Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 19:20:25 -0400
From: Navindra Umanee 
To: lwn@lwn.net, Cristian Tibirna 
Subject: KDE Development News

Lars Doelle is advocating ODBC support in KDE. In particular, he recommends including iodbc and freeodbc++ in kdesupport. In his own words: "Including the libraries would not only enable kde applications to become SQL database clients (the dbms could reside both on a linux system or on another os), but would also propagate the odbc api, which is not yet used in the unix world, but _the_ standard on ms systems. If we want the linux desktop in a corporate environment, it will not be without a proper db client api, and that is odbc."

KDE Internationalization. Woohyun Jang related some of his experience with non-Latin1 letters. He even provided some rather interesting screenshots. Such efforts are particularly important because many developers using languages with latin1 letters find it difficult to anticipate and resolve these issues.

In a related matter, Preston Brown has improved KLocale to now provide localization support for numbers, money, date and time.

Motif DND. Matt Koss has decided to add Motif drag-n-drop support to Caitoo, a nice download manager for KDE. The main advantage of this is that one will be able to drag URLs from Netscape directly to Caitoo for downloading. Matt will likely work on implementing more general support for KDE.

Columbo. Bernd Gehrmann announced a new project codenamed Columbo. Inspired from MacOS's Sherlock, Columbo will allow one to search the local filesystem or the World Wide Web with equal ease. In the future, other abstractions such as searching news or mail may be possible. The source code, which includes a replacement for kfind, can be found here. A screenshot showing the current status of the project is also available.

Daniel Naber also revealed his plans for KWordNet, a promising CORBA frontend and backend for WordNet.

KDE Quickies. Troll Tech has released a beta for Qt 2.0. Any bugs not reported soon will likely be present in the Qt 2.0 release, so if it matters to you, go out and test it. Meanwhile, the KDE 1.1.2 release schedule is now in week two. David Faure has made available some proof of concept screenshots showing text and image viewers embedded in Konqueror. Michael Koch announced a new class to provide general command-line parsing support for KDE programs. Hopefully, a KDE standard for command-line arguments will soon follow. Preston Brown provided us with an interesting run down of the Apache shared memory library for potential use in KDE. Finally, "the artist currently known as Torsten" Rahn is looking for a programmer to help with "the most beautiful screensaver in the world".