02: July 2005

This month in SVN

KDE Development news

Welcome to the second installment of This month in SVN. Thank you to everyone who sent such positive feedback about the first article. For those who are interested in contacting me, my email address can be found in the footer of this page and I welcome all comments and suggestions =).

Another month of KDE development brings us a flurry of improvements and new ideas across many KDE apps.

Kturtle:

(click for larger image)

Many of us have fond memories of our first experiences with programming a computer beginning with LOGO. Kturtle, an implementation of the LOGO programming language for KDE, now has preliminary support for self recursive functions thanks to a patch from Markus Koenig. Multiple mutually recursive functions such as those to write two-function plane filling curves aren’t working yet without using a hack. It’s rumoured that Kturtle will soon see a complete rewrite of it’s interpreter and a possible change in syntax.

Kalzium:

Kalzium developers have recently added many new features and asthetic enhancements. The table of elements now sports an attractive new tooltip with many of the elements illustrated by a small photograph. Many would remember first seeing these style of tooltips in Kicker in KDE 3.4, and it’s great to see them used elsewhere.

A new glossary has been added by Kalzium maintainer Carsten Niehaus, including descriptions and photographs of tools commonly found in laboratories. The glossary library has been added to libkdeedu, which means that a glossary can now easily be added to other kdeedu applications. KStars is already using the new glossary code, and we may see further use of it in other applications soon.

superkaramba:



Eye candy lovers rejoice,
superkaramba - a well-known app that lets you display attractive widgets on your KDE desktop - has recently been added to kdereview to prepare for integration into KDE for KDE 3.5 and Plasma for KDE4. It has a large range of themes downloadable from kde-look and it’s hoped that a symbiotic relationship between Kicker, KDesktop and superkaramba can be acheived for KDE4.

Superkaramba has joined the large number of KDE apps now supporting downloading of new themes and artwork via Get Hot New Stuff, letting you select new themes from within the application for automatic installation.

Konqueror

In response to a great deal of user feedback, Konqueror has had it’s text search options revamped. Now multiple engines can be listed at once in both the search toolbar and the context search availible on right click.

This month has been another exciting month in KDE development as 3.5 draws closer, and KDE 4 porting looks promising. Look out for next months article, which will start to talk about what’s happening in porting KDE to Qt 4 with some preliminary screenshots as well as highlighting more features that will make it into 3.5