RSIBreak is in good shape for KDE4, all the basic stuff works, just some bugs left. And those will take large amounts of time to solve probably. 90% of the task you do in 10% of the time, the other 10% will take 90%.

Today I sat down, and read up on Plasma. My last blog entry triggered comments about making rsibreak work with Plasma. After reading the example I made the Plasma applet. The screenie:

[img_assist|nid=165|title=rsibreakplasma|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=193|height=199]

It’s not graphically very appealing, but I don’t own the skills to do that yet, so I’ve to learn those before it gets visually more attractive.

Yes, it’s a bit late to start porting an app now, but I needed a break from Mailody for a while and I need an RSIBreak app for KDE4 anyway and I’m the maintainer of that app, so I feel the need to do something with it.

Anyway, RSIBreak is highly focussed as being a tray application. That means, there is no real main window which should popup when clicking on the tray. And that’s where I’ve some problems. As soon as I open the configuration from the context menu of the tray icon and close it again, RSIBreak exit(0)’s. And it does that for all the about screens as well. I’ve no idea why.

Another problem (or the same?) is that KSystemTrayIcon is no longer a QWidget, that means I can not intercept left clicks on the Icon – or catch the hover event. The latter problem I tackled with hooking into the tooltip event, but that’s far from ideal.

When RSIBreak starts for the very first time or when RSIBreak is started while running, it shows a popup with a screenshot of the system tray with the icon in there. Up to now I used (borrowed code from Konversation though) a QMimeSourceFactory to store the image, like in:


QMimeSourceFactory::defaultFactory()->setPixmap( "systray_shot", QPixmapOfTheTrayIcon );


then i could use that in a dialog:


KMessageBox::information(this,
i18n("<p>RSIBreak is already running<p><p>It is located here:")
+ "<p><center><img source=\"systray_shot\"></center></p><p>",
i18n("Already Running"));


But there is bad news, QMimeSourceFactory is not available in Qt4. The porting document tells me to look at Qt resource system, but that’s not the use case here. So I have the pixmap and I’ve a messagebox, just need to find an easy way to show the image there. I need to peek at Konversation again to see how they solved it.

Just some random issues you run into when porting… The good news is that there will be a RSIBreak ready, probably before the final release of KDE.

RSIBreak has been made Package of the Day. It’s nice to get this kind of publicity. I’ve not been blogging about it for a while and to be honest, have not worked on it for a while.

The main reason for it is that it does what I want it to do. I use it daily. Some days I don’t see it reminding me for a break at all – usually slow days – and sometimes it popups up every 20 minutes – busy days. I try to honor it’s suggestions usually.

It’s on my list to port to KDE4, because I want to keep using it there as well. It is interesting to see that when you give regular attention to an application in the form of blogs, the project becomes active and lively. For RSIBreak I see that there are usually no visitors on the irc channel, no patches, etc. While when it was in heavy development there were people in the channel and patches. But I guess there are written multiple e-books about ‘managing an open source community’.

Anyhow, it’s great to be Package of the Day!

While we are preparing RSIBreak 0.7.0, it is time to think about the next release. The feature which is at the top of my wanted list is the possibility to show exercises during breaks.

You can imagine different ways to show them, they can be an animated konqi, sitting behind a computer showing one exercises per break.

Or some very expressive drawings, maybe something like the card with emergency instructions in a plane.

All RSIBreak-like application have instructions and I consider it a must have for the near future. So if you want to work on this, please make a comment or drop by at irc.kde.org, channel #rsibreak

I use Konqueror as a webbrowser, if a site does not support it due to their stupid scripts, I try to change the user agent for that site (yes, that is you: http://www.elsevier.nl/ for example) and everything works fine.

I have only one request: I always want to have to bookmark toolbar. So whatever happens I want it visible. Now it randomly turned off when opening a new window. I see this behaviour on two kubuntu machine’s, but I’m not sure it related to kubuntu. Anyone an idea?

RSIBreak 0.7.0 is almost ready. So is a new release of the kipi-plugins. More on that soon.