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Second Alpha Release of Amarok 2.0, Codenamed "Aulanerk"

The Amarok team is proud to present the second Alpha of Amarok 2.0. Development is moving at full speed and a lot of bugs have been fixed since Alpha 1, as well as features polished. Thank you to everyone who has already helped by filing bug reports and sending patches. Please keep them coming! Read the release announcement for a list of bugfixes and changes. Get Alpha 2 today and help make Amarok 2.0 rock.

KDE Commit-Digest for 15th June 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: In a long-planned move, the FolderView Plasmoid also becomes a containment (which enables it to fill the desktop space). The FolderView Plasma applet gets standard folder interaction context menu items. First version of CommandWatch Plasmoid, which displays output of a given console command. Support for displaying the running state of plugins and terminating jobs, abstraction of code completion (leading to initial code completion support for Java), and the clearing out of bug reports in KDevelop 4. Integration of the Panaramio online service into Marble. Work on loading themes in Parley. A "drawing history" and support for undo/redo in the sketch widget of Fuzzy Search in Digikam. More features in the "vi input mode" project for Kate. More work on the new MessageListView project of KMail, and a keyring database editor for KPilot. Various developments across Amarok 2, including an early "NepomukCollection". Start of an implementation of the famous "cube switch" effect for KWin-composite. Fully auto-generated Kimono C# bindings. More work on the "Table" tool in KOffice, with other developments including progress in the Kexi reports and web interface components. The "GeoShape" (based on Marble) moves to playground/office. Read the rest of the Digest here.

Website for the KDE Utilities Launched

The family of KDE websites has got a new member, the site for the fine utilities applications from the module kdeutils. Despite being one of the first modules, kdeutils has always been without its own website. No longer. At utils.kde.org you can now find a lot of information about the KDE Utilities. See for yourself the details of the current set of programs below.

The module kdeutils is one of the modules that has been around since the very beginning of KDE. At the time of KDE 1.0 the module kdeutils was already well populated and consisted of KArm (now KTimeTracker), KCalc, KEdit, KFloppy, KHexedit, KJots, KLJetTool, KNotes, KTop (now KSysGuard) and KZip (now Ark). The observant will see that nearly all of these programs are still part of KDE and kicking. Only three of them are no longer in development: the very specialised program KLJetTool (used for configuring HP Laserjet printers) was removed from the development branch before KDE 3.1 due to being obsolete, and KEdit and KHexEdit were removed only recently before KDE 4.0, due to being unmaintained and with substitutes (KWrite and Okteta).

Over the times a younger module has drawn away some of the programs: KTimeTracker, KNotes, and with the upcoming KDE 4.1 also KJots are now part of the module kdepim. Any removal has been balanced with completely new programs. The two freshest members of kdeutils, which entered it in time for KDE 4.1, are Okteta and the Printer Applet. The latter also makes an interesting premiere, being the first program in the mainline KDE modules which is not written in C/C++, but in Python.

• Ark - Archiving tool
• KCalc - Scientific calculator
• KCharSelect - Font character selector
• kdessh - Front end to ssh
• KDiskFree - Free disk space viewer
• KFloppy - Floppy disk formatter
• KGpg - GPG frontend
• KTimer - Time controlled program starter
• KDE Wallet Manager - KDE wallet management tool
• Okteta - Hex editor
• Printer Applet - Applet to view current print jobs and configure new printers
• SuperKaramba - Version of Karamba with python scripting
• Sweeper - Cleaner for unwanted usage traces in the system

Each program has a description page, a page with an overview of the program's development (like activity or progress with translations) and a contact page. Over time more content will be added. If you are interested to help out with that, please get in contact with us.

If you have been developing a utility based on the KDE platform outside of the KDE repository and you think it would be a good addition to this module, do not hesitate to contact us. If you, contributor or user, are interested in some of these programs, go and find all information at http://utils.kde.org/. Finally: Thanks a lot to our KDE sysadmins David, Dirk and Tom, who did all the work in the background to get the site running.

KDE-Bindings / Kross Meeting

Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings and Kross meeting here at the KDAB Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people representing Ruby, Python, C#, Lua and PHP. The projects do not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and review the details of how the implementations worked.

Mauro Iazzi, Thomas Moenicke, Arno Rehn, Cyrille Berger, Aleix Pol
Richard Dale, Sebastian Sauer, Simon Edward

Python and Ruby are in a very good shape and stable for being used in application development using Qt and KDE facilities, while Qyoto, the C# binding is well on its way to providing the same level of completeness and stability. PHP will try to fill the gap between Desktop and Web Applications using the powerful technologies in the Qt toolkit, such as QtWebKit for instance. An interesting new star on the bindings horizon is Lua, which is widely used for scripting some well known computer games and other applications.

As a result of the meeting, we were able to get the Lua bindings running the cannon game tutorial t7, which is an important milestone in the progress of a Qt language binding, as it uses custom signals and slots. Furthermore, Lua bindings have been moved into KDE playground this week. Another technology we were working on was a Smoke to Kross bridge that allows one to share objects between e.g. Ruby bindings and Krossruby. Using it, a developer can show GUI elements using QtRuby and the underlying QObjects and QWidgets can be picked up on the Kross side. The issues discussed included how to organise modules and documentation, improving the design of the template based QList and QMap marshallers for the Smoke lib, and which modules for the new KDE APIs we should target.

An amusing demonstration of the power of some of the KDE bindings technology happened when Sebastian asked Richard for an estimate about the effort of make QtRuby applications scriptable with QtScript. He just came out with a Smoke2 module only 10 minutes later, and after an additional 10 minutes he wrote a corresponding extension for QtRuby, and we were quite amazed. More work was also done on the Kross plugins for Krita and KDevelop. On balance, it was a great meeting with great people and a nice ambiance at the KDAB office.

Now we are looking forward to Akademy and more bindings discussions there. If you are interested in developing support for programming languages in KDE or writing documentation, just hop on Freenode in the #kde-bindings or #kross channel, or write an email to the kde-bindings mailing list, and we will be very happy to help get you going.

Thanks to KDAB for sponsoring and hosting, and thanks to the KDE e.V. for supporting the event.

Alitheia Online Demo Available

The SQO-OSS project aims at developing a software quality assessment platform to Free Software developers. SQO-OSS is a project funded through the European Commission's Framework Programme 6 and consists of a number of European organisations with knowledge relevant to build such a platform, among which KDE e.V.. After more than one and a half years of research, design and development the SQO-OSS developer now have made available a first demo showing some capabilities of the Alitheia system. Alitheia stands for the ultimate and business-like truth. Read on for more details.

The significance of Alitheia 0.8.1 is the core being in a reasonably stable state and able to run metric plugins. Results of those plugins are being displayed in the webinterface. Some sample projects are available in the demo. Do note that the demo only shows the front-end of the system and little about its back-end, administration system. More information about the SQO-OSS project can be found on its webpage. If you want to get in contact with the developers of SQO-OSS you can subscribe to the SQO-OSS devel mailinglist or drop by on #sqo-oss on irc.freenode.net.

If you have any questions, such as how to develop your own plugin that combines metrics based on KDE's bug database, subversion repository or mailinglist archives, the places listed above are the right places to get started.

KOffice Releases Ninth Alpha of KOffice 2.0

The KOffice team announces the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.

Using editable rich text (e.g. in Krita) is now possible.

Apart from much invisible, but very important work on improving core funcationality like ODF support, text handling and other infrastructure, important visible areas of progress in Alpha 9 are:

KSpread has regained support for printing. It is possible to print a range of sheets or a selection of cells.

The Kexi report generator can now generate reports in html and ODS, the OpenDocument spreadsheet file format, which KSpread and OpenOffice Calc can read.

Vector layers in Krita can contain text and vector shapes. Editable, rich text in Krita is now a reality. Even nicer, it has become possible to add filter layers and masks to Krita, delivering live filter effects on vector shapes.

The text shape object, which is the basis for KWord and provides editable rich text in all KOffice applications has gained a visual way of changing the paragraph layout.

KOffice-wide, a new implementation of guides provides snapping to guides and dragging of guides for all flake shape objects.

New for text: visually alter your paragraph spacing.

The Google Summer of Code students have been hard at work: Lukas Tvrdy has implemented the core of a chinese painting brush engine. Benjamin Cail has ported most of the .doc import filter to make it convert to odf instead of the old native KWord file format, cleaning up and improving our ODF code along the way. ODF support is really being focussed upon with both Piere Ducroquet and Carlos Manuel Licea Vázquez putting in a lot of work. Piere has been implementing document variables and Carlos has made a lot of progress converting KPresenter to use ODF natively instead of its own old file format. Lorenzo Villani is very productive and has already shown off his Kexi web forms work on his blog, until his computer started smoking! The calligraphy tool Fela Winkelmolen is writing for Karbon is coming along very nicely and is already completely usable. Fredy Yanardi, finally, is shouldering a lot of development work on Kpresenter, focussing on the presentation notes feature.

But all KOffice developers have been working really hard on improving all components of KOffice. Please go to the changelog for more details! Or install KOffice on the operating system of your choice.

For more screenshots, please visit our visual changelog. The KOffice team would really welcome volunteers to maintain the visual changelog!

The KOffice team intends to continue delivering montly alpha releases until we have implemented all features in our feature plan: thereafter we will deliver beta releases until those features are stable. Coincidental with the release of Alpha 9, KOffice has entered the feature freeze stage.

4.1 Release Candidate Out For Testing

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page. KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.

The development in trunk/ in Subversion has already been opened for feature development, which is going into KDE 4.2 (to be released in January), but developers are strongly encouraged to concentrate on bugfixing in the 4.1 branch for now. Do give RC1 a spin, file bugreports and fix things, there is only a week left until 4.1 is being tagged. Do have your changes in the 4.1 branch reviewed by your peers, though. Note that some users might still be suffering from performance problems with NVidia graphics chips. There is a page on Techbase that gives some more information about it. Make sure you report bugs via KDE's Bugzilla so they can be addressed and do not get lost.

In Memory of Uwe Thiem

I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week. Aaron Seigo spoke for us all when he said "Uwe had a deep love for and belief in Africa and the role that technology can, and should, play on that continent. He put his back into it and was a great advocate for Free software in his area of the world". Our thoughts go out to his family and friends at this irreplaceable loss, we are all a little less than we were yesterday.

KDE Commit-Digest for 8th June 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Global keyboard shortcuts for applets, and an Amarok and "python expression" runner in Plasma. A Java test applet and various interaction improvements in Plasma. Simple network and CPU monitors in the system-monitor Plasmoid. Initial import of PeachyDock, a Plasma-based alternative panel. The Oxygen window decoration gets the "on-all-desktops" button. Continued development toward Amarok 2.0. KDevelop gets a new context browser, and various other improvements. Initial work on SVG theming in Parley and Step. Support for OpenGL rendering in Palapeli. Enhancements for KDiamond 4.2. Nonogram switches to its own package format, with the import of a collection of game files in this format. Planned developments start to materialise in KColorEdit. Map-based searches in Digikam. Digikam-related libraries move to kdegraphics for KDE 4.1. Enhanced printing support (selections, zooming) in KSpread. KThumb, a simple command-line utility for managing freedesktop.org thumbnails. Optimisations in Kate, Dolphin, and kjs-frostbyte. Ruby bindings for various KDE facilities (QtWebKit, NEPOMUK, etc). Decibel strips some of its KDE dependencies, and moves to kdesupport. KDiskManager is removed to make way for a replacement. Mailody moves to kdeextragear. KPilot, KMobileTools, and the Kontact Planner summary plugin are disabled for the KDE-PIM 4.1 release. Read the rest of the Digest here.