Application ideas

[rokejulianlockhart]

@Herzenschein

You want Tellico, which is a KDE app. I made my own home’s book inventory once with it, although not with a barcode scanner (I used their ISBN codes, which is what’s read with those barcodes anyway).

@Herzenschein, not integrating with a scanner is a pain if you have a few hundred books to file. I’ve been looking for the same kind of application that @Pacifist3 is, and didn’t settle on Tellico for the that reason. It’s also a shame that it’s solely for non-mobile OSes, since I’m more likely to want to file a book with my smartphone when I find it, instead of going to my PC.

@Herzenschein

It worked great for modern books >1970 since that’s when ISBN was made, not so much with a rare original 1960 German book of mine for example

Did you manage it? If so, how? I’ve got some Middle English (Germanesque) books from a few hundred years ago, and I have no idea where to start.

[Herzenschein]

@rokejulianlockhart

@Herzenschein, not integrating with a scanner is a pain if you have a few hundred books to file.

I thought Tellico did integrate with a scanner, I just personally don’t have one.

Now that I investigated I’m not so sure anymore. It does mention barcode scanners in https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/tellico/tellico/tellico.pdf#section.4.1, there’s source code just for barcode scanning, and there’s this setting:

I don’t have a barcode scanner to confirm whether it works only with webcams or if it also works with actual barcode scanners.

@rokejulianlockhart

Did you manage it? If so, how?

Adding manually.

[rokejulianlockhart]

@Herzenschein, thanks!

[Pacifist3]

I’ll check it out! Thank you for the info.

Edit: Just wanted to say this app is pretty nice. I haven’t figured out the webcam thing yet, but the app seems like a serviceable replacement for Libib. I wish their was some sort of Android app integration, but I can live without it I guess.

[Herzenschein]

@Herzenschein

Reminder that we have this wiki page now as a generic place for application ideas for simple apps:

App ideas - KDE Community Wiki

@carl

we had Issues · Teams / KDE Apps Initiative / Tasks · GitLab already

I’ve added the existing app ideas from the wiki to the issue tracker and removed the contents from the wiki. It will eventually just point to the issue tracker instead.

Use only Issues · Teams / KDE Apps Initiative / Tasks · GitLab from now on.

[rstephenson]

@rokejulianlockhart

@Herzenschein, not integrating with a scanner is a pain if you have a few hundred books to file. I’ve been looking for the same kind of application that @Pacifist3 is, and didn’t settle on Tellico for the that reason.

Most scanners that I’ve used act like keyboard input devices, so if yours is similar, you can scan the barcode in Tellico to use as the search text for certain data sources.

[rokejulianlockhart]

@rstephenson, do you mean that you can scan a barcode with a scanner? I don’t think I understand what you’re referring to. Apologies.

[Imerion]

One idea I think many users are missing is a medium-advanced image editor/drawing program. Something like what Pinta is for GNOME/GTK (https://www.pinta-project.com).

Today the KDE project includes Kolourpaint, which is very simple and mostly for quick drawings or annotations, and then there is Krita which is very advanced and with a focus on digital painting.

I think something in between those would be of use to many people. Now, I understand creating something like that from scratch is a huge undertaking, so I was instead thinking it might be possible to adopt another project. My top candidate would be Photoflare (GitHub - PhotoFlare/photoflare: Quick, simple but powerful Cross Platform image editor.). It is QT-based, already has a lot of features and there is a Qt6 branch that is almost complete, including support for layers. With that it does pretty much everything Pinta does. Just a thought.

There are other options too, of course. I wish I could suggest Pixelitor, my current favorite (it has layer masks, adjustment layers and other advanced stuff too), but it doesn’t use qt. A look around did show other promising qt-based image editors though.

[rokejulianlockhart]

@Imerion

there is Krita which is very advanced

@Imerion, does Krita with most of its toolbars and dockers disabled not also fill that niche? I find that it being available on desktop and mobile Linux DEs plus AOSP makes it a uniquely useful: