New Panel: Kicker. Matthias Ettrich announced
a new panel framework dubbed “Kicker” . The new design was
influenced by kpanel, some of Corel’s work and the GNOME panel
(which, too, was influenced by kpanel). New features include the
option of integrating the taskbar into the panel, applet support,
intelligent resizing and more (screenshot). Currently
missing is a pager applet which Vektor is reportedly taking care
of, as well as several kpanel features and work done by Pietro
Iglio (menu system, disk navigator,…) that remain to be
ported.
The applet API is not expected to change significantly although
the underlying protocol will, so start hacking those applets!
Writing an applet is as easy as subclassing
KApplet, see the
example.
More Chrome. Before leaving, Matthias also
committed KWin, the new KDE window manager. KWin is currently
not quite usable and not really open for hacking since Matthias
will be working on it without access to the net during his
vacation. It’s been mainly committed so that Mosfet can start on
some new drool-worthy decorations.
Speaking of Mosfet, he has recently been hired by MandrakeSoft to work on KDE.
He now has a news site
up and has already committed several juicy items including new effects and
gradient options for themes, arrow and
progress bar enhancements, QTabBar
enhancements, and bevel
effects/reverse gradients (whoa). Also, in case you missed it,
here’s a nice Linux.com
interview.
KDE HTML Widget. Lars Knoll
announced a rewrite of khtml. The rewrite uses DOM Level 1 as its internal
representation with the aim of adding javascript support. Since the
rewrite is not complete, it has been committed to the khtml_to_dom
branch.
More on KDEStudio’s DockWidget. Last week, I
lacked an explanation for the DockWidget library, Richard
Moore was kind enough to provide one: “It’s basically a fancy
type of MDI [Multiple Document Interface]. It allows an
application’s view widgets to dock in a similar way to the current
toolbars and menubar. This allows the user to arrange the windows
however they wish. This sort of idea is used in some microsoft
applications such Visual C++. Personally I quite like it, though I
hope there is an option to ‘lock’ things in place to prevent naive
users getting confused.” Indeed, looking closely at the new
KDE Studio screenshots,
you can see little controls on each view…
More on the KDE Application Server. Gabor
Szentivanyi wrote in with a new plan
of attack for the application
server that was proposed a while ago. The proposed first step
is to start porting the configuration and registry backends to a
small object persistence engine. He is looking for suggestions and
more developer involvement.
KDE Quickies. Kurt Granroth has made available
the
slides for his LinuxWorld Expo presentation. Spanish readers
may also want to check out Antonio
Larrosa’s slides for Campus Party. As usual, all these slides have
been created with KPresenter. David Sweet announced an update of
the KDE
Developer’s HOWTO. Boris Povazay sent an update
on the KDE Standard Website Project. In particular, the
medium-sized standard website is now available.
Ian Zepp announced
kmap-0.3, a frontend to the nmap
port scanner. Herwin Jan Steehouwer announced
KXIcq 0.3.90Beta, a total rewrite with lots of new features. Norbert Weuster announced
a webpage for
knetdump, a network analysis tool. Espen Sand announced
khexedit 0.8.3 which includes a funky new HTML
export feature (RPM available thanks
to Troy Engel).
New KDE 1.1.2 snapshots are available
for testing. The KDE Linux Packaging
Project may have binaries for your distribution. Ivan E. Moore
II announced
KDE 2 and KOffice packages for potato as well as us slink
users. The KOffice packages have something of a caveat.
Finally, David Faure
found some incentive
for preserving the .kde.html “hidden” feature previously
described.
From now on, the weekly reports will cover Mondays to the
following Sunday. Please also note that the spiffy new URL for the
archive is now http://developer.kde.org/news/weekly/.
The old
site will remain available so as not to break existing
links.