KDE.news 

hetz wrote us with the news that Charles Samuels has hacked together a kioslave for the Diamond Rio MP3 player. In other words, you can now reorder songs and soon upload to and download from the Rio, all within Konqueror. Check out the screenshot. Rumor has it Charles' next project is a Napster ioslave!

Curious about what KOrganizer 2.0 has to offer? Cornelius Schumacher has just the thing, with a brand new feature update including shots and all. Amongst other new features, KOrganizer now supports hierarchical To-Do lists, web export and archives. Future plans include group scheduling and synchronization with PDAs.

Over the course of development of a project like KDE, a lot of art gets created. Following, purely for your viewing pleasure, are some examples of art that have not yet made it to KDE CVS, for one reason or another. First off, Martin Kerz offered several suggestions for the KDE2 splash screen: startup1, alternative, krassnagel, colouredk. Sreshth Kumar offered yet another. For the default WM style, Mosfet proposed an interesting hybrid a while back but apparently got outvoted (new proposals are in the works). There is obviously a lot more of such art floating around -- if you have more links, feel free to post them in the comments.

Tink is back with a brand new edition of The People Behind KDE. This week, we learn more about the omnipresent and ever enthusiastic Cristian Tibirna. "I was on the lyx lists when Matthias Ettrich started it in October 1996. His ideas caught me bad. After finishing some exams at beginning of 1997, I got involved with coding (kwm's smart placement and magnetic borders algorithms) and I started to do a lot of user support on the mailing lists."

Matthias Elter, the KDE 2.0 release coordinator, has officially announced that KDE has been tagged for the 2.0 release in CVS! Things are moving on schedule for an Oct. 16 release date. Matthias noted that the KDE 2.0 release will be based on the forthcoming Qt^TM-2.2.1. Got my compiler all ready and rearin' to go!

Björn Sahlström wrote in to inform us of the first stable release of KBear, an easy to use and quite powerful FTP client for KDE2. Amongst other features, it supports extended MDI, includes a flexible site database, and can connect to multiple hosts simultanously. Several screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) are available on the project web page.

VisKProg is a visual KDE programming language suitable for beginning programmers. It comes with a complete IDE (including a form editor and a window editor) and generates C++ code, so no interpreter is needed to compile/run the programs. Though VisKProg's IDE is still based on KDE 1.x, we want to release a stable v0.2 in the next weeks for KDE 2.0. We are looking for testers to write programs and report bugs and for developers to finish the IDE and port it to KDE 2.0 (please! ;-)).

The German Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMB+F) recently sponsored a meeting of 16 KOffice developers in Erlangen, Germany by paying their travel and lodging costs. The meeting was held from September 23 - 25 in connection with the Linux-Kongreß, a technically oriented Linux congress that is jointly organized by German Unix Users Group (GUUG) and LiVe (Linux-Verband, a non-profit organisation that fosters commercial use of Linux in Central Europe). Many of the developers attended and two filed reports on the successful event. And what do hackers do at a hacker conference, you might ask? Read more below to find out . . . .

Information, screenshots, and source for noatun, a new media player, developed in the hope for release as part of KDE2.1 is available at noatun.derkarl.org. Noatun will be more than capable of competing head-to-head with XMMS, and is already stable, and usable. Comments and help are, as always, welcomed.

KBasic is a programming language which brings a complete BASIC to KDE. It will include a great IDE with a form designer and a complete binding to KDE like controls (CommandButton, TextBox, ComboBox, Image, Html) and the other KDE features. Read on for more.