KDE.news 

In this week's edition of Kernel Cousin KDE, Aaron J. Seigo covers the KDE 3 RC releases, the controversy about KDE 3 release coordination, progress with KOffice, trouble on the documentation front, and the new Qt C# bindings. Kudos to Aaron who, as usual, has wrapped a week's worth of development news up in a succinct and pleasurable, yet informative, read.

One of the more recent endeavours in the KDE world is the KDEduware project. A strong and valiant team is playing hard with this new enterprise. Tink speaks this week to a member of this team, Andy Fawcett.

Today marks a special coincidence. First, Adam Treat released the initial version of Qt bindings for C#, which consists of 476 Qt classes converted to C#. The bindings work with the Mono compiler, runtime environment and class libraries, enabling a fully Open Source implementation of C# for Qt. While not yet ready for a real application, Adam has managed to write and execute a Hello World! program (screenshot). KDE bindings are on the drawing board. Shortly thereafter, Phil Thompson, Jim Bublitz and theKompany.com released KDE 2 and KDE 3 bindings for Python. Together with the Java, Objective C and C bindings in the kdebindings module, as well as the Ruby bindings, KDE is providing developers a broad gamut of application development languages. Great work, Adam, Phil and Jim!

Chris Howells wrote in to announce his latest project, KDE Worldwide, to the world. KDE Worldwide wants to promote KDE internationally by providing information and to assist those interested in the localised and translated versions of KDE. A worldwide developer map is currently in the making -- if you are a contributor/developer, please help complete it by submitting your coordinates. There's a set of relevant links and those of you interested in this project can join the mailing list. In particular, Chris is looking to host more international content, including material such as any language tutorials, articles, screenshots, and content that could help enhance the international community's appreciation and experience of KDE.

Cristian Tibirna has written up a summary of the KDE Three Meeting, held in Nürnberg, Germany from Febuary 25 - March 4, 2002. Through the commitment of a group of active KDE developers (group picture, thumbnails 1, thumbnails 2), a large number of bugs were fixed, promising to make 3.0 KDE's best-tested and most stable .0 release yet. Thanks to all the developers for their great work, and to Cristian for the summary.

LinuxQuestions.org has concluded a vote on the Linux desktop, and KDE has once again had a great showing. It came in first in the Desktop Environment of the Year category with almost 69% of the votes. In addition, KDE standouts Konqueror tied with Mozilla (22%) as Browser of the year; KMail took top honors as Mail Client of the Year (beating Evolution by a large margin); and KOffice earned second place (substantially behind StarOffice) as Office Suite of the Year. Check out the complete results.

Did you ever, without any particular reason whatsoever, wonder "Who is Neil?" Despair no longer, for in this week's installment of The People Behind KDE, Tink came up with a whole new set of questions to find out. To learn what Neil wears inside and outside his bed or what his plans are for Noatun, jump straight to the interview.

Daniel Naber has been busy adding to the KDE.org family. Docs.kde.org is a new KDE documentation site which features KDE user documentation for both the 2.2.2 and HEAD (updated daily) branches. The documentation is both browseable and searchable, and developers of KDE CVS apps can link directly to the appropriate documentation from their application's homepage, saving some work (url format: http://docs.kde.org/<VERSION>/<PACKAGE>/<APPNAME>/, e.g., http://docs.kde.org/HEAD/kdenetwork/kmail/). While only available in English at this juncture, the goal is to eventually add all the translated documentation as well. A very useful new addition to the KDE.org family, thanks, Daniel!

The KDE Project is proud to announce its presence at CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade show, taking place in Hannover from March 13 to March 20, 2002. (Note the correct booth location of the KMail/Aegypten presentation is Pavillion P11/D 10-12.)

KDevelop guru Ralf Nolden has published a brief tutorial entitled "Developing C/C++ Applications with the KDevelop IDE" at LinuxJournal. The tutorial explains how to set up a development environment and how to create a small sample project, using a simple program to edit environment variables as an example (code listing). The step-by-step guide starts with the cool Application Wizard (screenshot), then describes how to use Qt Designer (screenshot), edit code (screenshot) and debug the program (screenshot). Really nice introduction to KDevelop, Ralf!