KOffice needs help. According to this message
from Reginald Stadlbauer, several parts of KOffice currently lack
maintainers and/or developers. He points out that the KOffice
framework is now stabilizing and it’s time to concentrate more on
the applications. KSpread needs a better interface to bring
existing hidden features to the forefront; KDiagramm, KFormula need
improvements…
In other KOffice news, Torben Weis announced KTar, a
class for reading/writing gzipped tarballs which will come in
useful for handling what will likely be the KOffice document
format. Shortly after, Werner Trobin posted initial drafts of a
KOffice Storage Specification as well as a
KWord Part-Frame Specification. Roland Kaufmann offered his
thoughts
on the matter.
Jeremy Blosser has created a new site for KImageShop, a
relatively new member of the family of KOffice applications.
KDE 1.1.2 is making good progress. Waldo
Bastian has been hacking the theme manager and has already added
several missing features, improvements and bugfixes. According to
Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel’s latest release
report, all critical 1.1.2 bugs have been addressed and the
icons are almost complete. The plan is to release source tarballs
on August 30th and binaries on and after September 6th.
Development Tools. Sandy Meier announced
KDevelop 1.0beta1, a rather featureful C++ IDE for Unix. Goodies include an
application wizard, a GUI designer, class browser, syntax
highlighter, documentation browser and
much more. Troy Engel was swift to provide an RPM (SuSE RPM also
available thanks to Stefan Suchi).
Johannes Sixt also announced
KDbg 1.0beta1, a graphical debugger
frontend for gdb. Both KDevelop and KDbg are slated for
inclusion in KDE 1.1.2.
On a related note, Bernd Gehrmann announced
Cervisia 0.2, a CVS frontend. RPMs and debs are already available thanks to
those cool guys at the KDE Linux
Packaging Project.
KDE 2.0 Updates. Daniel M. Duley has been
working on a widget theme designer for KDE 2.0. Users will be
able to design widget themes by easily customizing pixmaps,
colours, gradients, scrollbar button position, slider types, arrow
types, and more. A screenshot is available.
Lars Doelle announced
utmp support for konsole in the form of kwrited. The aim is to
register a single login no matter how many konsoles one has
running. kwrited registers this login and pops up a window whenever
a write or wall type message is received.
Richard Moore made available
a screenshot
showing off KAppletViewer, the demo for kdejava. Java support in
khtml (and hence konqi) is not far
off… developer.kde.org also now has a
page
for kdejava amongst lots of other additions.
Cristian Tibirna offered his
thoughts on transparent backgrounds for KDE. He proposes
implementing a transparent background server that would be part of
kdesktop, the desktop manager for KDE 2.0.
Torben Weis gave us a tiny
update on tinymico. Discussions are currently underway with the
MICO folks on how best to proceed. Cristian Tibirna has been
quietly
adding multi-head support to KDE. Rudiger Koch revealed
intentions of implementing Thai support for KDE but has a few
concerns that need addressing. Matthias Elter made available a
screenshot page for
KDE 2.0.
Widget/Class updates. Paul Campbell reminded
us of the existence of KUniqueApplication,
a class designed to be used in place of KApplication for situations
where only one instance of an application is required to be
running.
Judin Max announced the DockWidget
library. I’m not sure what it does but the reaction was pretty
enthusiastic. Also available are the STabCtl and
CheckListBox widgets. David Sweet announced
several improvements on KPlotW,
a 2D plotting widget. Mosfet
announced KDualColorButton. His KPixmapEffects has also been
getting
high praise.
KDE Quickies. Richard Moore announced
Psion 5/EPOC file link support for KFM. It is currently of alpha
quality. Moritz Moeller-Herrmann announced
a script
for converting the KDE menu structure to the IceWM menu syntax.
Amir Michail announced
more improvements to the Qt/KDE reuse patterns
page.
Espen Sand announced
khexedit 0.8.2. The new version includes a Qt 2.x port and features
several improvements and bugfixes. The reaction to khexedit has been very
positive indeed. As usual, Troy Engel made an RPM available. Chris
Schlaeger announced
KTop 1.1.0pre. Troy
promptly made RPMs available. Mirko
Sucker announced
kardinfo 0.1, a tool for handling PCMCIA cards.
KDE (and Qt) has picked up one of
LinuxWorld’s Editors’ Choice Awards and is evidently
related to several other wins. Congratulations to all
involved!
Finally, Steve Hutton reports that Corel is looking for KDE/Qt
developers.
An archive for these reports is available.