KDE.news 

Qt# 0.4 has been released! Qt# is a set of cross-platform C# bindings for Trolltech's Qt GUI toolkit that is currently targeted towards Mono and Portable.NET. Along with some initial API documentation, code samples, tutorials and bugfixes, there have been a lot of improvements over 0.3, including support for events, multiple custom slots, object tracking and even preliminary support for Microsoft.NET. Download here -- some screenshots can be found here [Ed: wow and wow], and Debian apt sources here. Interested parties should also feel free to drop by #qtcsharp on irc.OpenProjects.net. Read More

For those of you not yet convinced of the evils of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), Philippe Fremy presents the English version of an article by Pascal Audoux that pits MFC against Qt. "The [Qt] architecture is a good object-oriented one and was obviously intelligently designed. The result is a toolkit very consistent regarding naming, inheritance, class organisation and methods. Method arguments are the ones you want to supply, no more. They always come in the same order for different classes. And the return value is logical. Everything is powerful and simple at the same time." I also found this old comparison of Qt to Java (see this one too) rather interesting. Read More

Kernel Cousin KDE #42 has hit the virtual shelves. Juergen Appel talks about KOffice filter improvements, a Lyrics plugin for Noatun, a new Kivio developer, a transparent Kicker (1,2,3), voice synthesization and much more. Read More

Open for Business has held its first annual OfB Open Choice Awards and KDE 3.0 has won in the category Best Desktop Environment: "If the KDE Project had been content to stick with KDE 2.x, this may very well have been GNOME's year to shine. Unfortunately for the younger project, KDE moved forward at such a rapid pace this year, some people thought the project's development process might crumble under its own weight. It did not, and KDE 3.0 emerged as the most polished, professional desktop available for Unix and Unix-like systems." Read More

Sebastian Biot looks at KDE Usability in the first of a series of studies. "While some participants noted that KDE looked different from Windows, none seemed bothered by the differences and the look-and-feel of KDE. Users identified all the elements of the interface without any trouble including KDE's Konqueror and KMail icons. Most users seemed to understand the K menu's presence and function intuitively and they used it much more than I had anticipated. This test conducted in early July 2002 with four participants outlines of some of KDE 3.0's shortcomings including inconsistencies in KFileDialog and the difficulties of working with Konqueror's embedded viewers." It's good to see people stepping up to do this kind of work -- the good news is that discussion of the study has already been started (kde-usability, kde-cafe). Read More

The ability to select mimetype-specific actions from Konqueror's context menu is an oft-requested feature. The pleasant surprise is that this is already possible. The even more pleasant surprise is that you don't need to be a software developer to do it. This article, the fourth in the dot tutorial series, details step-by-step how to quickly and easily add new actions to Konqueror's context menu. Read More

Kernel Cousin KDE #41 has been published. This edition includes Konq/E updates, KOrganizer compatiblity with Exchange 2000, tabbed browsing updates for Konqueror, KDE 3.2 candidates such as fractions with KBruch and KSVG. Enjoy! Read More

Linux Today takes a closer look at Kernel Cousin KDE and the new KDE Myths site, particularly how they originated (1, 2) as a community effort by Aaron J. Seigo. "Our spotlight here is on Aaron's KDE Kernel Cousin. Aaron started as "a happy KDE user." But he wanted more. He wanted to get involved in the KDE project himself, so to him that meant getting to know as much about the people, culture, and goings on as possible. Soon he found himself on not only kernel issues for KDE, but also on more than a dozen other lists related to various aspects of KDE development. Several thousand pieces of mail a week flooded into his mailbox." A great read and a nice tribute to Aaron. Read More

OSnews is running an interview with the dot's very own Waldo Bastian. Besides his long-running contributions to a large range of the KDE libraries and other desktop infrastructure, Waldo is well known as the KDE 2 "release dude", for helping keep the KDE infrastructure operating, and as an inexhaustible supply of knowledge and tips to other developers on IRC. In his at times serious and at times tongue-in-cheek interview, Waldo talks about the growth of Linux, his employer SuSE, GNOME competition and cooperation, the role of UnitedLinux, and KDE's performance, and also reveals a secret way to get Trolltech to add requested features to Qt: "Catch a live Troll, lock it up and feed it beer till it promises to make whatever you need." Read More

User Interface designer Eugenia Loli-Queru has written a thoughtful and well-illustrated article for OSNews where she discusses which parts of KDE are good and which ones could use some polishing. "What is a good User Interface? Well, in order to answer that, we will have to take into account that different people like different shapes, colors and functionality. This article is just my personal opinion, how I would like KDE to evolve in the future. I am sure that other users would like to see other, different types of evolution. However, we can't deny the fact that some basic rules of UI design should never be ignored." The developers have started a discussion (thread1, thread2) based on this article. Read More