theKompany.com has announced
a technology preview release of
Rekall, a personal,
programmable DBMS for KDE. Rekall will simplify building database applications
with forms and reports. According to CEO Shawn Gordon, Rekall will have
a full complement of widgets so that applications built with Rekall will be
able to have the look and feel of any other application. He adds that Rekall
applications can be extended in their functionality arbitrarily via embedded
Python as a scripting language (this
capability is not included in the first release). This is a very
positive development for KDE, as programmable databases such as
dBase,
Paradox
and MS Access,
available on other platforms, have enabled
users to focus on the data model and to leverage their business knowledge
into working applications. Rekall even promises some advantages over
the aforementioned products, as it does not rely on a native database and
instead can be used with a database of the user's choice, such as
MySQL,
PostgreSQL or
Oracle, and uses a default database
format that is meant to be light weight, easy to use and require no RDBMS
experience. theKompany is working with the KOffice developers to include portions of this technology in KOffice. More information (including screenshots) is
available at Rekall's
homepage.

Kugar is a business-quality report generator and includes a standalone report viewer and a KPart report viewer. Any KDE application which supports KParts (including the browser Konqueror) thus can embed the report viewing functionality. This is a great addition to the budding KOffice suite. Hats off to theKompany (and Mutiney Bay Software, which started the Kugar project) for donating
this great code to the KDE project! Read more about Kugar below.

Back in November, Reginald Stadlbauer announced a new rich text widget for Qt. That widget could provide, he said, a very stable base for KWord. So a rich text branch of KWord was started and became the focal point of KWord development... The problem was that the new widget was only slated to appear in Qt3. Recently, Thomas Zander reasoned that a stable Qt3 was too far off and considering that current users needed more support right now, came to the conclusion that it might be best to drop the coolness-enhanced branch. Fortunately, David Faure valiantly tackled the task of backporting the Qt3 rich text widget to Qt2 and succeeded! This could be a big boost to rapid KWord development.

TheKompany has just released kivio-0.9.2.
Kivio is now officially part of KOffice, and the code is in the KOffice CVS as well as links on www.koffice.org. New features include printing, right-mouse-button menus on more tools, double clicking a stencil now puts you in text-edit mode, size and position actions have been moved off the toolbar and into a dock-window, snap to grid is now implemented, better zooming abilities, birds-eye-view of canvas, a zoom manager, and various bug fixes.

The second public beta of Kivio is now available from theKompany.com. Most major distributions are available and so is the source. License is now officially GPL.

theKompany.com is pleased to announce the first public beta of Kivio, our diagramming and flowcharting tool for Linux/KDE.

Kivio is the first and most complete diagramming tool for KDE. Kivio has been integrated into KOffice through the use of KParts. This technology preview release is the first public beta of Kivio. There is a core set of functionality and features to start getting feedback from the Linux/KDE community.

A second beta will be released within a day of the final KDE 2 release to ensure compatibility and release some new features. You can find out more and download Kivio here. [Ed: Nice screenshots too. Only RPM available at this time.]

The German Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für
Bildung und Forschung, BMB+F) recently sponsored a meeting of 16 KOffice
developers in Erlangen, Germany by paying their travel and lodging costs.
The meeting was held from September 23 - 25 in connection with the
Linux-Kongreß, a technically oriented Linux congress that is jointly
organized by German Unix Users Group (GUUG) and LiVe (Linux-Verband,
a non-profit organisation that fosters commercial use of Linux in
Central Europe). Many of the
developers attended and two filed reports on the successful event.
And what do hackers do at a hacker conference, you might ask? Read
more below to find out . . . .