03: August 2005
This month in SVN
KDE Development news
This month has seen some drastic changes in SVN, with KDE4 development moved to trunk and KDE 3.5 gearing up for a stable release sometime after this year’s KDE conference. The first alpha release of KDE 3.5 has just gone out for testers. KDE4 development will soon be starting in earnest once the porting to Qt4 is complete. If you’re interested in a very basic explanation of what is happening with KDE4 development check out KDE4 - understanding the buzz
KDE 3.5
Konqueror
A great deal of interest has arisen from the release of Safari KHTML improvements back to the KDE community through the opening of Webkit CVS. One of the more visible signs of KDE developers making use of Safari KHTML improvements is that Konqueror is now the second browser to pass the Acid2 test, thanks to Ivor Hewitt and Allan Jensen. Some of the support was taken from Safari patches, and some of it had to be written by hand. It’s great to see that KHTML is leading the field in CSS compliance.
AmaroK
AmaroK developers have just released amarok 1.3 ‘Airborne’. Recent new features include support for the latest audio craze podcasting, implemented by Seb Ruiz. Podcasts can be added through the playlist manager and can be streamed live or downloaded to disk.
The xine configuration dialog has been made more streamlined and more specific to amaroK by Ian Monroe. It’s hoped this new dialog will be less confusing and present better usability. The xine-engine now also supports crossfading between tracks.
Equalizer presets have been implemented, as well as caching of downloaded lyrics and google-like filter syntax. The swiss army knife of mp3 playing and cataloguing software keeps piling on the features.
Kicker
Kicker development has been proceeding at its usual steady rate since Aaron Seigo took over maintainership 6 months ago. The new tooltip coined by Aaron and Zack Rusin has been applied now to the Add Applet dialog. In order to give the user a visual cue of where the applet has ‘landed’ in a possibly cluttered panel, a tooltip floats down to the location on the panel where the applet was added and expands to display the name and description. Animated gif available
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Kdesktop
One of the most exciting things to happen in desktop & panel development this month is the fixing of a long standing and notorious bug. Bug 91575, ‘Icons get rearranged on login’ is the subject of one of the most frequently asked questions on mailing lists and IRC channels. This bug was caused by lack of proper communication between Kicker & Kdesktop and was recently fixed in a concerted effort between Aaron Seigo and Martin Koller. For everyone who has had their desktop icons rearranged on logging into KDE or on hiding and showing panels, this is finally fixed for 3.5!
Kmail
Laptop and dial up internet users will be pleased to note that Kmail now suports an offline mode. Based on advice from openusability.org, Kmail menus have been reorganised with ease of use in mind. The Kolab integration has seen a great deal of work lately, with no known bugs existing in this component. In response to a great deal of user feedback, the spam wizard for configuring spam filtering tools has been rewritten to be simpler and easier to use. With all of this the developers have still found time to fix a large number of bugs and restructure code, making Kmail in 3.5 even more stable and reliable than it was in 3.4.
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KViewShell
KViewShell is a universal document viewer framework in the kdegraphics module maintained by Wilfried Huss. It’s been the basis of KDVI for a long time. For 3.5, it’s been improved with two new plugins for FAX and DjVu files, support for documents with non uniform paper sizes, and an improved and more flexible API for file format plugins. A Firefox-like search panel has been added and there is now support for KPDF-style accessibility viewmodes.
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Konversation
Konversation is the new KDE IRC client taking chat-a-holics by storm with
its clean tabbed interface. Usage of the ‘network’ metaphor has been extended throughout the application. Tabs now show the network name instead of the server name, and bookmarks can store and open networks. Storing networks in bookmarks means a network is tied to an identity with a seperate nick and away message able to be set per network. ‘/server’ is now network aware - typing ‘/server freenode’ will now connect to the first freenode server address, and cycle through the list of servers if the first fails. Tabs have been improved to take up less horizontal space, truncating channel names when space is running out. A firefox-like incremental search bar has been added. Support for blowfish channel traffic encryption compatible with the popular mirccryption system has been implemented by Ismail Donmez.
System Kioslave
One very exciting new addition is to the media manager component of the system:/ kioslave. KDE now notifies the user when a new storage medium is detected and proposes a set of actions. The behaviour of the media manager can be configured via a Kcontrol module. This helps address some long standing complaints that many of the UNIX-like operating systems KDE runs on are not particularly user friendly in the area of peripheral devices, especially cameras and flash storage. This feature is thanks to initial code by Jean-Remy Falleri, refactored for integration into KDE by Kévin Ottens.
Thanks to all developers who sent me information and screenshots about their applications to be included in this months article. To those who have not had their app included, I haven’t forgotten you - I’m saving you for next time =). Thanks also to everyone who’s given such positive feedback, and to Rainer Endres for helping me with my web design and hosting my site.