From Navindra
Umanee.
Lars Doelle is advocating ODBC support in KDE.
In particular, he recommends including iodbc and freeodbc++ in
kdesupport. In his own words:
“Including the libraries would not only enable kde applications
to become SQL database clients (the dbms could reside both on a
linux system or on another os), but would also propagate the odbc
api, which is not yet used in the unix world, but _the_ standard on
ms systems. If we want the linux desktop in a corporate
environment, it will not be without a proper db client api, and
that is odbc.”
KDE Internationalization. Woohyun Jang related
some of his experience with non-Latin1 letters. He even provided
some rather interesting screenshots. Such efforts
are particularly important because many developers using languages
with latin1 letters find it difficult to anticipate and resolve
these issues.
In a related matter, Preston Brown has improved
KLocale to now provide localization support for numbers, money,
date and time.
Motif DND. Matt Koss has decided
to add Motif drag-n-drop support to Caitoo, a nice
download manager for KDE. The main advantage of this is that one
will be able to drag URLs from Netscape directly to Caitoo for
downloading. Matt will likely work on implementing more general
support for KDE.
Columbo. Bernd Gehrmann announced
a new project codenamed Columbo. Inspired from MacOS’s Sherlock,
Columbo will allow one to search the local filesystem or the World
Wide Web with equal ease. In the future, other abstractions such as
searching news or mail may be possible. The source code, which
includes a replacement for kfind, can be found here.
A screenshot showing the current status of the project is also
available.
Daniel Naber also revealed
his plans for KWordNet, a promising CORBA frontend
and backend for WordNet.
KDE Quickies. Troll Tech has released a beta
for Qt 2.0. Any bugs not reported soon will likely be present in
the Qt 2.0 release, so if it matters to you, go out and test it.
Meanwhile, the KDE 1.1.2 release schedule is now in week
two. David Faure has made available some proof of concept
screenshots
showing text and image viewers embedded in Konqueror. Michael Koch
announced
a new class to provide general command-line parsing support for KDE
programs. Hopefully, a KDE standard for command-line arguments will
soon follow. Preston Brown provided us with an interesting run
down of the Apache shared memory library for potential use in
KDE. Finally, “the artist currently known as Torsten” Rahn
is looking
for a programmer to help with “the most beautiful screensaver
in the world”.