KDE.news 

After her review of JuK, Savanna is back with a unique perspective on the importance of Kontact (preview) to KDE's success. Read on for an entertaining write up of this up and coming app.

At our Belgian SuSE LUG, we have written a handy bilingual HOWTO (dutch version) about how you can check your Hotmail email in KMail with the help of Gotmail. We are following in the same trail as KDE enthusiast Siddhu Warrier by offering our article to dot.kde.org. We believe there is a need for task oriented HOWTOs and we will be translating and writing more of these guides in the near future (help us). Enjoy!

This week in KDE-CVS-Digest: CD burning application K3b begins to gain DVD writing functionality, continued fixes and improvements to KWin, more on the binary compatibility debate, bug fixes, and more. Enjoy.

The latest KDE Traffic is up. Coming a bit late, but bringing along news like dropping kmidi, a new infra-red remote control subsystem for KDE, separating KMail's UI from the core, and more. Special guest: a happy user. Grab it at the usual place.

On June 18th 2003, the KDE Project released the second beta version of KOffice 1.3. It comes with a lot of bugfixes and a couple of new features such as a PDF import filter, new OpenOffice.org filters and more stencils for Kivio. Kexi isn't part of this version nor will it be in the final KOffice 1.3 but it's slated for a stand-alone release later this year and will re-integrated into KOffice in the next major version. Read more in the KOffice 1.3 Beta 2 release notes and in the detailed KOffice 1.3 Beta 2 changelog. Binary packages are expected to be available soon, for now you can only grab the source. Next step is a release candidate planned for 8th August.

Recently it came to my attention that Chris Howells could not make the expo date next week to run the KDE booth, and I have taken over trying to sort something out in time so KDE is properly represented.

Stephan Kulow (KDE 3.2 release coordinator) and Ralf Nolden announced a preliminary KDE 3.2 release schedule and asked everyone to check with the personal schedule. Every planned feature should be entered into the KDE 3.2 feature plan before September 1st, 2003 and has to be implemented before September 29th, 2003. An Alpha 1 release is expected for release after the KDE developer conference 2003 in Nove Hrady on September 1st, 2003. Provided that only one Beta release on October 6th, 2003 is necessary, the final KDE 3.2 release is planned on December 8th, 2003.

Trolltech announced today that they will release a GPL version of Qt/Mac on June 23rd at the Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2003 in San Francisco taking their successful dual licensing strategy for Qt/X11 to the Mac. Also the upcoming Qt Script for Applications (QSA), Trolltech's scripting toolkit for Qt-based applications, will be available under a dual license on Mac OS X. Sam Magnuson from Trolltech already got much of KDE building on Qt/Mac a while ago (screenshots showing Konqueror, Kontact, Games and KOffice). The new license now offered allows to distribute binary builds of KDE for Qt/Mac soon.

The CVS version of KDevelop (a.k.a. "Gideon") continues to improve, both stability-wise and in the feature department. Several new features of interest include the ability to easily attach the debugger to crashed applications inside KDevelop by clicking on a button in Dr. Konqi; the beginnings of integration of KCachegrind (screenshot) by Roberto Raggi, the programmer behind Gideon's solid C++ support; Qt Designer file preview support (.ui) in the file selector; and support for additional programming and scripting languages such as bash.

QuickRip (screenshots) is a DVD backup utility for GNU/Linux, with a Qt interface as well as a command line interface. It makes ripping DVDs onto your hard drive quick and easy, and so is ideal for those who aren't bothered about framerates, clipping, and other (usually) unnecessary options. Version 0.7 has just been released, bringing the basic list of features close to completion, but we'd like to see more feature requests, bug reports (or less!) and code submissions before we hit the 1.0 milestone to make QuickRip the best DVD backup utility for KDE.