KDE.news 

Recently, there have been some comments in the press regarding KDE's look and feel which were, to say the least, rather unflattering. The comments centered mainly around KDE's icons and the overall elegancy of the desktop. Like many of us, Mosfet felt these comments were unwarranted and somewhat misinformed, but he took the extra step of writing up a public response. I'm glad someone did. A lot of people have always enjoyed KDE's default look and feel, but with sites like KDE-Look.org (includes icon themes), appsy's theme section, as well as the new dedicated themes section on freshmeat, there are now more possibilities than ever to adjust KDE to your personal liking. KDE 3.1 will offer even more.

After 36 issues and over 300 mailing list thread summaries, I have decided to take a semi-permanent break as editor of the Kernel Cousin KDE project. KC KDE was taking up quite a bit of my available time outside of work and family and, as enjoyable as it was to put KC KDE together, I have had to reprioritize things a bit. It would be a shame to see KC KDE simply go away forever, though. If anyone is interested in taking up the role of editor, I would be more than happy to get them started and co-edit the first few issues until they are confident and comfortable with the process.

Have you ever wondered who contributes what to KDE? The berliOS project attempts to answer this question with KDE CVS statistics, a site tallying every developer's contributions (translators are currently not included). With regular updates planned, you can find the latest summary here and also statistics for every CVS module. And before you start to wonder: The account kulow is used to transfer the work of the translators from kde-i18n into the other modules; Stephan Kulow's exclusive account is coolo.

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.2beta1. While the "final" 1.2 release is not scheduled for another 5 months, this is a great chance to see what the active KOffice developers are up to, and also a great time for new developers / companies to join the KOffice project to accelerate the ascendence of KOffice into the market-leading office suite position <grin>. The highlights of this release are WYSIWYG in KWord, KPresenter and formula objects, much enhanced scriptability via DCOP, and a number of new and enhanced filters, including an XSLT framework for mapping between different XML office formats. Read the announcement for the many details, and feel free to give thanks to those awesome KOffice developers!

Ever wonder what a KDE developer looked like in a Christmas party setting? Ever wonder if Mosfet had a good-looking sister? Hop on over to this week's interview with Lukáš Tinkl, on the People Behind KDE page, and find out why Lukáš likes it hot and if it's possible to be single AND have a girlfriend. Lukáš is co-maintainer of kde-i18n, is coding on KOffice, KPresenter, KSpread, the image gallery plugin for Konqueror and, he doesn't know for sure, perhaps more.

A tutorial on programming with the KDEPrint module has been made available on the KDE Print web site. The tutorial is intended for application developers who wish to make use of KDEPrint within their applications. It covers the basic usage as well as more advanced features such as the print dialog customization or the automatic preview mechanism. The tutorial is illustrated with code examples and screenshots. Most of the code examples are taken from a demo application (a small image viewer), available for download. Enjoy!

Thomas Capricelli, Philippe Fremy, and Mickael Marchand are pleased to present the first ever stable version of KVim, finally bringing us "the power of VIM with KDE's friendliness". In case that means nothing to you, VIM stands for Vi IMproved and has become the defacto standard version of Vi on most Linux distributions. Vi is the traditional, ever popular, text editor on UNIX systems which can sometimes be a challenge to new users. As the names imply, VIM adds many powerful improvements over Vi, and KVim wraps the whole thing up in a nice KDE interface. Best of all, KVim offers a KPart for out-of-process embedding in KDE. The KPart can currently embed either of GVim or KVim in Konqueror, but further work is required before proper support for KDevelop, KMail and Kate is available. It also looks like KVim will be integrated into the main VIM source distribution in the future. Great news!

In this week's episode of The People Behind KDE, we travel to Osaka, Japan for a beer with Takumi Asaki. Takumi, who loves Renju and prefers Tatami to a bed, is very active in making KDE accessible to the Japanese. Read more about Takumi and his many talents here.

KDE reached a milestone last week with the release of KDE 3.0, but that doesn't mean that KDE development is finished. Indeed, many things still need improvement and many exciting features have yet to be added to KDE. Fortunately, there are a number of different ways in which you can help make KDE better!

Klaus Stärk informs us that the German KDE website has announced the April 2002 App of the Month: KView. As usual, the useful (German) review includes a screenshot-laden description of KView, as well as a note about, and an interview with, its maintainer, Matthias Kretz. Find out more about your favorite image viewer and the talent behind it.