KDE.news 

Translate.org.za (partly sponsored by Obsidian Systems) is spearheading an effort to translate KDE -- the complete desktop including Konqueror, KMail, KWord, KSpread -- into the eleven official languages of South Africa. As a first start, the Xhosa translation is already part of KDE 2.2.1. The Mail & Guardian newspaper has a full article on the project. Read More

The KDE Project today revealed its plans for the LinuxWorldConference and Expo, a European B2B summit for the Open Source community. Last year, in the conference's debut, over 11,000 trade visitors and 100 exhibitors attended. The conference will take place from October 30 - November 1, 2001, at the Frankfurt Fairgrounds, Frankfurt, Germany. We invite everybody to meet KDE developers, KDE enthusiasts and, of course, our mascot Konqi, at the KDE booth. Some details about the planned events, demonstrations and presentations, courtesy of Kurt Pfeifle and Torsten "Tackat" Rahn, follow. Read More

Richard Dale recently pleasantly surprised me (and probably others) by announcing that he has committed C bindings for the KDE3/Qt3 libraries to KDE's CVS. Richard generated the C bindings automatically using a hacked kdoc, with relatively little manual intervention. According to him, "The bindings wrap about 800 classes [and] 13,000 methods, with 200k [lines of code] of C/C++ generated." The same hacked kdoc can also generate Objective C and Java bindings, and Richard hopes to be able to consolidate generation of these various KDE bindings (Java/Objective C/C) with this one tool. Currently the C bindings for KDE 3 and Qt 3 are in KDE's CVS, with bindings for KDE 2.2.x/Qt 2.3.x awaiting resolution of a dynamic linking/PIC problem which affects the Objective C bindings (please contact Richard if you are knowledgeable in this area).

After a two month hiatus, I am happy to report that Aaron J. Seigo is back with another issue of his fabulous Kernel Cousin KDE. This issue, which covers the week of October 8-14, touches on wide-ranging topics such as KDE3, some new KIO Slaves, a new KDE XML editor, the new KDE PIM site, the new KDE address book, and many other exciting developments. You can read Aaron's well-written synopsis here. (And thanks to Aaron's suggestion I have created a new category for KIO Slaves.) Read More

Stefan Westerfeld has posted a summary of a IRC discussion held by the KDE Multimedia team last month. Essentially a KDE 3 roadmap for the multimedia team, the discussion covers topics ranging from MCOP and OSS compatability to recording and video embedding. A slightly edited version of his post follows. Read More

Ralf Nolden, our friend and colleague, brought us the news late last week that two major products of the KDE project won Linux New Media awards at the "Systeme" fair in München. Konqueror, the versatile KDE web browser, file manager and document viewer, won the award for "Best client-side Open Source Software". KDevelop, the outstanding integrated development environment (of which Ralf is a principal developer), merited the "Best development tool" award. Details about these and other awards can be found at linux-community.de. Congratulations to all the members of our community who make these successes possible through their relentless work on code, graphics, translations, testing and all the other components of our project. Read More

Klaus Staerk alerted us to the launch of pim.kde.org. The main goal of this site is to organize KDE Personal Information Management news updates as well as group together all the related projects and goals. The site already has some basic information about not so well-known PIM projects such as Kandy, Karm, and KAlarm. Also available is information on current and future roadmaps for KDE PIM. Read More

Trolltech have announced the release of Qt 3.0 for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, various Unices, and embedded systems. This version of Qt includes a rich text editor, database connectivity, improved font handling and internationalisation. As previously reported, the COM functionality, long-scheduled and subject to some discussion, was dropped two weeks ago due to serious concerns about its effect on the API. Qt 3.0 comes with an upgraded Qt Designer (which provides for full application design, including menus), Qt Linguist to aid in internationalisation, and Qt Assistant, an online help browser. There is also support for perl-style unicode regular expressions, multiple monitors and 64-bit safety. The press release is here, and the downloads are available here. [Ed: As an aside, this proposal for a "Killer Component Architecture" by Brad Neuberg may be of interest to some.] Read More

Five years ago, on October 14th, 1996, Matthias Ettrich delivered his famous newsgroup posting (also HTMLized), and spawned a new era in the history of desktop environments. I think that a simple look at www.kde.org and all its related sites will show everybody just what has happened in the last five years. Congratulations to KDE, and here's to future growth and success! Update: 10/15 10:15 AM by N: Rob Kaper obliges with photos of some developers celebrating this occasion. Charles Samuel goes nostalgic with a screenshot of KDE 2.0pre. Finally, LinuxToday, Slashdot, and even Gnotices join us in celebrating this event. Read More

LinuxJournal has published the results of their 2001 Readers' Choice Awards, based on ballots gathered from six weeks of on-line voting. KDE itself won in the "Favorite Desktop Environment" category, with the LJ editors explaining: "This was one of the most popular categories, and KDE is the clear winner, receiving 40% of all votes. GNOME came in second with 24.5%, and the favorite write-in was XFce." In addition, individual KDE packages/applications fared extremely well: KOffice placed in the "Favorite Office Suite" category; KMail placed in the "Favorite Email Client" category; KWord showed in the "Favorite Word Processor" category; KDevelop showed in the "Favorite Development Tool" category; and Konqueror showed in the "Favorite Web Browser" category.
In a separate review, UnixReview gave favorable marks to Quanta Plus, an HTML editor designed for quick web development. Quanta features PHP support and will be part of the HancomOffice package under the name WebBuilder. Read More