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 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 resulted in 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.
Navindra
Umanee
Last modified: Thu Sep 9 00:28:07 EDT 1999