Tunrau 

Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica is at it again, this time with an early review of KDE 4.1 Alpha 1. He writes, "This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability." Features that are listed as planned for 4.1 can still be implemented for 4.1. Next, our friends at Polish Linux are at it once again, bringing us a visual review of KDE 4.1 of revision 802150, which roughly corresponds to Alpha 1. Buried in the article, I found this interesting bit of news, "Kwin features a new visual effect known to most of you from Compiz: the Wobbly Windows." Read More

At Ars Technica, my colleague Ryan Paul has posted about KDE 3.5.6 now being able to run on the Nokia 770 and 800 tablets. If you want to get it up and running, check out the original forum post by "penguinbait" over at Internet Table Talk which gives the complete steps required in greater detail. The main drawback for these systems compared to full computers is the total memory available (64MB or 128MB), fortunately KDE runs quite nicely on these low memory systems nonetheless. Read More

At Ars Technica, I have put together an article detailing my impressions of KDE 4 Beta 2 (more or less, my source checkout is from within 24 hours of beta 2 being tagged last week). An official beta 2 announcement should be arriving shortly as the distros have been packaging it this last week. I am happy to say that beta 2 has made significant progress since beta 1. Read More

A few quickies again this week: the 4th Trophées du Libre (International Free Software Awards) contest is open. Please consider submitting your favourite KDE applications since the award is some €3000 in each category. Also new this week: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen has announced that he is being hired full time to work on Amarok, courtesy of the Magnatune music store. (Don't worry, this doesn't exclude support for other music stores). PyQt released a new version of their bindings. And every once in a while, we stumble upon an old piece of KDE history that just needs to be shared. Check out this 1998 Interview with KDE's grand-daddy: Matthias Ettrich. Read More

A number of KDE related news stories are floating about the interweb today, so here's a quick round-up. Aaron Seigo writes his KDE e.V. Presidential Address on his blog in an effort to force the e.V. to be more transparent about their activities. Over at Ars Technica, I have an article talking about the future of KHTML and WebKit: you'll be happy to know that this seems to no longer be a real problem. Daniel Molkentin has published a new book on coding for Qt 4.x which is now available for ordering at qt4-book.com. Lastly, I've stumbled across a short visual tutorial for those Mac OS X users among us that are looking to help test the KDE/Mac snapshots. Of course you can always go over to TechBase for the build instructions if you have some CPU cycles to spare. Read More

KDE has a number of sub-projects that have blossomed into enormous projects of their own. A number of them, such as KOffice, or KDE-Edu get a lot of press in the open source world, while the KDE PIM project has been quietly gaining corporate acceptance as a suitable enterprise suite. Today's feature are the libraries that power the KDE PIM project, and specifically, what changes have taken place since KDE 3.5.x, wherein the KDE PIM project is one of the most successful and stable components of KDE. Read on for more details. Read More

Hot on the heels of Apple's announcement of Safari for Windows, Clint Ecker has published a short discussion with Lars Knoll, one of the original coders behind KHTML. The article focuses on the connection between KHTML and Apple's Webkit, and in turn shows how Apple's announcement of Safari for Windows can benefit KDE and Qt. Safari on Windows will help KDE in two additional ways: improved website compatibility as more coders can now check site rendering when on Windows; and mindshare for KDE technologies for cross platform applications. Read More

Liquidat has posted a nice overview of the technology known as NEPOMUK, a part of KDE 4. An excerpt reads: "Nepomuk-KDE is the basis for the semantic technologies we will see in KDE 4. Sebastian Trüg, the main developer behind Nepomuk-KDE, provided me with some up2date information about the current state and future plans". Read More

KWin, KDE's window manager, has been around since KDE 2.0 (replacing KWM in KDE 1.x) and has grown to be a mature and stable window manager over the years. For KDE 4, however, there were a few people rumbling about visual effects, and perhaps KWin was feeling a little envious of its younger cousins Compiz and Beryl. While these new effects have created a lot of buzz around Linux and UNIX, long-term KDE users have wished they can enjoy the effects of Compiz/Beryl while still having the tried and tested window manager that is KWin. As a result, for KDE 4, KWin has received a huge graphical upgrade, with composite and GL support. Read on for more details. Read More

Again, after a delay brought on by a bout Real Life (tm), we return to bring you updates on the state of Konsole, KDE's UNIX terminal program. Konsole has been a staple of KDE since KDE 1.0, as has been showing signs of a little bit of clutter and wear. So, Robert Knight has stepped in to clean up the program's code, and more than anything else, fix a cluttered and difficult interface. Read on for the details. Read More

One of the many new technologies for KDE 4 is the often mentioned, but seldom explained Solid hardware API. Hardware has always been a bit of an annoying element of using Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, but Solid hopes to fix that for KDE 4. In many ways, Solid is like Phonon, in that it's a Qt/KDE style API around already existing components at the lower level, such as freedesktop.org's HAL. It is already quite functional in the backend, and it's already affecting visible KDE components. Read on for more... Read More

After a short delay due to a heavy dosage of Real Life(tm), I return to bring you more on the technologies behind KDE 4. This week I am featuring Strigi, an information extraction subsystem that is being fully deployed for KDE 4.0. KDE has previously had the ability to extract information about files of various types, and has used them in a variety of functional contexts, such as the Properties Dialog. Strigi promises many improvements over the existing versions. Read on for more... Read More

Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica has a short article talking about Dolphin and KDE 4. "The Linux-based Dolphin file manager is now scheduled for official inclusion in KDE 4, the next major release of the KDE desktop environment. Dolphin includes several unique usability enhancements that aren't available in Konqueror, KDE's current file manager..." Read More

Well, so far I've published a dozen articles about KDE 4 over the last 12 weeks. A lot of content has been covered, but there is rapid progress still being made on those topics. So, in no particular order, this week's issue deals with addenda and updates to the last 12 articles, so that you can see some of the rapid progress happening as KDE races forward. Read on for details. Read More

This week we'll take a brief look at some of the many features that are making their way into Amarok 2, which is the development branch for Amarok in KDE 4. The features discussed are all in-progress features which have reached varying stages of completion. Read on for information about Amarok's engines (including Phonon), UI changes, changes to the Magnatune music store, OS X support, and more. Read More

One of the big visual changes just happened in KDE 4, the transition of kdelibs to the Oxygen Icon set. This transition is still in progress, and it includes a massive icon naming scheme change that affects thousands of files. But, the Oxygen artwork project much is more than just an icon set, it's a unified way to do artwork for KDE 4. SVG an essential part of Oxygen, so many applications that are now capable of SVG display are also using Oxygen styled artwork. Read on for more... Read More

As some of you who monitor the KDE news sphere may have noticed, there has been a recent addition to the kdebase module. The Dolphin File Manager has been added to complement Konqueror's browsing capabilities. Read on for more information about this new File Manager and its relationship to Konqueror and the rest of KDE. Read More

When a project with the size and scope of KDE gets to be as big as it is, sometimes changing a decision established almost a decade earlier is very difficult. KDE has relied on autotools to build most of the project since its inception, but for the last year, KDE 4 has been building with CMake, a newer build system that is rapidly becoming a heavyweight contender in the world of buildsystems. Read on for more... Read More

Focusing again on applications this week, specifically I'll look at two of the promising document viewers for KDE 4, Okular and Ligature.
They are two of the rising stars of KDE 4, but they both have their roots as KDE 3 applications that have grown up. Read on for more... Read More

Like the previously featured articles on new KDE 4 technologies for Job Processes or SVG Widgets, today we feature the shiny new multimedia technology Phonon. Phonon is designed to take some of the complications out of writing multimedia applications in KDE 4, and ensure that these applications will work on a multitude of platforms and sound architectures. Unfortunately, writing about a sound technology produces very few snazzy screenshots, so instead this week has a few more technical details. Read on for the details. Read More

Since not all of the development for KDE 4 is in base technologies, this week features two of applications from the KDE-Edu team: Kalzium, a feature-filled chemistry reference tool, and KmPlot, a powerful equation graphing and visualization program. Read on for the details. Read More

Have you ever had your taskbar filled with 10 applications all doing something that involved waiting for a task to finish?
Document Printing Progress, a K3b CD burning dialogue, Audio Encoding via KAudioCreator, File Transfers in Konqueror, Kopete, KTorrent, checking email in KMail... The new Jobs support in KDE 4 will unify the display of progress for these tasks, making it easy to see and manage what is happening on your system. Read on for details. Read More

Just because KDE has been designed to be portable across Linux, FreeBSD and other UNIX/X11 environments for an age now, doesn't mean we aren't up for the occasional challenge. With version 4, Trolltech released Qt for the Mac, Windows and now even embedded environments under the GPL.
Since Qt is the base upon which KDE is developed, KDE is now free to offer native support for these platforms. Today I am focusing on the KDE/Mac developments for KDE 4. Read on for the details. Read More

In this week's edition of the Road to KDE 4, we'll take a look at the up and coming KWord 2.0 as part of the KOffice project. KWord 1.6.1 is already a powerful KDE-integrated word processor, but with KDE 4 technologies, KWord 2.0 promises to be among the most powerful free word processors available. Read on for more details. Read More

Since KDE 4 development is in full swing with plans for a KDE 4.0 release sometime later this year, I thought I'd put together a weekly piece entitled The Road to KDE 4. The idea is to have a short overview of one or two of the features that show progress in KDE 4. For my first issue, the goal is to show off some of the great SVG work that has taken place so far. Read on for the details... Read More

For the last couple days, I've been working on making things transparent in KDE. This is pretty easy to do, but time consuming. Most notable success so far is with Konqueror. Next up, ksirc, and hopefully kicker. This code cannot go into 2.1, since we are in a feature freeze, but the following version of KDE should be quite transparent! [Ed: Also check out the transparency screenshots for Kasbar TNG. There's some other slick stuff there too.] Read More