News Archive for December 1999

Thanks for the "business as usual" news, Gaël, it's freshening to get them in this unusual year end.

Many thanks to Matthias Kalle Dalheimer for signaling this. Congratulations to Matthias Ettrich and his collaborators, who worked hard to make KWM a revolutionary implementation of window managing technologies.

Heartwarming. Many thanks to all involved.

All this becomes even more charming when we realize that the final application resulted from Antonio's tutorial is a quite nicely featured web browser.

And no, you don't need the finances of a big corporation or the years of work of the dearing Mosaic pioneers. You only need a recent KDE installation, a text editor and the desire to learn modern programming.

Find the necessary information on Antonio's site, whom we all thank for the great work.

Release: kde 1.1.2
Platform: IRIX 6.5

Known Bugs: No audio support

Size: 20.4 MB

Thanks,
Shiv "

Thank you, Shiv. These are cool news.

But it seems that the secret order in apparent life chaos arranged all things for better. It happens that, more than one would believe, life after KRASH is pretty wild in KDE.

Here is a brief list of last development events:

• Stephan Kulow and Carsten Pfeiffer, well-known members of our community, were heavily busy working on a new, swiss-army-knife-like file selection dialog. Their work is dearly hailed in the community and is poised to cover a long lasting need in KDE.
• Lars Knoll and Antti Koivisto have restructured the default KDE HTML widget (this is like fourth time this happens :-). New hot features: initial work on XML support, style-sheets support, better and smarter parsing engine.
• complementary news in the HTML widget front are referring to the excellent work of Rich Moore concerning Java support and the fast-evolving efforts of Harri Porten to implement JavaScript support.
• Nicolas Brodu wrote today to our mailing lists with hot news about the first window manager with real brains. Look here for Nicolas' work on a neural network driven window placement mechanism for kwin. Right now all is in experimental stage, but there is nice promise.
• The activity in the Artists Team increased in intensity in the last days. New members are joining, tonus is increasing again, now that there is a workable 2.0-like KDE base to experiment with. Kurt Granroth researched about the steps needed in order to boost up the graphical quality of the toolbar buttons.

"I've put v0.10 of my Python bindings for Qt (v1.x) and KDE (v1.1x) in the usual place at:

http://www.river-bank.demon.co.uk/software

Changes since v0.9 are mostly under the covers, but include:

• PyQt should now compile under NT
• QString and QByteArray now implemented as regular classes
• Addition of KAccel

Phil"

Nice work, Phil. We're eager to see the 2.x bindings.

Torsten says that his contacts at Freiberg promised a donation to KDE for the beginning of the next millenium :-). Many thanks to all involved.

"I set the clock ahead and let it ride into the year 2000....no problems noted with anything in the KDE environment.
kernel 2.2.9.19
mandrake
micron 333mhz/128meg
"

Thanks a lot, Bob.

NOTE: Of some interest might also be KDE Team's statement on the Y2K problem.

The Pillbox unthemed style.

"After a long beta phase the KDevelop Team is proud to announce the final release of its KDevelop (http://www.kdevelop.org) IDE for Unix Systems, version 1.0 final. This version contains bugfixes, many improvements in classparser and some new translations.

Sandy Meier
The KDevelop Team"

Behind this virtuously modest announcement is hidden one of the biggest events in the computing industry for the last ten years. KDevelop is the best Open Source development environment available for Unix. And many say it's a strong candidate for this title at the level of the whole industry.

KDevelop sports a large number of features. Several occasional observers also indicated that a quite large majority of the KDE applications currently available are apparently developed using this excellent IDE.

It can't be stressed enough: availability of KDevelop (well, in its first final version, since it was already largely usable since the first beta versions) has the same importance for Unix development as the modern desktop environment creations had for the Unix usability.

Our warmest congrats to the excellent Kdevelop creators. And many thanks.

A few bits: "...when I use KDE on my Linux desktop, people say to me "That looks cool!"...". Or: "...all the empirical evidence suggests that KDE is going to be the wave of the future...".

It is also interesting to see that even if the author has a quite different way of perceiving some licensing issues, he has the merit of clearly distinguishing the politics from the excellent actual programming work. Worth a read. And please, don't flame Patrick :-) Remember? Peace, love, understanding ...

Surprizingly large number of interesting themes have become available for KDE in the last weeks. Seems the addition of Stefan Taferner and collaborators' Theme Manager to KDE-1.1.2 pushed a benefic button. Case Roole of and his hard working team at KDE.Themes.Org are doing also a great job at making their site appealing and easy to use.

Desktop War? Hmmm... Where's that fighting suit ? Ah! Yes, there isn't, since we're pacifists. Peace, love and understanding :-)

Linux Journal has a nice review of the coolest features of the latest Linux distributions releases and KDE is credited with a central importance.

Linux Today published on Saturday a radio interview with KDE developer Kurt Granroth. Pretty interesting talk about latest KDE-2 developments and other juicy details :-)

There's also the Slashdot interview kindly driven by Roblimo (which I would personally like to thank for the patience to listen to much dense KDE-techno-babble on KDE's developers IRC channel :-). Kurt Granroth and Richard Moore answered to ten questions moderated from a large amount of Slashdot readers' questions.

And of course, last but not least, the already famous Mosfet's development site got newer hotter screenshots for us all.