Developer

After a lot of hacking behind the scenes, a new initiative to improve KDE's interaction with network and hardware devices has been launched. Solid will provide a robust basis for the dynamic modern desktop in KDE, which needs to be aware of available hardware and networks, paving the way for innovative functionality. Users should see KDE applications taking advantage of Solid in KDE 4, from the most basic Plasma applets and complex applications to desktop-wide awareness.

The GStreamer developers have just released version 0.10 of the GStreamer multimedia framework into the wild, and their coders' fingers will never be the same. "Thread-safety, RTP/VoIP support, automatic registry maintenance, twice the performance, and a whole lot more...the best just got better.

Sebastian Kügler has written a new PyQt tutorial. Python is the perfect language to start learning programming with and this tutorial takes you through making a basic Qt based program. He also shows how pyuic from PyKDE Extensions makes it possible to use Qt Designer with Python.

KDE developer Benjamin Meyer explains the concept of a Type Manager as a new form of specialist file manager application. "In the past few years many of us have been introduced to a new type of application, the Type Manager. There are many Type Managers out there such as digiKam and amaroK that are gaining market share and a rabid fan base of users . Type Managers seem to have that magic combinations of features that makes users love them.

Two recent articles cover the success of Trolltech and their product Qt 4, on which KDE 4 will be based. Trolltech: A case study in open source business looks at the continued growth of the company based on dual licenced Free Software. The article describes what KDE and Trolltech gain from each other, including user feedback to Trolltech and sponsored developers for KDE.

A research group in the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have been working on an operating system to support traditional Eastern languages such as Mongolian, Uighur and Tibetan. We have now extended Qt and KDE 3 to support these langages. Some screenshots show the scripts in use (mirror). Any comments are welcome.

At the build system BoF at aKademy it was decided to start moving the KDE 4 build system from unsermake to the SCons/Python based system bksys. To find out more about this important future technology, KDE Dot News talked to its lead developer Thomas Nagy about the reasons behind the change and what it will mean for KDE developers.

Some highlights from this week's KDE Commit-Digest (all in one page):

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest (all in one page):

More KDE development news in the August edition of This Month in SVN.