KDE.news 

Open for Business features an interview with Torsten Rahn and Everaldo Coelho, the famous icon duo of the KDE artist world, and creators of virtually all of the default icons you see in KDE. The interview discusses how the new Crystal icon theme came about, how it ended up replacing Tackat's HiColor theme, and the overall importance of icons to the enterprise desktop. "In 2001, Frank Karlitschek put up his web page "KDE Look". This boosted KDE artwork contributions beyond belief. A lot of fresh new icon themes appeared and I saw the chance to get the most active people involved with the work on the default icon set." Speaking of KDE-Look.org, you may have noticed recent slowdowns. The site is in need of new hosting or donations. Read More

This past week a new mailing list was created called kde-optimize (archive). The list is for developers who are willing to actively work on optimizing KDE or KDE applications, those who have profiled KDE or those who have the knowledge to help others optimize KDE. Two initial documents have already been created as part of this list. The first one is to teach users how they can improve the performance of their system. The second one is to give developers a starting point when looking to optimize applications. Read More

The latest KDE-CVS-Digest is now available. This issue features news about Apple using khtml in Safari and the subsequent merging of Apple's contributions, support for RDP in the KDE Remote Desktop Client (krdc) and numerous bug fixes and new features. Enjoy! Read More

DRT is a design recovery tool for interactive graphical applications running under X Windows. The tool automatically captures actions performed while using such an application. Functions particularly relevant to each action are highlighted. Moreover, the action itself is described visually from fragments of the application display. One can search and browse these actions to learn about the design of an application. The latest version, DRT 0.2.2, now supports shared libraries, which allows applications such as those in KOffice to work. This version also includes template drt files for all KOffice 1.2.1 applications for easy instrumentation Read More

newdocms is a proposal for a new and radically different way of managing your documents in KDE. It is a move away from the now over 30-year-old hierarchical file system towards a meta-data-based document retrieval system. A 0.1 preview has now been released along with a description and screenshots (typical, newdocms, save, open, results -- the GUI isn't all that pretty at this point). Although not yet ready for production use, newdocms has the potential to really change the way users interact with their computer. Herein lies a challenge to the Open Source community in general, and KDE in particular, to take a step ahead of the competition in a truly innovative way. Should newdocms be a standard part of a future KDE release? Read More

In kicking off the <a href"http://www.macworldexpo.com/">Macworld Expo keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a new Macintosh web browser named Safari. Jobs said the browser was "based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster", JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform). The KDE connection: "[f]or its Web page rendering engine, Safari draws on software from the Konqueror open source project. Weighing in at less than one tenth the size of another open source renderer, Konqueror helps Safari stay lean and responsive." The good news for Konqueror: Apple, which said that it will be "a good open source citizen [and] share[] its enhancements with the Konqueror open source community", has today sent all changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers. Congratulations to the KHTML developers for this recognition of their outstanding efforts. Update @22:34: Dirk Mueller has posted an interesting mail from the Safari engineering manager as well as his response. Hats off to collaboration! Read More

Two new chapters have been released on the trylinuxSD.com website titled "KDE Tips & Tricks in Mandrake 9.0" which offer some KDE3 tips that may not be so obvious to new users. Although the pages are geared toward Mandrake Linux 9.0, much of the content should also apply to anyone using KDE. Please note: The site makes extensive use of screenshots, so dialup users be warned. Read More

KDE 3.1rc6, which most likely will be the final KDE 3.1 release candidate (where have I heard that before?), is now available for download. It incorporates all of the security fixes from the security audit that delayed the release of KDE 3.1. KDE 3.1 is scheduled for packaging on January 13th, so your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to run this release through its paces to find any show-stoppers. To help compile it you might check out Konstruct, a build system which helps you to install KDE releases - it has been updated today for the rc6 release. While its compiling you might hop over to the draft KDE 3.1 Requirements page and notify me of any omissions or mistakes. Read More

KDE, KWin, Konqueror, KMail and KOffice have been nominated for Desktop Environment, Window Manager, Browser, Mail Client and Office Suite of the Year at LinuxQuestions.org. You can see the Members Choice Announcement here or go right to the nomination awards. Read More