KDE.news 

Yesterday we posted a story about the IBM developerWorks' KDE Theme Contest. It quickly became apparent that the contest had a few shortcomings, which were noted in another update and in the comments from our readership. It turns out that the people working on the contest were new to the Open Source community and KDE and did not realize the mistakes that were made. I drew IBM's attention to these problems and when the Open Source leadership at IBM noted them they immediately recognized and corrected them. An explanation from Shailendra follows. Kudos to IBM for being so receptive and responsive to our community! (Also check out the NewsForge story on this.) Read More

This new KDE tutorial on IBM developerWorks is designed to teach you about KDE themes: Learn how to create, save, load, and share the fundamental look and feel of the KDE environment. After completing this tutorial, you should feel confident in your ability to customize KDE to fit your personal working style. (free registration required). Update: 04/11 18:34 by D: Shailendra wrote in to inform us of a KDE Theme Contest currently sponsored by IBM developerWorks in conjunction with the tutorial, with a bounty of $2,000, $1,500 and $500 for the top three submissions. The contest runs until May 1, 2001, and submissions must be of original, previously unpublished themes (one entry per person). Note that only KDE 1 themes are eligible. Update: 04/11 19:54 by D: After a closer look at the rules I discovered that by submitting your theme you assign your copyright in the theme to IBM developerWorks. Also, the contest is only open to US residents. Read More

theKompany.com has announced a technology preview release of Rekall, a personal, programmable DBMS for KDE. Rekall will simplify building database applications with forms and reports. According to CEO Shawn Gordon, Rekall will have a full complement of widgets so that applications built with Rekall will be able to have the look and feel of any other application. He adds that Rekall applications can be extended in their functionality arbitrarily via embedded Python as a scripting language (this capability is not included in the first release). This is a very positive development for KDE, as programmable databases such as dBase, Paradox and MS Access, available on other platforms, have enabled users to focus on the data model and to leverage their business knowledge into working applications. Rekall even promises some advantages over the aforementioned products, as it does not rely on a native database and instead can be used with a database of the user's choice, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle, and uses a default database format that is meant to be light weight, easy to use and require no RDBMS experience. theKompany is working with the KOffice developers to include portions of this technology in KOffice. More information (including screenshots) is available at Rekall's homepage. Read More

It's clear that the KDE Project has done a very poor job in communicating our policy on releasing binary packages. I say this because as the primary contact on the release blurbs, I am the one that gets swamped with emails asking "where is insert-your-distro package?" and "how does this package work?" and "why are you discriminating against that-distro?" These emails obviously stem from the (incorrect) belief that the KDE Project is responsible for creating those packages. The following document will hopefully clear up just what our policy is in this situation. Read More

Ralf Nolden is an energetic KDE advocate and one of the main developers of KDevelop, the highly praised integrated development platform based on KDE. While answering Tink's questions, Ralf confesses his strong desire to implement advanced coffee brewing in an upcoming KDE release. Find this and more, in this week's edition of The People Behind KDE. Read More

BrowserWatch is running a very positive review of Konqueror/Embedded, Simon Hausmann's efforts to build a lightweight version of Konqueror for Qt/Embedded systems. They mention the common codebase of both Konqueror versions, and have some nice words about KDE's Konqueror in general. Read More

Trolltech is now previewing Qt 3.0: "Among the new capabilities in Qt 3.0 are: database support; data-aware widgets that provide automotive synchronization between the GUI and the underlying database; a new version of Qt Designer that has become a full-function GUI builder; comprehensive internationalization; and a host of other improvements." Check out the announcement for full details; Qt 3.0 snapshots can be found here. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo has done it again. This week in KC KDE, you can read about KDE database connectivity, Kaboodle the light-weight embeddable media player, KPrinter progress, Kant's renaming to Kate, an updated KDE/Qt port of the featureful and fast programmer editor FTE (by KDE's very own COLA warrior), KMail improvements, and much more. This week's edition can be found here. Read More

Bernd Gehrmann writes: "As you may have noticed, the HEAD branch of KDevelop now contains Gideon which is very near to being usable and complete. This is not just another version of KDevelop, it's a big step forward: it's modular, it's extensible, it can support multiple languages, it has a project management feature that is usable for non-trivial projects. Gideon can be thought of as a a modular lego-like framework for an IDE that could be used to build a C++ IDE, a Python IDE, or even a web development platform. A complete C++ IDE is already in place." Gideon is the codename for KDevelop 3.0 and is already highly usable. This is your chance to get involved whether by contributing plugins or new features such as Python scripting. For more details, you can also check out Bernd's initial email as well as the screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Note that KDevelop 2.0 is still based on the KDevelop 1.4 branch and is scheduled to ship with KDE 2.2. Update: 04/07 02:04 PM by N: According to KDE hacker Richard Dale, Gideon now also includes Java and Objective-C support. Read More

KBattleship is a TCP/IP-based boardgame similar to the common game played on a sheet of paper, where two players try to battle the other's fleet. KBattleship has just been moved into the KDE Games package and will be publicly available with the KDE 2.2 release. For the moment, you can only get it via APPS.KDE.com, anonymous CVS, CVSup, or a recent kdegames snapshot. Check it out! Read More