Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 00:07:03 -0400
From: Navindra Umanee 
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: KDE Development News

KOffice news. KImageShop is making very good progress. The project has passed the 10,000 LOC milestone and the first screenshot has been posted. Being able to drag around and manipulate various layers of Cameroun Diaz is indeed very cool! Matthias Elter also presented his thoughts on a plugin system for KIS. (found in the KDE Forum)

The KSpread development pace has also picked up thanks to a new active hacker, mlaurent. Hopefully some of those hidden features will now be brought to the forefront.

The KOffice website will soon get a facelift thanks to Jeremy Blosser. The new site has not yet gone online due to a few remaining interaction bugs with KFM.

KDE multimedia. Stefan Westerfeld wrote in with a proposal listing the pros and cons of replacing KAudioServer2 with aRts, the analog realtime synthesizer. aRts is now very flexible, offering more than the just the possibility of mixing audio streams. As a bonus, the core does not depend on KDE/Qt so other projects are free to adopt it. Another option being considered is switching to the more light-weight Enlightened Sound Daemon.

Stefan also happens to be looking for developers and graphical artists to help with the user interface for aRts, please contact him if interested.

Konqueror. The idea of view plugins is that konqueror should be able to seamlessly embed and integrate applications that can take care of mimetypes not otherwise understood by the browser. For this to work however, the helper application needs to conform to a certain interface. Simon Hausmann has written a nice little HOWTO explaining exactly what's involved. It is hoped that more people will start building konqueror support into their applications. Nice candidates for this include the wonderful aKtion movie player, kghostview, kdvi, ...

Simon also posted his thoughts on how konqueror should progress before the next developer's release.

Better Dialogs. Espen Sand has been working hard at improving KDE dialogs. You can find his latest proposal and screenshots for the KDE About dialog here. He also posted some information on DialogCore, an effort to standardize and clean up KDE dialogs in general. As it turns out, some of this functionality is already available in DialogBase (see also kdelibs/kdetest for an example) so the efforts will have to be merged.

Leon Widdershoven brought up the issue of print dialogs.

KDE 1.1.2. The high colour icons, themes and the rest have finally been committed to CVS. KDE 1.1.2 binaries are expected to ship next week. One piece of sad news is that the KDevelop folks have judged that KDevelop is not quite ready for a stable release and so it has been decided that KDE will ship without it. Incidentally, a certain company is looking to customize KDevelop for non-C/C++ languages and is interested in hiring developers. Contact Daniel M. Duley for details.

Also on the subject of IDEs, Judin Max has announced several updates and the first source snapshot of KDE Studio. As you may know, this project has already been the source of many useful and general widgets.

News from the Web. Avus announced KDE Forum, a Zope-based discussion site for KDE, temporarily hosted here. It already has several interesting news items. Avus is looking for someone to help move this site to a nicer URL.

Mosfet has also declared intentions of starting a new KDE development news site. He is currently looking for a co-founder to help with the design.

On the subject of news, Mosfet asks a very good question: Why are KDE developers not posting their applications to Freshmeat? Tons of new KDE applications are being uploaded and processed, yet many of these are not being announced on the defacto website for new and updated applications. A few volunteers could well take over this task.

KDE Quickies. Mirko Sucker announced a rewrite of KDatePicker. Ian Geiser announced kweather, a dock applet for kpanel. Peter Putzer announced KSysV 1.0.0pre2. Paul Dwerryhouse announced kticker 1.0.0beta2. Finally, Mosfet has an update on the KDE Widget Designer (with screenshot).

An archive for these reports is available.