24th June 2005 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Digikam adds a Golden Mean photo editing plugin. Kalzium shows isotope and Scientist information. New home:/ ioslave. This ioslave displays all the home folders of the users being in the same group than you. Many bugfixes in KMail, khtml and Kopete.
It is always surprising to see how much work goes into KDE each week. This issue has highlighted commits from the last two weeks. There are a few interesting news items. Adam Treat has taken over maintainership of Kugar, a database reporting tool that has languished in KOffice for some time. Waldo Bastian started porting the D-BUS bindings to Qt 4. KDE 4 porting continues apace, with khtml working apart from some missing functionality.
Adam Treat announced dataKiosk version 0.7:
What can this version of dataKiosk do?

dataKiosk 0.7 can provide a fully featured data entry application tailored to any SQL database in a matter of minutes.

What does fully featured mean?
  1. dataKiosk uses Trolltech's Qt SQL module which includes drivers for: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server,IBM DB2, ODBC, SQLite, Interbase, Sybase. a) A single project can even include multiple tables from multiple databases. b) dataKiosk 0.7 ships with identical sample projects for both MySQL and PostgresSQL.
  2. Integrated Basic, Advanced, and Custom SQL query modes that provide seamless searching capabilities no matter how simple or advanced your query needs. a) Basic searches are provided automatically via a search bar attached to every datatable. b) Advanced searches are available via a query editor allowing you to specify the tables/fields/operators and values you wish to narrow your search. c) Custom SQL searches allow you to edit the actual SQL used to generate your search. d) Advanced and Custom searches can be saved with the project to be used again and again. e) You can even specify parameters for your searches to be prompted from the user. Once the search is invoked a parameter prompt dialog pops up with data aware widgets asking the user for the appropriate parameters.
  3. An optimized data entry form that automatically configures it's data aware widgets to the fields in your table including relation combo editors with full text completion. a) The data entry form can keep track of the state of the current record with a colorbox that surrounds the form indicating whether unsaved modifications have been made to the current record. b) The data entry form has navigation buttons and configurable keyboard shortcuts for optimum speed of entry. c) The relation combo editor has the ability to constrain itself to other values in the editor form. Example: If I have two relation combo editors that point to the street and city values of an address, the street relation editor can be constrained to only display those streets from the current city value.
  4. Customizable data tables that automatically include a search bar at the top which converts human language queries into SQL and filters accordingly. a) Data tables can be configured to display or exclude fields with customized labels. b) The fields order and many other properties are also configurable. c) Foreign key fields can be marked as such and configured to display another field via the foreign key relationship.
  5. The ability to relate data tables with master-detail, one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. a) Selecting a particular record from the master table will constrain the child table's records and so on. b) The navigation buttons and keyboard shortcuts are sensitive to the relationships between fields. For instance if you are currently in a child datatable that has a one-to-one relationship with it's parent and you navigate to the next record, you will actually navigate to the parent's next record.
  6. Integrated data reports that can be configurably bound to any set of tables, fields and searches in your project. a) The reports can be associated with a particular saved search or they can be run against the current searches of their respective datatables. b) The reports can be configured to sort and group according to the set of fields associated with it. c) The reports automatically create a JOIN SQL statement combining the associated search (whether it is an Advanced search or a Custom SQL query) and the set of tables and fields associated with it. The resultant data set is then used to generate an XML file and fed to Kugar. d) The reports can even display virtual fields. (See Below.)
  7. Ability to specify the default sorting and grouping of your tables and reports. See above.
  8. Virtual Fields can be added to any data table (and accordingly to any data report) and configured to calculate a user specified equation. Every field in every table can be used as a variable in the virtual field along with constant variables like: current date, current time, a constant string or a constant number.
  9. Clipboard manager modeled after the clipboard manager found in MS Excel or Access. NOTE: This is not clippy! It provides a clipboard stack that does not steal focus from the underlying editor form. You can use this to copy disparate data into your editor form with tab navigation.
  10. In short, INSERT/SELECT/DELETE and create a user friendly interface to any SQL database with a Qt SQL driver to your hearts content :):)
HOMEPAGE: http://extragear.kde.org/apps/datakiosk/
Sebastian Trueg announced a new release of K3b:
The highly anticipated (at least by myself) new K3b release 0.12 is finally here. K3b 0.12 features a lot of cool stuff and also fixes many problems that drove user, especially unexperienced, crazy. As always my ChangeLog is not complete and way too large to state in full.

So here an overview of the highlights in K3b 0.12:
  • The main focus of this release is clearly the audio project. It has been nearly completely rewritten. As a result one can now merge tracks, split them, or add silence at the end or the beginning of a track. The unusual handling of pregaps in older K3b versions is gone. Now the unexperienced user does not need to bother with pregaps at all. K3b does not add two second pregaps by default anymore. It now works like it should: the pregap is simply a property of the track and if one wants to add a real gap there is always the silence source which can be added whereever needed.

    One can now drag audio tracks directly from the audio CD browser into an audio project. No need to rip the tracks manually. Just drag the tracks you want and let K3b do the rest: it will ask for the CDs when writing the project.

    Apart from that we have new audio decoding plugins for Musepack audio files, for all libsndfile and ffmpeg supported audio formats (this includes wma audio files), Musicbrainz support to fetch CD-Text information, as well as a Cddb plugin which queries the internet for a cddb entry for an audio project. The audio project now features a "prelisten" feature. Listen to your audio CD before writing it. This results in a funny sideeffect when used in combination with dragging audio tracks from the audio CD browser: K3b can be used as an audio CD player.

    It is now possible to convert a complete audio CD project into any audio format supported by K3b. The used dialog looks a lot like the audio CD ripping dialog and also features things like file naming patterns or cue file creation.

    Last but not least K3b 0.12 improves the "Auto" writing speed selection in audio CD projects. It will not as before simply use the highest supported writing speed but check for the highest possible writing speed. That means it will test how fast the tracks can be decoded when writing on-the-fly.
  • Another audio CD related feature is the support of audio cues. K3b is now able to import audio cue files into an audio project or simply write them to CD using the write CD image feature.
  • K3b now has proper session management. Don't bother with saving your projects when logging out of KDE. K3b will restart with the exact same open projects as before once you log on again.
  • Also very nice is the new automatic multisession handling in the data project. K3b automatically decides whether to start, continue, or close a multisession CD/DVD based on the size of the project and the remaining size on the media.
  • K3b 0.12 features simple HAL support: K3b will automatically add and remove devices that are turned on or off while K3b is running (for example usb or firewire devices).
K3b 0.12 also features some interesting changes for developers and artists:
  • K3b 0.12 has a highly improved_DCOP_interface which allows for some nice scripting.
  • I enhanced the theming support. All the pictures now have proper names and themes can be installed and removed from the GUI. There is also a little K3b Theme_Howto which should help a lot when creating a theme for K3b.
  • K3b is now split into three parts:
    1. libk3bdevice provides the low level device handling and detection including an implementation of big parts of the MMC standard.
    2. libk3b provides all one needs to write CDs and DVDs along with all the project types but without all the GUI elements used in k3b.
    3. k3b itself, the main application providing the user friendly GUI we all know.
This allows other applications to link against the k3b libs to simply include CD/DVD writing support. Be aware that the API of both libk3bdevice and libk3b are highly unstable and I cannot even guarantee source compatibility before the 1.0 release. So if you want to use one of the libs it might be best to link them statically for now.

Get it from http://www.k3b.org and have fun.
Joris Guisson announces a test version of KTorrent:
KTorrent is a simple BitTorrent client for KDE. I have just released version 1.0rc1. This is a testing release for the final 1.0 release. To get it go to it's homepage at http://lumumba.luc.ac.be/~joris/ktorrent/.

It's main features are:
Carsten Niehaus announced a release of Kalzium, a periodic table of elements (far more than that):
Osnabrück, June 16th 2005: The Kalzium-developers decided it is time for a preview of the good things to come in the next version of Kalzium. This release previews the standalone version planned for July 11 2005. It is almost finished feature wise but does not include translations and documentation as they are too much of an moving target. You can help make a better Kalzium if you test this version and give us feedback using bugs.kde.org or the usual channels.

Kalzium is an interactive application which shows you information about the periodic table of the elements. Kalzium can be used as an as an information database. Kalzium has already some nice features, however but there remains things to add. As Kalzium has been included in KDE 3.1+, we still work steadily to add in some new enhancements, while hopefully making it as fast and usefull as possible. You can help us by testing it or make proposals for new features or a better design.

This version of Kalzium requires KDE 3.3 or greater.

URL:
http://www.cip.biologie.uni-osnabrueck.de/niehaus/kalzium-3.5-preview1.tar.bz2

GnuPG-Signature:
http://www.cip.biologie.uni-osnabrueck.de/niehaus/kalzium-3.5-preview1.tar.bz2.sig

Statistics

Commits 2247 by 198 developers, 55167 lines modified, 2528 new files
Open Bugs 8988
Open Wishes 8402
Bugs Opened 321 in the last 7 days
Bugs Closed 325 in the last 7 days

Commit Summary

Module Commits
www
337
 
l10n
242
 
extragear
240
 
work
201
 
stable
174
 
kdepim
148
 
koffice
114
 
kdeedu
111
 
kdelibs
103
 
kdenonbeta
103
 
Lines Developer Commits
1458
 
Laurent Montel
83
 
477
 
David Faure
76
 
773
 
Nikolas Zimmermann
56
 
565
 
Adriaan de Groot
49
 
147
 
Rob Buis
48
 
726
 
Frans Englich
44
 
215
 
Anne-Marie Mahfouf
44
 
145
 
Carsten Niehaus
40
 
320
 
Pino Toscano
40
 
589
 
Sebastian Trueg
39
 

Internationalization (i18n) Status

Language Percentage Complete
British English (en_GB)
99.95%
 
Swedish (sv)
99.78%
 
Estonian (et)
96.37%
 
Portuguese (pt)
96.2%
 
Danish (da)
95.87%
 
Italian (it)
93.19%
 
French (fr)
92.28%
 
Serbian (sr)
91.89%
 
Dutch (nl)
91.03%
 
Spanish (es)
91.02%
 

Bug Killers

Person Bugs Closed
Thiago Macieira
28
 
Maks Orlovich
17
 
Inge Wallin
13
 
Jason vanRijn Kasper
13
 
David Faure
11
 
Stephan Binner
11
 
Alexandre Pereira de Oliveira
10
 
Heinrich Wendel
10
 
Lex Hider
9
 
Tommi Tervo
9
 

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