KDE.news 

During the LinuxTag 2003 conference, KOffice hackers Ariya, Norbert and Phillip had a chance to meet and discuss the current state of KSpread as well as the future direction of the project. Plans include an Excel export filter as well as switching to the OpenOffice.org Calc format -- read on for the full KSpread Development Roadmap that resulted from the discussions.

The newest iteration of Qt has been released today. See the announcement on Trolltech's site. User desktop improvements include a "completely re-written, faster font rendering engine." Developer improvements include new QSplashScreen and QToolBox objects. Looks fun!

KDE Traffic #59 is out. As it has been a slow news week, we cover a couple of fun things, as well as the MusicMan plugin for Konqueror. Get it at the usual place.

Have you ever wondered what the KDE developers were thinking? Have you ever wondered what motivates or annoys KDE developers? It was these questions that prompted the development of http://www.kdedevelopers.org/, an online weblog for KDE developers.

The Nové Hrady program committee is proud to announce the schedule for the conference program of the KDE Contributor Conference 2003. From now on only minor changes are expected to happen. Conference registration for all attendees is still possible until 29th July. Companies are invited to support KDE and the conference with their attendance. If you're a KDE contributor and want to join the subsequent hackfest please drop an email to eva@kde.org. Also note that there will be a keysigning party on Monday. Read about the required preparations if you plan to attend the keysigning.

The first, very-alpha, release of the Qt library on DirectFB is now available for testing! A lot of things still have to be implemented, so please don't expect to be able to run Konqueror on DirectFB (yet). You can find screenshots and a link to the source here.

YellowTAB is a German-based company developing an operating system called "Zeta". Based on the BeOS source code, for which they have obtained legal rights to use, it is meant to be the next-generation version of the now 3 years old BeOS r5. On their website they have just announced two new technologies for their OS, based on KHTML: "JavaScriptCore and WebCore are two technologies, ported from Apple's work on KHTML (the engine from Konqueror, a "modern Net+" for Linux's KDE), by YellowTab. These components will allow both developers and users to take advantage of the latest technology available, in their everyday Zeta usage."

Franz Schmid, who has been diligently working on the excellent Desktop Publishing application Scribus (screenshots) for over two years, this week announced the first stable release. Available in 17 languages, Scribus is billed as "the first open source DTP application capable of generating professional 'press-ready' results." To mark this milestone release, OSNews has published a review of Scribus 1.0. In addition, Slashdot has a thread on the release.

This week's digest features: Kig Python scripting support, KPilot Palm generic db viewer, an action menu in Konqueror to print files, DVD burning in K3b, RDP support completed in krdc (KDE Remote Desktop Connection) and an httpmail protocol ioslave. Plus many aRts bugfixes besides KDevelop and Quanta fixes and improvements.

As always, the KDE Team participated in this year's LinuxTag which took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. LinuxTag is a platform for Free Software projects and Linux related companies with an exhibition area and a wide range of talks. With more than 19,500 visitors, this year's LinuxTag has become the largest Linux event in the world. Even away from the KDE booth, there was a lot of KDE stuff to see. (Update: Pictures of KDE/GNOME dinner added.)