KDE Development News

KDE 2.0 Release Plan! The KDE 2.0 release plan has at last been announced, as designed by the release coordinators Kurt Granroth and Preston Brown. The schedule is very aggressive, with a true KDE 1.9 beta due out at the beginning of May. Please refer to http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-2.0-release-plan.html for the text of the plan and up-to-the-minute information.

Magellan Is Vapourware No Longer! Development snapshots for the much-hyped Magellan are now available using rsync. Check the Magellan web site at www.kalliance.org for details and some impressive screen shots. Thanks to Klaus (k.woelfel@gmx.de) for the scoop!

Application-Starting Indicator. A great deal of discussion on how to provide user feedback while an application is starting took place this week. Rik Hemsley came through with specific details on how this should be implemented, which was submitted as a job on www.kde.org/jobs.html to await a willing coder. Those interested can submit patches directly to Rik.

KDE Usability Crew Proposal. During the discussion of the app-start indicator, Timo Hummel threw out an excellent idea: forming a KDE Usability Crew comprised of a variety of both developers and users. The crew would provide input to the KDE developers to further KDE's ease-of-use.

Multi-threading with Pth HOWTO. Roberto Alsina has created a new KDE HOWTO from his work with creating a threaded version of KRN. Qt is not reentrant-- therefore it is tough to truly implement a Qt application using threads. Roberto's code uses the GNU Portable threads library, however, which skirts this particular problem by using cooperative user-space multi-threading. His HOWTO can be found here.

KDE Quickies. Chris Lee has updated his Vitreus theme as announced last week. The new version is much smoother, and Chris is interested in comments. Roberto Alsina has hacked together the beginnings of a PDF QPaintDevice, and is offering his very raw version here. In practical terms, this will give KDE applications the ability to directly generate PDF files, once complete. Daniel Duley (aka Mosfet) was interviewed by LinuxUK. You can find the article, complete with reader comments, here.

Suggestions, comments, and especially contributions to soudan@kde.org. You can always find the current edition of KDN at http://developer.kde.org/news/weekly/, as well as archives of past editions.

If you'd like to have each issue of KDN automatically emailed to you as soon as it comes off the press, send an email with the subject "subscribe kdn-announce" to soudan@kde.org.