Why does KDE work so well? Benjamin Meyer thinks he knows why, and he explains his thoughts in this Tribute to KDE. Benjamin is the lead developer of Kaim (screenshots), and has been working hard at porting this application from being Qt-only to a fully-fledged KDE application.
KDE 2.2alpha2 is here! Blessed by release master Waldo Bastian only a few hours ago, this release has a ton of improvements over KDE 2.1.x. You can view the ChangeLog or glance at the alpha1 announcement for an overall idea of some of the changes versus the stable branch.
As many of you have noticed, we have had a lot of downtime lately brought on by some severe server problems. With our regular server admin away on a well-deserved vacation, we have been forced to move to a new location, at least for now. The new server, bero.org, is owned and operated privately by our friend Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, but is hosted on the excellent network and resources of Red Hat Europe.
This week's issue is momentous as it marks the growth of the editing team from one lonesome soul to a whopping two people! Rob Kaper joins the KC KDE effort this week with a summary of the kde-games list. He will also be following the konq-e list which tracks development of Konqueror for the frame buffer (non-X) and the kde-promo list. This brings the total number of lists summarized each week up to an even dozen.
The current interviewee of Tink's grand series is George Staikos. One of the members of the young KDE guard, George is very active in the parts of KDE that relate to cryptography. He helps with KMail and KOffice too, and he makes up brilliantly for the notorious lack of Canadian KDE developers :-). On a personal note, George is one of the very few KDE friends that I had the great chance to meet in person.
FreeOS.com is running an interesting, circa KDE 2.1, interview with Martin Konold. Apart from a few misspellings and minor errors, it makes for an entertaining read. "Konqueror is really good. It supports Netscape plugins. Java is supported too. It's extremely standards compliant. When we started out with Konqueror, people questioned our decision. They questioned that Mozilla would be out soon why then, were we building our own browser.
Mike Pilone has stepped up to the challenge of implementing gesture recognition for KDE. "KGesture uses libstroke to recognize definable gestures, then run an associated command. Using KDE's DCOP interface, KGesture can interact with applications already running, or launch new applications." You might be forgiven if, like me, you first thought this was a joke.
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.
A second beta of KOffice-1.1 is now available. The improvements since the first beta are considerable, particularly in KWord. If you are looking for a stable and full-featured word processor under Linux, give it a try! This release also features improved filter support throughout the suite including better MS Word and MS Excel support, and a new Quatro Pro filter.
Trolltech have announced that they have successfully ported Qt to the Macintosh platform.