Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 08:56:19 -0400
From: Navindra Umanee 
To: lwn@lwn.net, editors@linuxtoday.com,
Subject: KDE Development News

New Panel: Kicker. Matthias Ettrich announced a new panel framework dubbed "Kicker" . The new design was influenced by kpanel, some of Corel's work and the GNOME panel (which, too, was influenced by kpanel). New features include the option of integrating the taskbar into the panel, applet support, intelligent resizing and more (screenshot). Currently missing is a pager applet which Vektor is reportedly taking care of, as well as several kpanel features and work done by Pietro Iglio (menu system, disk navigator,...) that remain to be ported.

The applet API is not expected to change significantly although the underlying protocol will, so start hacking those applets! Writing an applet is as easy as subclassing KApplet, see the example.

More Chrome. Before leaving, Matthias also committed KWin, the new KDE window manager. KWin is currently not quite usable and not really open for hacking since Matthias will be working on it without access to the net during his vacation. It's been mainly committed so that Mosfet can start on some new drool-worthy decorations.

Speaking of Mosfet, he has recently been hired by MandrakeSoft to work on KDE. He now has a news site up and has already committed several juicy items including new effects and gradient options for themes, arrow and progress bar enhancements, QTabBar enhancements, and bevel effects/reverse gradients (whoa). Also, in case you missed it, here's a nice Linux.com interview.

KDE HTML Widget. Lars Knoll announced a rewrite of khtml. The rewrite uses DOM Level 1 as its internal representation with the aim of adding javascript support. Since the rewrite is not complete, it has been committed to the khtml_to_dom branch.

More on KDEStudio's DockWidget. Last week, I lacked an explanation for the DockWidget library, Richard Moore was kind enough to provide one: "It's basically a fancy type of MDI [Multiple Document Interface]. It allows an application's view widgets to dock in a similar way to the current toolbars and menubar. This allows the user to arrange the windows however they wish. This sort of idea is used in some microsoft applications such Visual C++. Personally I quite like it, though I hope there is an option to 'lock' things in place to prevent naive users getting confused." Indeed, looking closely at the new KDE Studio screenshots, you can see little controls on each view...

More on the KDE Application Server. Gabor Szentivanyi wrote in with a new plan of attack for the application server that was proposed a while ago. The proposed first step is to start porting the configuration and registry backends to a small object persistence engine. He is looking for suggestions and more developer involvement.

KDE Quickies. Kurt Granroth has made available the slides for his LinuxWorld Expo presentation. Spanish readers may also want to check out Antonio Larrosa's slides for Campus Party. As usual, all these slides have been created with KPresenter. David Sweet announced an update of the KDE Developer's HOWTO. Boris Povazay sent an update on the KDE Standard Website Project. In particular, the medium-sized standard website is now available.

Ian Zepp announced kmap-0.3, a frontend to the nmap port scanner. Herwin Jan Steehouwer announced KXIcq 0.3.90Beta, a total rewrite with lots of new features. Norbert Weuster announced a webpage for knetdump, a network analysis tool. Espen Sand announced khexedit 0.8.3 which includes a funky new HTML export feature (RPM available thanks to Troy Engel).

New KDE 1.1.2 snapshots are available for testing. The KDE Linux Packaging Project may have binaries for your distribution. Ivan E. Moore II announced KDE 2 and KOffice packages for potato as well as us slink users. The KOffice packages have something of a caveat. Finally, David Faure found some incentive for preserving the .kde.html "hidden" feature previously described.

From now on, the weekly reports will cover Mondays to the following Sunday. Please also note that the spiffy new URL for the archive is now http://developer.kde.org/news/weekly/. The old site will remain available so as not to break existing links.