December 2005

From KDE Apps:

Version 0.8.2 of KMyMoney, a KDE-based personal finance manager, has been released. It features bug fixes, usability enhancements and improvements to localisation; full changelog to be found on the KDE Apps link above. Screenshots here, source downloads at Sourceforge here.

Various reports have been posted (as at the KPilot Development blog, KDE Developers, KDE Dot News and NewsForge) that the KDE project are to remove KPilot from KDE 4, and use OpenSync as the basis for its PDA sync'ing application which is to be called KitchenSync. Adriaan De Groot writes:

Frankly, none of the syncing projects in KDE SVN was going anywhere. Chronically strapped for time and with no developer community to speak of (this certainly goes for KPilot, where I've had on-again-off-again help from Reinhold and Jason in recent years, which was useful but never grew into a concerted effort), things languished in a partly-functioning and buggy state for a long time. I do hope that working with OpenSync will bring a change there -- it's a larger developer community for one thing.

KPilot itself is to continue as a separate project; its website is www.kpilot.org.

Here is an article, with a series of screenshots, which explains why "KDE rules" in the author's opinion. It refutes some of the myths (such as that Qt isn't Free, that "C++ sucks" and a few others) and explains the benefits of technologies like DCOP and KParts. (This is a useful rejoinder to the writings and sayings of certain GTK bigots, like the people on a certain Linux User Group radio show who called Qt "sh-t" and the guy at the Linux User expo earlier this year who said C++ is for people who can't implement OOP in C or something stupid like that.) (Hat tip: OSNews.) Here's an earlier related story.

From KDE Developers:

KDE now has a Community at OpenSolaris. It was only started yesterday, hence the lack of downloads or announcements from them as opposed to the KDE project generally. There are, however, now KDE 3.4.3 downloads at SunFreeware, with download instructions and a mailing list; the main Solaris KDE page is solaris.kde.org.

From QDevBlog:

Matthias Ettrich has posted a defence of Qt's macros in which he claims that on certain discussion fora like OSNews, "even the most verbal critics are finally running out of arguments", and the only one left is the addition of introspection to C++ through the use of macros like "signals", "slots", "emit" and so on:

The complaint comes from people that prefer other languages, and consequently they dislike Qt for making the life of C++ programmers easier. We wrote Qt, we know it is not a “pure” C++ framework, just like C++ is not a “pure” language. Qt makes use of the C-subset of C++, including the preprocessor. And it makes very good use of it. What made C++ the most successful programming language on the planet is its pragmatic design, and its compatibility with C. It’s a meta language, a language powerful enough to be extended to something as beautiful and easy to work with as Qt.

From KDE Dot News:

The KOffice team has received a $1,000 donation from an anonymous donor to be used as the prize in a competition to design the GUI for the upcoming KOffice 2. This version is to be released around the same time as KDE 4. Submissions could take the form of GUI mockups with written descriptions of the intended workflows. Full details at the competition page. Winning the prize does not guarantee that your ideas will actually be used in KOffice 2.

From Trolltech web site:

Trolltech has released Qt 4.1. The new version features integrated SVG graphics support, a PDF back-end, a lightweight unit testing framework, Mac OS X "universal binary" support, an interactive menu and action editor in Qt Designer and improved OpenGL and Visual C++ support; full changelog here. Full documentation here, open-source downloads here.

From KDE Apps:

Version 2.4 of Cervisia, the KDE CVS client, has been released. Unlike the previous version 2.3, it requires KDE 3.5. Apart from that, the changes (all four of them) can be found at the link above or on the front page of the Cervisia home site. Screenshots here, documentation here, downloads are with the KDE SDK package (your distro homepage may well have these).

From KDE Dot News:

People Behind KDE has added an interview with the seven people responsible for the Qt/KDE Debian packages. Questions include how they each contribute, how they each came to get involved in KDE, what's missing, plans for KDE 4, their favourite widget styles and text editors, and who they prefer between Linus T and RMS.