I’ve been busy (and will be for some months) with my degree final thesis, and KDE Connect is suffering it with a development slow-down. However, we have received emails from people willing to help and I think that your contributions can be a good way to re-activate KDE Connect’s development. So, this post is for all of you who want to help!

First of all I want to post our own to-do list for KDE Connect, ordered by difficulty from easy to hard. Most of those items can be programmed as plugins, so code will be pretty stand-alone . Of course, if you have your own awesome idea you can also contribute it.

Input emulation: Use your phone as a touchpad/keyboard. [DONE]

Use your phone as a touchpad/keyboard. [DONE] Answer SMS from the desktop: maybe integrating it with Telepathy. [WIP]

maybe integrating it with Telepathy. [WIP] Share from desktop: send files from Dolphin using a context menu service. [DONE]

send files from Dolphin using a context menu service. [DONE] Reverse media controls: Add remote controls to the plasmoid.

Add remote controls to the plasmoid. Sync stuff: Contacts, Wifi passwords (will need root acces), etc.

Contacts, Wifi passwords (will need root acces), etc. File browsing: FUSE or KIO slave to access your phone filesystem. [DONE]

FUSE or KIO slave to access your phone filesystem. [DONE] Call answering: I have no idea if this is possible and will probably need root access.

I have no idea if this is possible and will probably need root access. Port to other platforms: Windows (it already builds using KDE Windows!), iPhone, Blackberry, Jolla…

For now I think we can use this post comments to publicly discuss any issue and organize the development. If there is enough people involved I will set up a mailing list.

And finally I would like to explain to people not from KDE how to contribute to KDE Connect or any other KDE project. To get involved in KDE is easy: We use a tool called review board to submit patches to projects. This allows the project maintainer to review the code, ask for any modifications and finally integrate it into the development branch. After you submit a few patches and they are accepted, you can ask for a developer account so you can push your changes directly (even though you should always use the review board anyway). Remember that patches should be as atomic as possible, and not include more than one feature.

In the KDE Projects site you will find the URIs of the different GIT repositories to grab the sources and start coding. Non-stable projects, like KDE Connect, are in the “Playground” category. And also remember that KDE Connect has two different repositories: kdeconnect-kde and kdeconnect-android.

Happy hacking!

October 14th 2014: Updated post to reflect the things that have been implemented already!