Author: Barry O'Donovan

Mikolaj Machowski posted an nice example of using KDialog with DCOP to the KDE Developers mailing list a while back:


#!/bin/bash

if [ $PROGRESS ]; then
  for (( i=0; i<30; i++ )); do     dcop $PROGRESS setProgress $i     sleep 1   done   dcop $PROGRESS close fi

The purpose of Mikolaj's post was to suggest a method of regimenting work periods - e.g. 20 minutes on, 5 minutes off - using the above script and KAlarm, a personal alarm message, command and email scheduler. But, more than that, it shows off one of the many hiddens treasures of KDE: KDialog, which allows shell scripts to take advantage of some of the KDE widget set, and DCOP, KDE's Desktop COmmunications Protocol.

More information and a tutorial can be found at:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/kdialog/t1.html

I often listen to the radio in the background while working/coding and in particular I’m a bit of a news talk junky. Generally I use my TV/radio tuner card with KRadio so I can control the channel and volumes with a few simple keystrokes. Of course there’s no explaining why someone always rings during a good Matt Cooper interview or while Vincent Browne is berating yet another politician for giving an answer that’s at a right-angle to the simple question asked – but now there’s a solution on the horizon:

Ernst Martin Witte has just released KRadio 1.0 beta with a new feature that looks very promising – the ability to pause radio playback and continue it later. This is still a beta version which may explain why I’m having some difficulty getting it to work properly. While I eagerly await the final release, the good news is that the normal recording function works perfectly so I won’t miss those interviews; and it supports both Ogg/Vorbis and MP3.