Rmoore 

News emerged recently that Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) were working on their first IDE for Qt, code named Project Greenhouse. Today saw the release of the first technical preview under the name Qt Creator. The initial release is binary only, and under the terms of the Qt preview license, but the final release will be released with source code under a GPL compatible license. The initial release is available for Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Read on for a users review. Read More

I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week. Aaron Seigo spoke for us all when he said "Uwe had a deep love for and belief in Africa and the role that technology can, and should, play on that continent. He put his back into it and was a great advocate for Free software in his area of the world". Our thoughts go out to his family and friends at this irreplaceable loss, we are all a little less than we were yesterday.

The Richmond Post, a news site covering adoption of the Mozilla XUL UI description language is current featuring an interview with KDE's own George Staikos. George is well known for his work on applications such as kdetv and KWallet, but he is also working on a facility that allows XUL applications to use native KDE widgets. The interview is in two parts: Part One and Part Two. Read More

Following the success of the KDE 3.2 release, the KDE project is pleased to announce a new ambitious project dubbed 'Kimono'. The aim of the project is to write a complete wrapper for KDE/Qt using the Mono framework and is based on early work by KDE bindings hacker extraordinaire Richard Dale. In addition to using Mono for the back-end work, Kimono will entail migrating to KaXul, a fully XML-based representation of the UI. Kimono will be the main focus of the forthcoming KDE 3.3 release. Read More

KDE Traffic #50 has been released. This month it includes information about improvements to bugs.kde.org, KWord patches, OpenOffice filters and a forthcoming PDF import filter. In addition it adds coverage of two more mailing lists: kde-pim and kde-devel. Read More

eWeek's Jason Brooks gives us his take on the discussion about the complexity of KDE and GNOME in his article "Sometimes, More Is More". "I didn't switch from Windows to Linux on my home and work systems because Windows wasn't easy. I switched because as I came into contact with OS alternatives, I became frustrated with lack of flexibility I found in Windows." Do you agree? Are we (roughly) on the right course, or should we be trimming away options? Read More

As many people will have noticed, things haven't been too rosy in the KDE world for the last few days. Virtually all of our critical services have been broken, including cvs, mailing lists, kde.org mail addresses and a number of web sites (such as developer.kde.org). Unsurprisingly, this has meant that KDE 3.0 Beta 2 (originally scheduled for Monday) has been delayed. Read More

c't magazine has just published an English translation of an IOSlave tutorial written by Carsten Pfeiffer and Stephan Kulow. The article tells you everything you need to know to add support for new protocols to KDE. Examples covered include slaves that generate HTML and an ioslave for audio CDs. This is a great tutorial, so check it out and start coding! Read More

Kernel Cousin KDE #13 has just been published. In this week's issue: Avery label templates for KWord, improvements to Kicker, and a new personalizer wizard to make configuring KDE easier. You can read the full article here. Read More

Kernel Cousin KDE #10 has just been released, as usual it describes the latest discussions on the KDE development lists. Topics this week include a new busy cursor implementation, KSpread filter news and the code freeze for KDE 2.2 alpha2. You can find the latest issue here. Read More

Debugging code is always a pain in the neck, but there's a tiny new utility in kdesdk which might make things a little less stressful. The utility, KSpy, gathers information about the state of a running KDE application and displays it graphically. Read more below. Read More

One of the most fascinating aspects of KDE is the speed with which new developments occur after each release. KDE 2.1 came out yesterday, and was celebrated in the traditional manner by adding lots of new features to the KDE development tree in CVS. For me, one of the most exciting things to arrive was a very large commit to the kdebindings module (used for bindings between KDE's C++ code and other programing languages) which added bindings for the KDE and Qt libraries to the well known Java language. The author of the code, Richard Dale, has kindly agreed to answer some questions so that readers of the Dot can get up to speed with this new addition to KDE. Read More

There's a very complimentary article about KDE 2.1 on LinuxToday AU. From the article: "They certainly don't mess around on planet KDE. This week saw the release of the second beta of KDE 2.1 - a major upgrade which adds a huge number of improvements to this impressive, must-have software". You can read the full story here. Read More

Trolltech, IBM (NYSE:IBM - news), and KDE have teamed up at LinuxWorld Expo in New York and are demonstrating IBM's ViaVoice speech-recognition technology running on Qt and KDE. With ViaVoice integrated into Qt/KDE, it will be possible to control Qt/KDE desktop applications with speech input -- from launching applications to menu selections to text entry. Developers can easily integrate this technology into existing applications; in fact, in many cases no changes have to be made. The Trolltech press release follows. Read More

I'm in the process of improving the Kasbar taskbar replacement, and as there seems to be a fair degree of interest I thought I'd outline what I've done so far and my plans. My first aim (which I have nearly achieved) was to ensure that Kasbar had all the features of the standard taskbar, but I have quite a bit more in mind... Read More