KDE.news 

Two months ago, we announced the birth of Gideon, codename for the next generation version of KDevelop that was most notable for its modularity and extensibility. Since then, Gideon has made enormous strides -- not the least of which includes Java, Perl, Python, PHP and Fortran support, full Python scripting, and an editor framework that will allow one to plug in a favourite editor. Furthermore, thanks to the remarkable efforts of hacker Richard Dale, KDevelop plugins can now be developed in Java. Read on for the full update from Bernd Gehrmann including screenshots and download link. Read More

KC KDE #12 is out, with a slight delay due to a family emergency in the life of the Kernel Cousins coordinator. This week, read about the collaboration between the Abiword, wvWare and KWord developers, some very interesting developments and ideas regarding a sidebar in Konqueror, KPovModeler, and much more. As usual, credits go to Aaron J. Seigo, Rob Kaper, and Zack Brown. Get your fix here. Read More

This week, in The People Behind KDE, yours truly speaks candidly to Tink. "I'm rooting for the KDE League to have some form of impact on the PR scene any time now, but it is quite clear that community involvement is more important than ever. The community can accomplish quite a lot on its own that the KDE League could never do, though there are definitely things (such as mainstream press) best left to the League." Read it all here. Read More

Why does KDE work so well? Benjamin Meyer thinks he knows why, and he explains his thoughts in this Tribute to KDE. Benjamin is the lead developer of Kaim (screenshots), and has been working hard at porting this application from being Qt-only to a fully-fledged KDE application. In doing so, he has come in contact with the KDE development community and processes. Benjamin's experiences have led him to conclude that KDE's CVS culture, release strategy, and focus on consistency lead to polished, mature applications. Read More

KDE 2.2alpha2 is here! Blessed by release master Waldo Bastian only a few hours ago, this release has a ton of improvements over KDE 2.1.x. You can view the ChangeLog or glance at the alpha1 announcement for an overall idea of some of the changes versus the stable branch. However, to discover the rest of the cool stuff -- such as the new regexp filter in KNewsTicker or the Kicker taskbar/extension improvements -- you'll have to download KDE 2.2alpha2 and see for yourself. As usual, source is available as well as binary packages (read our policy) for Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Tru64. Debian users should check the regular sources. Keep in mind that this alpha release is not for people who expect a stable desktop, there is a short list of known problems already. Read More

As many of you have noticed, we have had a lot of downtime lately brought on by some severe server problems. With our regular server admin away on a well-deserved vacation, we have been forced to move to a new location, at least for now. The new server, bero.org, is owned and operated privately by our friend Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, but is hosted on the excellent network and resources of Red Hat Europe. I would like to extend a huge thanks both to Bero and to Red Hat for their support! Read More

This week's issue is momentous as it marks the growth of the editing team from one lonesome soul to a whopping two people! Rob Kaper joins the KC KDE effort this week with a summary of the kde-games list. He will also be following the konq-e list which tracks development of Konqueror for the frame buffer (non-X) and the kde-promo list. This brings the total number of lists summarized each week up to an even dozen. Check it out here... (includes coverage on thesaurus support in KWord, fax support in KDE, and much more). Read More

The current interviewee of Tink's grand series is George Staikos. One of the members of the young KDE guard, George is very active in the parts of KDE that relate to cryptography. He helps with KMail and KOffice too, and he makes up brilliantly for the notorious lack of Canadian KDE developers :-). On a personal note, George is one of the very few KDE friends that I had the great chance to meet in person. Consider yourself invited to a joyful reading with this new colourful interview of the successful "People series". Read More

FreeOS.com is running an interesting, circa KDE 2.1, interview with Martin Konold. Apart from a few misspellings and minor errors, it makes for an entertaining read. "Konqueror is really good. It supports Netscape plugins. Java is supported too. It's extremely standards compliant. When we started out with Konqueror, people questioned our decision. They questioned that Mozilla would be out soon why then, were we building our own browser. Well, it's been two years and look where Mozilla is." Read More

Mike Pilone has stepped up to the challenge of implementing gesture recognition for KDE. "KGesture uses libstroke to recognize definable gestures, then run an associated command. Using KDE's DCOP interface, KGesture can interact with applications already running, or launch new applications." You might be forgiven if, like me, you first thought this was a joke. KGesture works as advertised, and is almost as fun as the now discontinued KVoiceControl, but it does need a little more fuzzy logic before it becomes practical enough. I did manage to get it to work for simpler gestures -- I can draw an L-shape on my desktop and a dot.kde.org window will pop up. However, for more complex gestures such as a circle, it takes a little practice and patience to get right. With time, your help and feedback, KGesture is bound to improve. Download it here or view the screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Read More