KDE.news 

People of KDE: Cornelius Schumacher

Monday, 4 February 2002  |  Inorog
Tink's weekly report from the steady journey through our fellowship features today the author of Kandy and the present maintainer of the highly-praised KOrganizer. We thus name Cornelius Schumacher. He also co-authored a nice new developer tool dubbed KBugBuster and is a trusted member of the KDE-PIM team. We now get the chance to learn more about him and his passions. Thank you, Cornelius. And thank you, Tink, for another interesting interview. Read More

Impressions on the Paris Linux Expo

Saturday, 2 February 2002  |  Pfremy
I have written a report of my experiences at the KDE booth of the Paris Linux Expo 2002. "Then I saw this magic thing: A live coding session by a truly talented KDE core developer: David took his laptop and started coding under my eyes. In five minutes, it was done: the "URL" label on Konqueror would accept a pasted URL and simply open it. Really great! He did that again on the next day, when a visitor asked for the domtree plugin to support copy/paste of every branch." You can also view photos of the event thanks to Laurent Rathle, webmaster of the excellent kde-france.org site. Read More

People of KDE: Chris Howells

Wednesday, 30 January 2002  |  Inorog
From the old british kingdom, Tink brings to you this week the feelings and the thoughts of Chris Howells. One of the youngest members of our community, Chris is an excellent proof of the kind of diversity and richness that KDE's people bring to the project. In the distant time of glory and legend when KDE got started, Chris was too young to even care. Yet he grew to appreciate what we do and he decided to get involved in web design and, recently, to learn about writing code for KDE. A typical sample of the "People behind KDE" series. Read More

KDE/aRts Video Roadmap Meeting Results

Monday, 28 January 2002  |  Nstevens
The aRts/KDE Video Roadmap Meeting ending up having a fairly large turnout, peaking at 26 participants on the IRC channel. There was so much turnout, in fact, that participants could not agree on a single line of strategy for video development in aRts and KDE. Some wished for a successor to mpeglib, something that would work within aRts but with the optimizations necessary for high framerate video. Others saw no need for aRts itself to be extended for video, and proposed using one of two external video systems. Fortunately, there were volunteers willing to code for each approach, so development will commence on multiple paths concurrently. In time, when the results are mature and ready for use by KDE, one will be chosen to be part of the KDE Multimedia standard. Read on to find out more about the teams and the code already produced. Read More

KDE Icon Chatter

Sunday, 27 January 2002  |  Numanee
As MacOS X, and arguably, GNOME, have shown, many people love photorealistic icons despite the theoretical trade-offs with usability. So if you've ever wondered about the philosophy behind KDE's default icons, you might want to read Torsten Rahn's recent article on the matter. Tackat explains how KDE's default icons are a compromise between good usability and beauty, using a mock up of traffic signs to illustrate his points. To conclude, Tackat proposes a slightly different approach for KDE 3.1: Add more photorealistic design to the application icons, while sticking to 2D for toolbars and mimetypes. But wait, there's more. In related news, Kristof Borrey has announced the release of iKons 0.5.5. More importantly, Kristof is now working on getting iKons 0.6 in shape for inclusion in KDE3. For other icon activity, check out everaldo et al on the kde-artists list. I should also point you to the growing number of KDE icon themes on KDE-Look.org. Read More

Adam Wiggins: Open Source on the Business Desktop

Saturday, 26 January 2002  |  Numanee
TrustCommerce has spent the the last 12 months or so transitioning to KDE/Linux-based desktops for general staff, with "resounding success". As Chief Software Architect, Adam Wiggins has written an excellent essay detailing the situation, requirements, issues, and the process of switchover. Apps such as KMail, Konqueror, and KOrganizer have been successfully deployed, along with the main KDE desktop. Check Part II of the essay for those details Read More

KDE 3.0 Release Plan Update

Thursday, 24 January 2002  |  Nstevens
The KDE 3.0 Release Plan has been updated, with the KDE 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (likely to be renamed Beta2 shortly) now scheduled for February 4th, followed by a "deep freeze", and the announcement of KDE 3.0 on March 18th. A list of KDE 3.0 planned features is available as well as a list of features postponed for KDE 3.1. Read More

Kernel Cousin KDE #31 Is Out

Thursday, 24 January 2002  |  Someone
Aaron J. Seigo and Juergen Appel deliver again with Kernel Cousin KDE #31. This week's summary includes talk about chemistry application Kalzium (1, 2) as a candidate for kdeedu, KDE artists' discussions (have a peek at the new tear-offs on text icons), word wrapping in dialogs, KDirAdm - an LDAP administration tool, animated icon support in KDE 3.0, and more. Read More

Matthias Ettrich: Integrating Qt Apps with KDE

Wednesday, 23 January 2002  |  Numanee
Matthias Ettrich is proposing a new strategy for more strongly integrating Qt-only applications into KDE. It's an intriguing proposal and relevant to KDE, considering the growing number of cross-platform but Qt-only applications becoming available. The initial "not-perfect but simple" basic idea is that a small libQtKDE proxy library would invoke KDE functionality when available, or otherwise fall back to Qt functionality. This would not involve changing Qt or KDE, but would require the programmer to link against the libQtKDE wrapper. The benefits for the former Qt-only developer is that KDE functionality would be made available cheaply without giving up the Qt-only cross-platform approach. The benefits for the KDE user is that what would have otherwise been a pure Qt-only application could now potentially integrate much more strongly with KDE. Good thing or bad thing? Read on for the full details of the proposal. Read More

People of KDE: Dimitris Kamenopoulos

Wednesday, 23 January 2002  |  Wbastian
In this week's episode of The People Behind KDE, you can learn all about Dimitris Kamenopoulos. Dimitris provides internationalisation (i18n) and localisation (l10n) of KDE into Greek. Rush to the interview, if you want to find out how to spend time on KDE without having your girlfriend complain. Read More