KDE.news 

OSnews.com features a "non-typical" review of KDE 3.3 Beta 1. It contains the observations of what the user Osho GG saw when he updated from KDE 3.2.3 to KDE 3.3 Beta 1. The story examines the central parts of KDE and some major applications.

This week's KDE CVS-Digest: Kolourpaint adds Emboss and dithering effects, more levels of undo. Digikam adds RGB balance plugin. KPresenter adds a custom slide show option. Krita improves input tablet support. Kexi continues improvement to query editing. KSpread gets a new formula engine. Kopete sees beginnings of MSN file transfer support. KConfigEditor can edit both Gnome and KDE configurations, and export configurations in KJSEmbed JavaScript.

The Kexi Team today announced the immediate availability of Kexi 0.1 beta 4 (change log), codenamed "FireDuck", the newest preview release of the integrated environment for managing data aimed at developers and experienced users.

The Onebase Linux Project has released a special flavor of its OnebaseGo-2.0 edition, which includes the complete KDE 3.3 Beta 1 "Klassroom" suite and KOffice 1.3.2. The main purpose of this flavor (LiveCD) is to try, test and report bugs on this beta version. And also to provide a technology preview for KDE users.

There is a new interface for executing actions in a uniform way called Logical Desktop, a successor of the program segusoLand. It is a quite interesting approach on using your desktop as you work by composing one verb actions with one or more objects. ***

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest: Query designer in Kexi now has the ability to switch between visual and SQL mode. KPresenter improves page effects. Krita adds computing histograms. amaroK adds support for streaming over any supported KIO protocol. Many bugfixes in aKregator, Kopete and Umbrello.

As part of its Grumpy Editor series, LWN.net looks at graphical mail clients. KMail is titled the most configurable and flexible graphical email client. Criticism includes missing features which can be already found in KDE 3.3 Beta 1 like HTML composing and better usage of external spam filters. In summary it's found to be one of the best mail clients available.

The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.3 Beta 1. As another step towards the aKademy in late August, this release is named Klassroom. This beta release shows astonishing stability, so the KDE team asks everyone to try the version and give feedback through the bug tracking system. For packages, please visit the KDE 3.3 Beta 1 Info Page and browse the KDE 3.3 Requirements list. The Konstruct build toolset has been updated for this release.

KDE is known to be remarkably configurable. Unfortunately up till now there was no GUI application exposing that. The problem got more evident with the coming of the wonderful KConfig XT framework. Developers and administrators wanted to have nice graphical tools to edit and create configurations. KDE developers listened. We introduce three applications which let administrators and developers take full control over their desktops.

The KOffice team is happy to bring you the second bugfix package that builds upon the successful 1.3 version. Many bugs have been fixed and the filters from/to OpenOffice.org Impress and from/to OpenOffice.org Calc have been enhanced. As preview, there is a new language: Upper Sorbian. See the release notes and the complete list of changes.