2.0 Beta Release Schedule. Kurt Granroth, KDE core developer, posted an email on the tentative beta release schedule for KDE 2.0. The first beta, 1.90, is due out Wednesday, May 10, with regular beta releases to follow on one month intervals. If everything goes according to plan, expect a 2.0-final release in September!
aRts C API Ready. Stefan Westerfeld announced that the aRts C API is now ready for public use. aRts is the sound server that will be used for KDE2, which allows many applications to use the audio device at the same time. This means modules can now be developed for plain C applications to allow them to output through aRts. Stefan also notes that he has already developed two: one for Quake, and one for Mpg123.
Kicker Updated. Matthias Elter wrote in with the note that many new features have been merged into Kicker in the main KDE2 CVS branch. New features include: no more splitter between the buttons and applets, a simplified applet API, applets can be moved and reorganized just like buttons, general code cleanup, and more robust layout save/restore code.
KDE Developer Tutorial Updated. A new version of Anontio Larrosa's KDE Developer Tutorial is now available at http://www.arrakis.es/~rlarrosa/tutorial.html. Recent additions include a new chapter on using KXMLGUI and miscellaneous small fixes needed by the latest KDE2 snapshots.
KWord Developers Wanted. Reginald Stadlbauer is requesting for new developers to take over the development and maintenance of KWord. Time is now limited for him, and he plans to focus on his first pet project, KPresenter. Of course, he will answer any questions about design and implementation issues. If you're interested, please let him and the kde-devel/koffice lists know!
Multimedia Market 2000. Martin Konold brought word of the great success the KDE team had at the Multimedia Market 2000 exhibition which took place recently in Stuttgart, Germany. He also provided a link to pictures of their booth and presentation at ftp://ftp.us.kde.org/pub/kde/events/Multi_Media_Market_2000/. Our friends at the gnome project, who were also there, have more pictures of the event at http://home-of-linux.org/germany/mmm-2000/.
KDE Developer Network. Dan Pilone posted the news that the upcoming KDE Developer Network is almost ready to go live. The submission process is already open, however, and articles can be submitted at articles@shdn.org. As usual, feeback and suggestions are also welcome.
Talking KEdit. A version of KEdit that can talk has been uploaded as KTalkEdit by Richard Moore, as part of his attempt to add support for speech synthesis to KDE 2. Note you must have the Festival speech synthesizer installed for KTalkEdit to function. Currently, it supports reading the document text and reading the current text selection. In addition, a first step towards a screen reader has been made, but extra methods in Qt will be needed before it can progress further.
Modern Theme. Mosfet, the developer of the KDE 2.0 theming system has designed a theming module for KWin, the new KDE window manager. This code clones much of the "Aqua" style look and feel but is much faster without the associated memory and speed penalty of pixmaps. Check out his work at http://www.mosfet.org/modern-0427.html.
Qt-2.1 Released. The official 2.1 version of Qt has been been released by the trolls, prompting yet another update of qt-copy. You can download the new Qt version at ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/qt-x11-2.1.0.tar.gz.
Quickies. Konqueror now supports Netscape plugins! Look here for some screenshots of a flash application running in Konqi. KDE's CVS server has officially been transferred to SourceForge, as of Friday, May 5. Kurt has posted a FAQ here. For those of you having trouble making Jade and SGML work properly on your system, Frederik Fouvry has created a troubleshooting document that you can find at http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~fouvry/kde/sgml-errors.html.
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