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KDE Development News

Wed 28 Jul 1999 - Tue 10 Aug 1999

KOffice needs help. According to this message from Reginald Stadlbauer, several parts of KOffice currently lack maintainers and/or developers. He points out that the KOffice framework is now stabilizing and it's time to concentrate more on the applications. KSpread needs a better interface to bring existing hidden features to the forefront; KDiagramm, KFormula need improvements...

In other KOffice news, Torben Weis announced KTar, a class for reading/writing gzipped tarballs which will come in useful for handling what will likely be the KOffice document format. Shortly after, Werner Trobin posted initial drafts of a KOffice Storage Specification as well as a KWord Part-Frame Specification. Roland Kaufmann offered his thoughts on the matter.

Jeremy Blosser has created a new site for KImageShop, a relatively new member of the family of KOffice applications.

KDE 1.1.2 is making good progress. Waldo Bastian has been hacking the theme manager and has already added several missing features, improvements and bugfixes. According to Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel's latest release report, all critical 1.1.2 bugs have been addressed and the icons are almost complete. The plan is to release source tarballs on August 30th and binaries on and after September 6th.

Development Tools. Sandy Meier announced KDevelop 1.0beta1, a rather featureful C++ IDE for Unix. Goodies include an application wizard, a GUI designer, class browser, syntax highlighter, documentation browser and much more. Troy Engel was swift to provide an RPM (SuSE RPM also available thanks to Stefan Suchi).

Johannes Sixt also announced KDbg 1.0beta1, a graphical debugger frontend for gdb. Both KDevelop and KDbg are slated for inclusion in KDE 1.1.2.

On a related note, Bernd Gehrmann announced Cervisia 0.2, a CVS frontend. RPMs and debs are already available thanks to those cool guys at the KDE Linux Packaging Project.

KDE 2.0 Updates. Daniel M. Duley has been working on a widget theme designer for KDE 2.0. Users will be able to design widget themes by easily customizing pixmaps, colours, gradients, scrollbar button position, slider types, arrow types, and more. A screenshot is available.

Lars Doelle announced utmp support for konsole in the form of kwrited. The aim is to register a single login no matter how many konsoles one has running. kwrited registers this login and pops up a window whenever a write or wall type message is received.

Richard Moore made available a screenshot showing off KAppletViewer, the demo for kdejava. Java support in khtml (and hence konqi) is not far off... developer.kde.org also now has a page for kdejava amongst lots of other additions.

Cristian Tibirna offered his thoughts on transparent backgrounds for KDE. He proposes implementing a transparent background server that would be part of kdesktop, the desktop manager for KDE 2.0.

Torben Weis gave us a tiny update on tinymico. Discussions are currently underway with the MICO folks on how best to proceed. Cristian Tibirna has been quietly adding multi-head support to KDE. Rudiger Koch revealed intentions of implementing Thai support for KDE but has a few concerns that need addressing. Matthias Elter made available a screenshot page for KDE 2.0.

Widget/Class updates. Paul Campbell reminded us of the existence of KUniqueApplication, a class designed to be used in place of KApplication for situations where only one instance of an application is required to be running.

Judin Max announced the DockWidget library. I'm not sure what it does but the reaction was pretty enthusiastic. Also available are the STabCtl and CheckListBox widgets. David Sweet announced several improvements on KPlotW, a 2D plotting widget. Mosfet announced KDualColorButton. His KPixmapEffects has also been getting high praise.

KDE Quickies. Richard Moore announced Psion 5/EPOC file link support for KFM. It is currently of alpha quality. Moritz Moeller-Herrmann announced a script for converting the KDE menu structure to the IceWM menu syntax. Amir Michail announced more improvements to the Qt/KDE reuse patterns page.

Espen Sand announced khexedit 0.8.2. The new version includes a Qt 2.x port and features several improvements and bugfixes. The reaction to khexedit has been very positive indeed. As usual, Troy Engel made an RPM available. Chris Schlaeger announced KTop 1.1.0pre. Troy promptly made RPMs available. Mirko Sucker announced kardinfo 0.1, a tool for handling PCMCIA cards.

KDE (and Qt) has picked up one of LinuxWorld's Editors' Choice Awards and is evidently related to several other wins. Congratulations to all involved!

Finally, Steve Hutton reports that Corel is looking for KDE/Qt developers.

An archive for these reports is available.