KDE.news 

Not so long ago Richard Dale announced Korundum, a RAD environment for KDE that makes developing desktop applications extremely fun and easy. Now, another KDE developer has announced Rubydium, his efforts to bring Just-In-Time optimisations to the Ruby runtime. Could Ruby become a serious contender for KDE application development? The combination of Ruby, KDE and a fast runtime could mean competition to Java and .Net on the Linux desktop.

Before amaroK was born, most KDE users were stuck with XMMS; others would even run console-based audio players. Now those days are over. amaroK, written for the KDE desktop environment with its slick GUI and plugable, engine-independent audio capabilities is coming to a computer near you!

Ok, so I don't like KCalc much. I think that usability-wise, it's the worst KDE application ever. So here's a proposal for a replacement. And since code speaks louder than words, here's an implementation too (PyQt).

Next week sees the Linux World Expo (renamed from Linux Expo UK) in London's Olympia where KDE are teaming up with Gnome to run one of the biggest stands in the .org village. As well as representing the desktop environments, we will be promoting the desktop platform projects freedesktop.org and X.Org. To be demonstrated on the stand are KDE 3.3, FreeNX, X.org 6.8 with XComposite and a cool Konqi the Dragon animation. Many kde-gb developers will be on the stall, we hope to see you there.

Krita, formerly known as Krayon, formerly known as KImageShop, never known as nor intended to be the Kimp, is available for your testing pleasure.

For the first time since development started in 1999, Krita is complete enough to be packaged as the first preview release. Building on the great foundation laid by the original team, the enthusiastic work by John Califf and the thorough architecture designed by Patrick Julien, the Krita developers have been working real hard during the last year to bring you a firework of interesting features.

The eWeek Labs have reviewed the latest releases of both major Free Software desktops. The report focuses on their groupware applications and how the desktops can be locked down. Additionally Kopete gets praised for its improvements and desktop integration. From KDE's executive summary: "KDE 3.3 is another strong release from the prominent KDE project and stands out most for us in the improvements to its Kontact groupware application."

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest (experimental layout): KPDF supports table of contents. Krita adds scaling. Plastik is now the default style. The aKademy section introduces the requirements of the KDE 4 multimedia architecture, reports about kdemultimedia developers' plans and summarizes the first talk "MAS in KDE" of the multimedia track.

Dave Fancella tried the document processor LyX and writes his findings: "A common problem with word processors today is that they force users to deal with typesetting, a skill that is about as useful to a writer as metalworking is to a mechanic. This focus on typesetting means that writers have to spend too much time dealing with the way their documents look. To make matters worse, many documents are shared in a variety of different formats requiring additional time wasted in export, conversion, and quality control on the finished product. To help get around these obstacles, Linux users can turn to a document processor called LyX. LyX is optimized for writing and takes the chores of typesetting out of the writer's hands and places them in a competent professional: LaTeX."

Coming week the 4th edition of SANE will start, an international 5-day event on System Administration and Network Engineering. Wednesday evening 29th September, the Free Software Bazaar will take place which is part of SANE 2004. Bazaar is forming a bridge between the tutorials and the conference and is a perfect opportunity to meet software developers and get involved in these projects. This event takes place in the evening and it can be visited for free. Richard M. Stallman will start the Bazaar with a presentation on Free Software followed by some BOF sessions of different Free and Open Source Software projects. The KDE project is represented with two sessions arranged by KDE-NL. It looks like it is going to be a nice evening so if you have the chance please visit us at this event!

As part of its Grumpy Editor series, LWN.net looks at presentation software and KPresenter was given high marks: "From the outside, however, KPresenter looks like a more vibrant, fast-moving project...OpenOffice should not be written off by any means, but KPresenter looks like it may be set to surpass it."