Bloggin’ it up

Yesterday in the #kde-edu IRC channel, I witnessed the following conversation:

<piacentini> Another guy was consterned when I told you about KEduca not being in 4.0
<piacentini> He says he used it already for test with more than 45,000 students
<annma> oh
<annma> really?
<piacentini> And he changed his lecture when I told you this
<annma>
<piacentini> Gonna tell people that they need to colaborate, participate, or products can die
<annma> yes
<annma> whenever we looked at KEduca it did not work
<piacentini> I hinted (he works on a government) that he could even sponsor someone to work on it
<annma> but if we had use cases we would have fix it
<piacentini> Yes, I asked him for a list of things he likes, things he does not like, what he uses
<piacentini> And we talked a bit about it
<piacentini> He says (really) that he estimates that the state has saved R$ 15.000 in printing when he switched to KEduca tests
<piacentini> That is about U$10.000
<piacentini> per quarter
<piacentini> Notice that these are tests applied on free courses to a poor community, where they train people in free software and also in other stuff like mechanics, cooking, etc
<piacentini> So for this sort of feedback events like this are good imo, hopefully he will get back to me, and we can use this story to motivate someone to port KEduca to KDE4, and address its shortcomings. I got moved, but my plate is more than full for now

And well, I can say that this story did motivate me and I immediately started work on porting KEduca to KDE4. Now somehow, it had managed to evade any sort of porting effort thusfar so my work was more than cut out for me.

However, a day later and I’ve got the main application compiling and here’s the proof:

As you can see, the menubars are a bit screwed (in fact the Settings and File menus don’t even do anything) but that’s all just a matter of time I’m sure.

Now of course, it’s too late for KDE 4.0 but I’ll try to get it in shape for 4.1 and make some people in poor communities happy