Remember a year ago when I blogged about the Social About dialog? The dialog in Amarok that replaces the dull old About dialog with something more colorful?

Last Wednesday, after an almost complete rewrite and a few days of review, I committed my KDElibs port of the Social About dialog to trunk, to be released with KDE SC 4.6.

What does this mean for end users?

The Social About dialog is a small built-in Social Desktop client, available in any KDE application. Its purpose is to bridge the apparent gap between users and developers by providing an additional communication channel right inside the application. As a user, you will be able to see some more information about the project’s contributors, and directly access a contributor’s online presence as exposed by openDesktop.org or another provider which implements the Open Collaboration Services (OCS) API, as chosen by the authors of the app.

Looking back at the time when I wasn’t a KDE dev I can distinctly remember that I used to perceive KDE contributors as a reclusive and elite clique of people somewhere far away, with mad skills, encircled by an aura of awesomeness. While I can testify that a lot of KDE people really do have superpowers, I’d hardly call them reclusive. To quash that misconception, I’m giving you, the user, a way to get to know the people behind the project. You might even be surprised to find out that there’s an active bunch of KDE hackers in your very city or that the authors of your favorite KDE app share your taste in music.

The Social About dialog replaces the old “About Project” dialog and exposes the Social Desktop features if all of the following conditions are met:

You are running KDE 4.6 or later

You have a working internet connection

The contributors of the application you are using have chosen to add their usernames for an OCS provider such as openDesktop.org.

For every contributor who wishes to share his OCS data the dialog shows fields such as location, blog, homepage and social network profiles including Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Twitter and several others.

If there’s no internet connectivity or if a contributor does not wish to expose his data on the dialog, the appearance of an item will be very similar to how it was in the old offline about dialog.

What does this mean for application developers?

The general idea is to convey the message that the ﻿project is developed by real people, with another channel of user-developer interaction right inside the app.

This is a drop-in replacement for the old KAboutDialog. Obviously if you don’t touch anything in your KAboutData the dialog will be very similar to how it used to be, aside from some minor cosmetic differences i.e. you need to opt-in to use it. The dialog will also be in offline mode if KDElibs is built with the mobile profile (which is expected to remove the Attica dependency). By default, the Open Collaboration Services provider is openDesktop.org, and the contributor’s usernames can simply be appended to the KAboutData::addAuthor and addCredit calls.

In Amarok the experience has been positive, and there have been no instances of abuse (such as bug reporting in the wrong place or harassment) that I know of that could be attributed to the communication channels exposed by the Social About dialog.

If you already have a profile on openDesktop.org (or another OCS provider), don’t forget to update it before adding your username 😉

Why was this an almost complete rewrite?

For several reasons. At the time I wrote Amarok’s Social About dialog, Attica (the library that talks to the Open Collaboration Services API used by openDesktop.org and other providers) was still a moving target, and I needed to throw away some of the code that used now deprecated and removed API elements. Also, Amarok’s Social About dialog couldn’t work as a drop-in replacement for the old KAboutDialog since the data structures used by Amarok’s Social About dialog were a hack designed to make the it work with an unmodified KAboutData and OCS usernames thrown on the side. Finally, the persons list in Amarok’s Social About dialog was just a bunch of widgets in a layout, and lacked many of the performance and reliability advantages offered by the new dialog which uses model/view.

I wish to thank Frederik Gladhorn for his useful suggestions and review, the Amarok team for their useful suggestions and support in surviving git-svn and the developers who reviewed my submission on KDE’s Review Board for their patience, attention to detail and help.

What’s missing?

Aside from some minor planned improvements under the hood, the most prominent missing interface elements are about a dozen icons that represent links provided by OCS, such as Facebook, Identi.ca, LinkedIn and other social network profiles. We already have some of those from Amarok’s Social About dialog, but I still have to check if inclusion in KDElibs would be possible because of licensing restrictions, and what do KDE artists have to say about the appearance of said icons in the context of Oxygen.

And obviously, we are missing the data, so if you are a contributor for a KDE application and you feel like joining the Social Desktop bandwagon, go ahead and add that username!