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| This Week... |
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KFileDialog becomes aware of media:/ and system:/. New icons and other fixes in amaroK. New privacy features and multiple webcam connection support for the MSN protocol in Kopete. kcmwifi removed in /trunk (to be replaced by Solid in KDE 4). Kerry, the KDE Beagle frontend, is imported into KDE SVN.
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Welcome to the first issue of the new KDE Commit-Digest! It has been just over six months since the last digest by Derek, and this is the first issue of many from me. Enjoy :)
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Inge Wallin announces the release of KOffice 1.5:
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The KOffice team is proud to announce KOffice version 1.5. With this release, KOffice starts its ascent into the office suite hall of fame in the company of OpenOffice.org and MS Office.
Native Support for the OpenDocument File Format
KOffice was the first to support, and now with 1.5 the second office suite to announce full support for OpenDocument as the default file format. It is also the first one not based on the OpenOffice.org code base, which makes ODF into a true industry standard. KOffice 1.5 is therefore the version that lets enterprises and organizations all over the world choose the office suite that fits their needs best.
The spread of the OASIS OpenDocument File format (ODF) is widely regarded as one of the most important developments in the whole IT industry right now. It will give users world-wide the opportunity to control the future of their own data and also ensure that all documents can always be read at any time in the future.
KOffice 1.5 offers native ODF support for the important productivity applications KWord (.odt), KSpread (.ods), and KPresenter (.odp). In addition to that, the supporting applications KChart (.odc) and KFormula (.odf) also support ODF, although not yet fully.
Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that supports OpenDocument, most notably OpenOffice.org. We acknowledge, however, that the ODF support and interoperability is not yet perfect. We hope to be able to quickly identify and fix the incompatibilities that do exist in the upcoming 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 bugfix releases.
The principal improvements over KOffice 1.4 are:More information about this major new release of KOffice is available at: http://www.koffice.org/releases/1.5-release.php
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Philip Rodrigues discusses a proposal for improvements to WhatsThis? context help dialogs in KDE 4:
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At the moment, tooltips, whatsthis help and documentation are generally produced and presented to the user quite separately. In the HCI team proposal, they're brought together in a sort of natural progression of increasing detail: single-word or -phrase tooltips -> single paragraph whatsthis -> detailed docs. So, tooltips will present a way of progressing to whatsthis, which will present a way of progressing to the full documentation. This is one element of the proposal...
...The second element is to improve the usability of the whatsthis windows themselves. At the moment, the whatsthis help appears in "bubbles" which disappear as soon as you click anywhere. That's obviously not ideal, so in the HCI team design, they're "upgraded" to full windows, so you can keep them open while following the instructions in them, have multiple whatsthis windows open, move the windows around, and so on.
More detailed information about this proposal can be found in this design document (3.1 MB PDF file).
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Daniel Molkentin suggests a relaxation of the feature freeze for KDE 3.5.3:
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Hi,
I'd like to ask to go for another partitial lift of the freeze to add some minor stuff for KDE 3.5.3. I for one would like to seize it to integrate Will's great online status patches to KDE PIM and possibly add new ones for other application in that module where appropriate (knode comes to my mind).
Details on that: SUSE/Novell has undergone a huge effort to make integrate network manager, an effort to control your network connections from the desktop, with KDE. network manager can signal the systems current online status so applications can react properly, i.e. kmail will not try to send or fetch messages.
SUSE 10.1, SLED 10 as well as Kubuntu Dapper are three distributions that will support network manager. Others are likely to follow (I for one am already drawn to it due to its ease of use :). I therefore think it's a good idea to have this technology in KDE 3.5 to let our users benefit from that advantage, since KDE 4.0 is still far away for our users and and this feature enhancement is quite a low hanging fruit, thanks to Will's work.
Will has written a nice set of patches which are currently only applied to SUSE rpms. One patches the networkstatus kded service, which currently still resides in kdelibs, to listen to network manager via DBUS and then inform attached applications via DCOP (the DCOP-API is in place for quite a while IIRC). The other patches kmail and the SLOX-resource to remain to properly communicate with networkstatus.
KMail is technically well prepared for offline handling since 3.5 and it would be easy to add it to other applications in KDE PIM that need it without creating a big GUI string mess. If other application maintainers care, we could also move it to libs, but I think that's quite a drastic change for a minor release. Still, it would be nice to have since Kopete or even Konqueror/khtml could profit from it. Since we're talking about a DCOP service, the move is not strictly needed anyway.
What's your opinion
a) on the freeze lift?
b) on the network manager changes?
Cheers, Daniel
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This week has seen the appearance of several automated source code quality check tools: Krazy and a service provided by Coverity. In the words of Adriaan de Groot:
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...automated tools plus careful human filtering is a very effective way to fix (small) bugs. As you can see in the -core-devel thread, this has led to dozens of fixes already. I hope the Coverity checks will bring similar improvements in the quality of KDE code in general.
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| Statistics |
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| Contents |
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Bug Fixes |
Features |
Optimise |
Security |
Other |
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Accessibility |
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Development Tools |
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Educational |
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Graphics |
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KDE-Base |
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KDE-PIM |
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Office |
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Konqueror |
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Multimedia |
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Networking Tools |
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User Interface |
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Utilities |
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Games |
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Other |
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Bug Fixes |
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Richard Dale committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebindings/qtruby:
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* Marshalling of Value lists to Ruby wasn't working at all. The bug was because the following two lines are not equivalent. void *p = &valuelist[i]; void *p = (void *) &(valuelist->at(i)). The first line doesn't work correctly, but the second was does.* The marshaller for QList<QImageTextKeyLang> was defined wrongly. |
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Educational |
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David Saxton committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kmplot/kmplot:
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- For Cartesian plots, use distance to closest point insetad of distance to point using the mouse's x-pos for finding the plot under the mouse. - Use closest plot to click point instead of first plot within required distance when finding the plot that was clicked on. |
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