KDE.news 

Simon Edwards will be talking about KDE application development using Python in the FOSDEM KDE Developer's Room. In the interview below he talks about the advantages of Python, how it compares to other languages and whether KDE should be rewritten in Python.

The community has spoken and the winner of the First Annual KDE-Look T-Shirt Contest with 24 out of 81 votes is Nenad Grujicic with his entry Green. Nenad has won the first official KDE-Look T-shirt and an External 7 in 1 Memory Card Reader.

KToon, is a new 2D animation toolkit created by Toonka Films and now made available as a free GPL'ed option to the 2D animation industry. KToon has been developed using OpenGL from the Qt library and follows the same interface style of commercial products such as Macromedia Flash (TM) and ToonBoom (TM). Currently KToon is still in beta and only has 2 modules (Illustration and Animation), but it already allows one to export animations to the SWF format. Screenshots are available. Developers and testers are welcome!

With its new 1.2 release, KDE-based media player amaroK becomes the first player to offer integrated support for Audioscrobbler. In close cooperation with the Audioscrobbler team amaroK developers have deployed exciting new ways to use the popular Internet service. Read on to learn about Audioscrobbler and new features in amaroK 1.2.

OSNews have written a review of KDE 3.4 Beta2. Highlights picked out include the new application welcome screens, the many improvements in KPDF, the new system ioslave and text to speech support. The conclusion, "it looks like the developers have done a great job with this beta release".

The Independent Qt Tutorial provides an example-driven approach to learning Qt. It tries to bridge the gap between the official Qt documentation and the average programmer. Recently, translation work has made impressive progress and the tutorial is now available in French and Italian.

FOSDEM have published the interviews of the speakers from their developer tools track. Alexander Dymo and Harald Fernengel talk about KDevelop including Umbrello integration and what might be in store for KDevelop 4. Benoit Minisini answers questions on Gambas discussing how it compares to other IDEs and how programming is like a music composer writing a symphony.

This month in our series "Application of the Month" we show you the alternative FTP client, KBear. As usual we have an interview with the author and a description of this powerful but easy to use program. Enjoy Application of the Month in Dutch, English, French, and German!

Once again KDE will be exhibiting at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. This year the show has moved to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston and KDE can be found at booth .ORG#3. Drop by for a demo of KDE 3.3 or the latest 3.4 beta 2, and meet some of the east-coast US KDE hackers. The show floor is open from tomorrow (Tuesday Feb 15) until Thursday. KDE is also a finalist for 2 Product Excellence Awards for KDE 3.3 and Kopete.

OSDir.com has published screenshots of recently released KDE 3.4 Beta 2 utilizing the &quotKlax" Live-CD. Jump over to their gallery with 70+ screenshots.