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KDE Development News – Sun 2 Apr 2000 – Sat 8 Apr 2000

KDE Development News

Sun 2 Apr 2000 – Sat 8 Apr 2000


Application-Start Notification. App-starting
notification has just been added to KDE 2, thanks to Robert Wall
(Robert.Wall@ireland.com). This
provides immediate feedback when an application is started, showing
a taskbar entry with a spinning disk. When the application is
actually up and running, this entry is replaced with the normal
entry, showing the application’s icon. This feature is missing from
most X desktops and will surely be welcomed by users. No more
wondering if the application crashed before it started, or whether
you pressed the button properly. The system works with 99% of X
applications, though some buggy applications may require a special
entry to be made to the .desktop file, which can be done very
easily.

New Session Management. Matthias Ettrich has
implemented new session management code for KDE2, in the form of a
dedicated session management server, ksmserver. The new server
talks the standard X11R6 session management protocol, XSMP.
Unfortunately the protocol does not seem to be well supported–
even within X11R6’s own distribution, the only application which
uses it is xclock. However, using an existing standard is probably
a better move than creating a KDE-specific protocol, and hopefully
XSMP will be utilized by more third party applications in the
future. For more details, check Matthias’
README
.

Dr. Konqi Now Functional. Waldo Bastian

wrote in
about a new feature in KDE2 called Dr. Konqi, which
will automatically startup and inform the user should a KDE
application crash and dump core. If you’re a developer and you need
to disable Dr. Konqi, simply pass ‘–nocrashhandler’ as an argument
to the application or set the KDE_DEBUG environment variable to a
true value.

Kaim Needs Developers! Benjamin Meyer recently
began work on the “Kaim” project, an AOL instant messenger client
for KDE, and is requesting the assistance of other developers. He
has code and screenshots of his work in progress on his website at
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/benjamin/works/kaim/.
There is still much work to be done so if you can give him a hand,
contact him at benjamin@csh.rit.edu.

KAudioPlayer. Stefan Westerfeld
has added
a KAudioPlayer class to libkdecore, in order to
assist porting old KDE1 applications which were written using the
KAudio Class. The new class plays sound files using KDE2’s aRts
framework, yet does not require linking to the MCOP libraries.

Qt-copy Updated. Qt-copy has once again been
updated to the latest Qt beta from the Trolls, qt-2.1.0-beta4.
As usual, the update is highly recommended.


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