About dialog openDesktop.org integration - Profile guidelines

[Téo Mrnjavac]

Dear team,
as you may have noticed from the commit messages and IRC activity, I
have recently modified KAboutDialog to include openDesktop.org support
through the OpenCollaboration Services API, and called it
ExtendedAboutDialog for lack of a better name.
What does this mean?
This means that those contributors who also have Author status (and
soon "Thanks to" contributors too) have additional extended entries
with data downloaded from openDesktop.org that can be viewed if the
user has internet access and an openDesktop.org account. The About
dialog becomes a small social desktop client, and enables more direct
interaction between the users and the team.
This shows that there's real people working on the program, and I
think it could do wonders for promotion.

The implementation indirectly uses the OCS REST API, through the
Attica library. Attica is an almost-library, originally developed for
the OCS dataengine and currently in kdeplasma-addons. Though the
dataengine is already in 4.3, the Attica library is pending review for
inclusion into KDE 4.4. Until then, I have crudely copied over
libAttica into our tree, to src/aboutdialog/libattica-ocsclient, like
we did with Plasma in 2.0 times. With any luck and a lot of work, by
4.4 we might even have the ExtendedAboutDialog itself in kdelibs :)
If you haven't tried it yet, screenshots are available here [1].

Anyway, this email is about the data the dialog shows. As I said, it's
downloaded from openDesktop.org, which means that if you don't have an
openDesktop.org account, or the profile isn't very complete, then the
data shown by the ExtendedAboutDialog will still be valid but entirely
(or almost entirely) extracted from KAboutData, much like the old
About dialog. While the dialog looks way cooler with actual data
inside it, I realize that some of us dislike social networking for
various reasons and prefer to keep their data more private, so all the
fields shown by the ExtendedAboutDialog entries are optional: you may
link an openDesktop.org account with your full profile, an
openDesktop.org account with a partially filled profile, or even not
link an account at all.
I have started a wiki page here [2] which states some guidelines on
how to build your openDesktop.org profile so that it looks good in the
dialog. Since the ExtendedAboutDialog is still very much a moving
target, these guidelines are somewhat subject to change so keep an eye
on the page for changes :)

Also, I wanted to let you know that this little project of mine is
competing in the Social Desktop Contest on openDesktop.org and the
deadline is August 25th (in three days), so if you have the chance it
would be nice if you could check out the candidates [4] and give your
votes.

Cheers
Téo


[1] http://www.opendesktop.org/content/show.php/ExtendedAboutDialog+for+KDE+apps?content=110614
[2] http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/openDesktop.org_Profile_Guidelines
[3] http://www.socialdesktop.org/contest/
[4] http://www.opendesktop.org/index.php?xcontentmode=99