17th December 2004 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Kdevelop implements profile and language plugins. Digikam adds a ratio-crop tool. Kpdf now does full screen mode. New media kioslave backend for cd insertion detection. KMozilla part committed to kdenonbeta. Konversation adds dynamic theme switching.
Stephan Kulow sent a note regarding the release schedule:
I'd like to summarize where we are:

KDE 3.3.2 was released and while there are the usual regressions, I don't see an urgent need for a KDE 3.3.3 yet. I keep you posted about that.

KDE 3.4 Alpha 1 was released and the number of incoming bugs indicates it's put to use.

December 18th (*THIS SATURDAY*) starts feature freeze. This means, no new features can be added that weren't noted in the feature list before.

After that I keep you doing what you like and start of january will see the last first beta of a KDE3. I would like everyone to be finished with new features till then.
We will soon see a reorganization of the kdenonbeta module. Waldo Bastian created a number of new modules where the various applications in kdenonbeta will be moved. The kdeplayground modules are for experimental or incomplete applications, and the kdereview modules for applications that are candidates for inclusion in Kde. Already we see some work in kdeplayground-artwork where Jan Holesovsky has been committing SVG icons for OpenOffice.

Here is a list of the modules:
  • kdeplayground-artwork
  • kdeplayground-edu
  • kdeplayground-games
  • kdeplayground-ioslaves
  • kdeplayground-multimedia
  • kdeplayground-pim
  • kdeplayground-utils
  • kdereview-artwor
  • kdereview-edu
  • kdereview-games
  • kdereview-ioslaves
  • kdereview-multimedia
  • kdereview-pim
  • kdereview-utils
The KDE Accessibility team is pleased to announce the first public release of KTTS -- the KDE Text-to-Speech System.
KTTS is a subsystem within the KDE desktop for conversion of text to audible speech. KTTS is currently under development and aims to become the standard subsystem for all KDE applications to provide speech output.

User Features:
  • Speak any text from the KDE clipboard.
  • Speak any plain text file.
  • Speak all or any portion of a text file from Kate.
  • Speak all or any portion of an HTML page from Konqueror.
  • Use as the speech backend for KMouth and KSayIt.
  • Speak KDE notifications (KNotify).
  • Long text is parsed into sentences. User may backup by sentence or paragraph, replay, pause, and stop playing.
  • Audio output via aRts or GStreamer (version 0.8.7 or later)
Programmer features:
  • Priority system for screen reader outputs, warnings and messages, while still playing regular texts.
  • Plugin-based architecture for support of a wide variety of speech synthesis engines and drivers.
  • Permit generation of speech from the command line (or via shell scripts) using the KDE DCOP utilities.
  • Provide a lightweight and easily usable interface for applications to generate speech output.
  • Applications need not be concerned about contention over the speech device.
  • FUTURE: Provide support for speech markup languages, such as VoiceXML, Sable, Java Speech Markup Language (JSML), and Speech Markup Meta-language (SMML).
  • FUTURE: Provide limited support for embedded speech markers.
  • Asynchronous to prevent system blocking.
KTTS actually consists of several programs:
  • kttsd: the KDE Text-to-Speech Deamon, which is a non-GUI application that provides TTS services to applications via DCOP.
  • kttsmgr: a GUI application for configuring and controlling kttsd. kttsmgr sits in the system tray.
  • libkhtmlkttsdplugin: A plugin for the Konqueror web browser that permits you to speak all or a portion of the text on a web page.
  • katekttsdplugin: A plugin for the Kate text editor that permits you to speak all or a portion of a text file.
To use KTTS, you need KDE 3.2 or greater and a speech synthesizer, such as Festival, Festival Lite (flite), Epos, Hadifix, or FreeTTS.

For more information and downloads, including Debian and SuSe binary packages, see the KTTS website at http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/
Clarence Dang announced a new version of KolourPaint:
KolourPaint is a free, easy-to-use paint program for KDE. Features include undo/redo, more than a dozen tools, selections, transparent image editing and zoom support.

KolourPaint 1.2.2 fixes several longstanding bugs, improves performance and for the first time in history, includes translations to 32 languages.

Bugs fixed include:
  • incorrect scaling/zooming under Qt 3.0
  • missing icons in some GNU/Linux distributions
  • copying selections with the CTRL key not working
The 1.2.2 release with full source code is immediately available for download at http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/download.html. This is a backport of KDE 3.3.2's KolourPaint to KDE 3.0.

We're still looking for a website maintainer but nevertheless, the site has been updated with an expanded About section and a new People page.

KolourPaint Project - http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/
"Your paintings, our passion"

Statistics

Commits 1997 by 200 developers, 166748 lines modified, 632 new files
Open Bugs 7829
Open Wishes 7223
Bugs Opened 324 in the last 7 days
Bugs Closed 381 in the last 7 days

Commit Summary

Module Commits
kde-i18n
608
 
kdeextragear-2
169
 
kdenonbeta
146
 
kdepim
137
 
kdelibs
125
 
kdeextragear-1
114
 
kdevelop
102
 
www
91
 
kdebase
75
 
kdeextragear-3
54
 
Lines Developer Commits
5908
 
Thierry Vignaud
169
 
760
 
İsmail Dönmez
60
 
1048
 
George Staikos
54
 
3499
 
Kevin Patrick Scannell
47
 
3708
 
Malcolm Hunter
47
 
469
 
Stephan Binner
46
 
1461
 
David Faure
45
 
1810
 
Alexander Dymo
42
 
1382
 
Pedro Morais
38
 
1357
 
Rob Buis
37
 

Internationalization (i18n) Status

Language Percentage Complete
Swedish (sv)
99.54%
 
British English (en_GB)
98.17%
 
Danish (da)
97.02%
 
Estonian (et)
96.07%
 
Portuguese (pt)
95.38%
 
French (fr)
94.77%
 
Dutch (nl)
92.09%
 
Tamil (ta)
89.92%
 
Spanish (es)
89.83%
 
Italian (it)
88.6%
 

Bug Killers

Person Bugs Closed
Matt Rogers
54
 
Till Adam
42
 
Jens Dagerbo
21
 
Allan Sandfeld Jensen
18
 
Stephan Binner
18
 
Mark Kretschmann
17
 
Alexander Dymo
14
 
Thiago Macieira
13
 
Aaron J. Seigo
12
 
Maks Orlovich
12
 

No commits found