By Navindra Umanee
(archived at this site).
KOffice updates. Werner Trobin has
implemented an OLE-stream decoder for KOffice. This is a big
step towards decoding Microsoft Office documents and will be of
great use to developers currently working on MS Office import
filters. More information on the OLE structure of MS Office
documents can be obtained at the LAOLA
Homepage.
While the KOffice document format is generally stored as plain
text in human-readable XML, documents are often accompanied by
embedded binaries such as images or sound files. Torben Weis
has
tackled the problem by implementing tar read/write capabilities
for KOffice with gzip compression support soon to follow. Hence
KOffice documents may soon be stored as tgz-style files containing
the XML document and any accompanying files or binaries.
The KOffice site is
currently very much out of date and does not reflect the relentless
progress of the KOffice project; if anyone would like to take the
initiative to help maintain this site, please get in touch with
Reginald Stadlbauer
and Martin Konold.
Christian Esken has shed some light
on the multimedia situation. As it turns out, there are
currently 4 or more independent efforts to implement multimedia
systems in KDE. This includes Christian’s own kaudioserver, Stefan
Westerfeld’s aRts and
Martin Vogt’s kmpg.
Unfortunately, while these efforts have similar goals, they are
mutually incompatible and it will be necessary to agree on a common
system soon. (ref: Last week’s proposal
from Stefan.)
Pietro Iglio wrote in with some proposed
improvements for KPanel. In particular, he intends to
make matters more transparent to the user by eliminating the
concept of separate global and personal menus, and allowing full
user customization while still enabling priviledged users to
globally publish menu items. See the discussion
for all the details.
KDOC. Sirtaj Singh Kang gave us the
skinny on the history of KDOC as well as an update on the new
and planned features of KDOC 2. It is
hoped that KDE developers will stick to kdoc for class/API
documentation and will help extend and improve KDOC when their
needs are not met.
KDE Quickies. Mirko Sucker
announced the addition of 2 new classes, DialogBase and
KAboutDialog, to kdelibs. Daniel M. Duley
has added diagonal gradient support to KPixmap (screenshot). Amir
Michail announced
the availability of improved KDE/Qt
reuse patterns. Espen Sand announced
version 0.8.1 of khexedit (RPM available thanks to
Troy Engel).
Finally, if you’re a KDE developer and you’re interested in
writing a book on KDE programming, you might want to get in
touch with Miller-Freeman.
An archive for these KDE devel bits is available.
Navindra
Umanee