KDE.news 

Tink is back, this time with an interview of the venerable Stephan Kulow. Stephan has been with the KDE project, way back when, so we get a free history lesson too. Favorite quote: "But for me a KDE without kpat is no KDE."

LinuxPlanet carries an interview with Shawn Gordon of theKompany. It's all about their business model and their really cool projects like Magellan (coming soon to a FTP server near you!), Kivio and KDB. Really interesting.

Browsing the kde-announce mailing list archive, I found an announcement for the release of Kaptain, a universal graphical front-end for command line programs. I didn't understand very well what could be the use for such a program, but I was curious, and so I surfed to the project's homepage. And what I discovered was a little utility that can help you quickly develop a user interface to launch a command that would otherwise be long to type and hard to remember. Check out this cool example with screenshots (and some more here). I'm now convinced that kaptain can be used to significantly improve a newbie's experience with Unix.

Borland is featuring an exciting presentation on Kylix, the upcoming Rapid Application Development environment for Linux. "In our view, the release of Kylix will mark an evolutionary step for the Linux world. Delphi and C++Builder developers will be ready (on the very first day) to start writing applications for Linux using Kylix. [...] Apart from the Delphi developers, Kylix also brings hundreds of thousands of applications, built in Delphi today, ported with Kylix tomorrow. On the first night that Kylix ships, we'll probably see more new Linux applications than we've seen in the past few months..." Kylix is based on Qt and will integrate with KDE.

Stefan Westerfeld has a neat document up summarizing the status of aRts in the KDE 2.0 final beta preview. Most of the work of the past year has been focussed on integrating aRts into KDE. The result of those efforts is a new multimedia middleware known as MCOP, a brand new notification system, a brand new optimized sound server, kaiman, Brahms, and more.

theKompany.com announced a new reporting application for KDE that works by merging application data and a template to create a final report. It can run standalone or as a KPart (which means it can be embedded in other KDE applications, such as KWord or Konqueror). Impressive stuff. "Kugar is a business report generation and viewer tool for KDE. Kugar takes application generated data and merges it with a template to produce a high quality report that can be displayed or printed. Both data and templates are specified in XML ... Konqueror can be used to view formatted reports simply by clicking on the XML data file." Kugar homepage

Buried under hundreds of emails on the Konqueror mailing list, was this little gem from Ming Poon of Corel. Apparently, Corel has been working for months on a Qt port of Mozilla. The results are reportedly impressive with QtMozilla turning out to be more stable than the official Linux GTK version. Corel plans to port QtMozilla to KParts so it won't be long before you can embed even that in Konqueror. Honorable mention goes to Roberto Alsina who had begun his own Mozilla port the weekend before.

The KDE Desktop Environment project is pleased to announce the launch of KDE Dot News, a news and discussion site dedicated to KDE and supported by the KDE community. KDE Dot News is the response to a large and growing demand for a KDE-specific news site.

Surfing the official KDE website, I found the budding KDE Games Center where you can find a list of games based on KDE (and not only those included in KDE). There are also several links to developer resources such as AI, network programming,... If you develop a game for KDE, then please contact Martin Heni with the info.

The first developer release of KVim is out, thanks to Thomas Capricelli. In case you've been living under a rock, VIM is one of the most popular Vi variants out there, and KVim is evidently the KDE port of that worthy editor. A screenshot or two are available. KVim will shortly be ported to KParts, so it won't be long before you can embed it in Konqi... (As an aside, rumor has it that progress on a KDE/Qt port of XEmacs may not be too far off either.)