KDE.news 

Sure to put an end to countless discussions on the ever-lively kde-look mailing list, and to cut off a stream of "wishlist" bug requests, KDE CVS (look for it in the upcoming KDE 2.2-beta1 release) now features task-grouping in Kicker, the KDE panel. As is shown in this screenshot, task grouping optionally groups all windows opened by the same application in the same task-bar button. Here, 17 Gimp windows can be seen grouped in the same taskbar button, and the same can be seen for Konqueror and Konsole windows. With no more overflowing task bars, I am a happy camper :-). Read More

Our recent poll (courtesy KDE.com) on the upcoming KDE 2.2 suggests that the area of greatest concern for KDE users is speed -- at this time, out of 3,463 votes, over 24% consider speed as most important for developers to address. Waldo Bastian, who developed the kdeinit speed hack among other things, has written a paper entitled "Making C++ ready for the desktop", in which he analyzes the various startup phases of a C++ program. Noting that one component of linking -- namely, library relocations -- is currently slow, he offers some suggestions for optimizations. An interesting read. Read More

Wolfgang Müller is the maintainer of GIFT, GNU's very interesting Content Based Image Retrieval System (CBIRS). A CBIRS is a system to search for images based on their content. Wolfgang wrote to the dot recently inviting us to make public his latest efforts to integrate CBIR and related technologies in KDE. He has launched a new project, Fer de Lance, which is meant to properly integrate GIFT's technology in Free Software desktop environments and browsers. The goal is to have a completely open source infrastructure which can make open source desktops "content-aware". Carsten Pfeiffer found this new development very innovative, and started to write kmrml to provide KDE support for GIFT. Kmrml, which already has a preliminary Konqueror plugin as well as an IO slave, is available here (screenshot). Wolfgang and Carsten hope that you will find a minute to read the relevant information at the sites linked above, and then want to contribute to their projects' development. Read More

Werner Trobin is a member of the hard working KOffice team. He is the first non-fantastic entity to answer the new series of questions in Tink's weekly interview at the KDE People page. This is a very refreshing and colourful interview. Go there, read it and enjoy Werner's enthusiasm at being a part of KDE. We're lucky to have such teammates. Also, please note that, as promised, Tink has added a People index with interviews, quotes and URLs. Read More

Polls are an oft-requested feature of the dot. KDE.com has risen to the challenge with its latest user poll: "What Should Be the Highest Priority of KDE Developers Leading Up to KDE 2.2?". I just installed Linux Mandrake 7.2 (until my SuSE package arrives), and after upgrading to KDE 2.1.1, I feel that a KDE port of the configuration utilities could bring a huge amount of polish to this distribution. A KDE interface to Linuxconf might be a good start. Others would however prefer a KDE installer, and some simply think that KDE should be faster and/or less of a memory hog. Here's your chance to cast a vote and voice an opinion. Read More

Debugging code is always a pain in the neck, but there's a tiny new utility in kdesdk which might make things a little less stressful. The utility, KSpy, gathers information about the state of a running KDE application and displays it graphically. Read more below. Read More

In this week's KC KDE, Aaron J. Seigo covers everything from KOrganizer's architecture improvements, improved message filtering in KMail, the new KDE configuration file upgrading mechanism, to the exciting new KDE font installer. Get this, and much more, here. Read More

Just over two years ago (end of April 1999), Konqi the dragon decided to join the brave crew of the KDE ship in an endeavor to conquer your desktop. His help in promotional activities (as well as his intimidating flaming breath) has been invaluable to KDE's success. Tink had the brilliant idea to interview the handsome dragon for the launch of a new series of the famous KDE people interviews. Tink made the site even more beautiful and the new series of questions even more interesting. And there are other goodies in preparation, as you can check for yourself. Thank you, Tink, for this refreshing story. Read More

As we announced last week, the KDE Project has released kdelibs-2.1.2 to address a security issue and fix some bugs. Besides fixing the KDEsu security exploit, particularly joyful to many of you who use Konqueror will be the fix of the "protocol for http://x.y.z died unexpectedly" bug. "Read more" for the full text of the announcement, including a list of changes. Read More

Matthias Elter has written a tutorial (print version; example source tarballs) on developing panel applets for Kicker, the KDE 2 panel. Kicker is a complete rewrite from the KDE 1 panel; this was done mainly to increase the panel's extensibility. KDE 2.0 introduced the panel applet API and KDE 2.1 added the panel extension API. The tutorial teaches you how to implement a simple panel applet using the panel applet API. From the tutorial: "Both the applet and extension APIs are simple. This qualifies writing a panel applet as a suitable task for an introduction to KDE programming." Read More