in time we also managed to merge the Qt 6 port of Itinerary, after dealing with a few last-minute surprises that only occurred in specific configuration and on phones with limited debugging options:

  • Looking up a QTimeZone by IANA id on Android is significantly slower than on all other platforms, presumably because lack of an internal cache. Since Itinerary does that a lot when loading your data we suddenly faced startup times of 20-30 seconds. This has been worked around with our own caches during loading for now, but it yet has to be investigated and fixed in Qt properly.
  • The Breeze Qt Quick Controls style triggered a memory alignment violation on 32bit ARM, due to a copied internal Qt class which meanwhile changed its memory layout.
  • The Kirigami Addons date picker popup caused an application freeze on 32bit ARM. This has been addressed by using the native Android date picker instead, making this also consistent with the time picker.
Dark background pass shown with light forground text despite using a light color scheme.
37C3 Apple Wallet pass entry ticket in KDE Itinerary.

And with all that done we could also fix the rendering of the Apple Wallet pass for 37C3. That contains a dark background image but does not specify text colors, which we so far rendered practically unreadable by using a dark text color. In such a case we now consider the dominant color of the background to pick a better text color.