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Issue 14
9th July 2006
by Danny Allen
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This Week...
Kamefu (a multi-machine emulator frontend) has been renamed Gamefu. Physiks, a physics educational project, and a project for advanced session management, both a result of the Summer Of Code, are imported into KDE SVN. Work progresses in the "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" and "WorKflow" projects. KDE 4 changes: KPat, a card game application, gets OpenGL bling, while kwin gets experimental compositing support and compiz-like effects. Okular gets support for the TIFF file format. Akonadi advances towards its goals with the import of a command-line and GUI client.

This week, there have been 3079 commits in KDE SVN. This is about 700 (or 30%) more than the average of around 2300 per week, and much of this can be attributed to the KDE Four Core meeting at Trysil, Norway, which concluded this week.

Mark Kretschmann announces the availability of Amarok 1.4.1, the first bugfix release of the 1.4 series:
Scientists have discovered a new species, a species that doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, and doesn't socialize. They have named this species 'Amarok developers'. These developers have been hard at work preparing version 1.4.1 of world's "fastest" forwarding media player in a small Netherlands town, Annahove.

In Amarok 'Fast Forward' 1.4.1 we introduce native support for Last.FM radio streams, including advanced features known from the Last.FM player. In addition, Amarok's custom icon theme is completely finished. Users who tested out the 1.4.1 beta probably noticed the completely renovated UI design. After careful evaluation of feedback from our users, we have decided to delay the layout change until Amarok 2.0. The 1.4.1 release again features the classic and proven Amarok layout!

New Features:
  • Support for Last.FM streams
  • LibVisual 0.4 supported and required
  • Great new icon theme by Vadim Petrunin
  • Support for custom scoring algorithms, via scripts
  • Creative Nomad Jukebox support
- The Amarok team

Another upcoming release is for KOffice, who will be releasing the last bugfix release of the 1.5 series, KOffice 1.5.2. Martin Ellis, the co-ordinator for this release, briefly talks about the progress made:
For this release, we have shared the responsibility of the release process between several members of the KOffice team. I tagged and created packages for the translations for the last release, so did so again for this one. Sebastian Sauer did the code tagging and packaging, and Thomas Zander has written the release announcement and compiled the changelog.

Users of Debian will be pleased, because a bug with Krita on PowerPC in earlier 1.5.x releases that was keeping all of KOffice out of the testing repository has been fixed with this release. This means that users not running the unstable distribution will be able to enjoy KOffice 1.5.2, and that we can expect KOffice 1.5.2 to be in the next Debian release, "etch".

This is also the first KOffice release with support for Traditional Chinese (zh_TW), which brings the number of translations with more than 70% complete for KOffice to over 28.

Our next release will be the technical preview version of KOffice 1.6, with some of the new features developed in Kexi, KFormula (including Summer Of Code improvements), KChart (the final version of 1.6 will at least have support for all chart types that are defined in the OpenDocument specification) and Krita. You can expect this release at the start of August, in around 3 weeks time.

Olaf Schmidt, a kde-accessibility developer opens a consultation on "Colours and Fonts guidelines" for KDE 4:
I am currently working on extensive guidelines for a new color scheme system in KDE 4: http://amen-online.de/~olafschmidt/colors/

Feedback is welcome.

The colors would also (optionally) be applied to Gtk applications when running under KDE, as is already partly the case since several KDE versions.

Within these guidelines (which are still a work-in-progress) are some very interesting observations regarding accessibility concerns within KDE applications. Here are some extracts:
Current Problems:
  • Colors are inconsistent between applications, e.g. Konqueror uses yellow for "encrypted connection", but Kontact uses blue for "encrypted email".
  • Colorblind users perceive colors differently and are losing access to information that is only shown via color. The same will be true for blind users once KDE 4 supports screen­readers.
Suggested Solutions:
  • Hard­coded font settings must never be used. Applications may provide settings for user­defined fonts, but they must default to the current system font settings.
  • Font settings in applications should be relative to the global settings. kdelibs will provide improved standard widgets for font settings in applications to increase consistency and to make it easier for developers to follow these guidelines.
  • Color must never be the only way to show information. The information must also appear in text or icon form.
  • Application color schemes: Applications that offer their own color schemes must provide a scheme that uses global KDE colors. This color scheme must be the default.

I fully recommend reading the full document, as I say, it is interesting and enlightening.


Statistics
Commits: 3079 by 205 developers, 9361 lines modified, 1621 new files.
Open Bugs: 12894
Open Wishes: 11203
Bugs Opened: 294 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 193 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/KDE
1069
/trunk/www
340
/branches/work
326
/trunk/extragear
286
/trunk/l10n
229
/branches/stable
223
/trunk/playground
206
/branches/KDE
83
/branches/koffice
69
/trunk/koffice
65
Lines Developer Commits
429
Laurent Montel
208
255
Dirk Mueller
151
212
Stephan Kulow
117
165
Tobias Koenig
113
149
Simon Hausmann
95
146
David Faure
93
160
Hamish Rodda
79
80
Ludovic Grossard
64
88
Reinhold Kainhofer
58
311
Kevin Ottens
50

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Swedish
99.99%
Portuguese
99.99%
Danish
99.47%
Spanish
95.92%
Dutch
94.50%
French
93.97%
Estonian
93.81%
Italian
94.33%
Greek
93.46%
German
90.76%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Seb Ruiz
32
Mark Kretschmann
19
Maks Orlovich
18
Philip Rodrigues
12
Tommi Tervo
12
Germain Garand
10
Dominik Haumann
10
Peter Simonsson
10
Andreas Kling
9
Stefan Borggraefe
7

Program Buzz
KWord
  299
KStars
  143
Kalzium
  105
KTouch
  57
KGeography
  45
Kiten
  40
blinKen
  33
Atlantik
  31
KVocTrain
  29
Kig
  28


Person Buzz
Tom Chance
  412
Waldo Bastian
  367
David Faure
  350
Kurt Pfeifle
  331
George Staikos
  322
Scott Wheeler
  316
Aaron Seigo
  316
Stephan Kulow
  295
Boudewijn Rempt
  295
John Tapsell
  293
Contents
  Bug Fixes Features Optimise Security Other
Accessibility [*]
Development Tools [*] [*] [*] [*]
Educational [*]
Graphics [*] [*]
KDE-Base [*] [*] [*]
KDE-PIM [*] [*]
Office [*]
Konqueror
Multimedia [*] [*] [*] [*]
Networking Tools [*] [*] [*] [*]
User Interface [*]
Utilities [*] [*]
Games [*] [*]
Other


Bug Fixes
Development Tools
Andras Mantia committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdewebdev/quanta:
Make Open File in context menu work for remote projects as well.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4 Revision 557428

David Nolden committed a change to /branches/work/kdevelop-teamwork/kdevelop/plugins/teamwork/serializationutils.h:
I tried everything, but it seems that it isn't possible to directly embed the serialized xml-data into the kdevses xml-tree, because Qt changed the syntax in a way that boost cannot read it. So I use a simple
text-archive now and store the data in a text-entry. The advantage is that it doesn't bloat the kdevses-file that much.
Diff Revision 558052

Games
Inge Wallin committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdegames/kreversi:
Fix bug 110942: The hourglass cursor is kept too long

- Set state to Ready when the game is over.

This bug was the last one for KReversi, so the bug count is now ZERO!

CCBUG: 110942
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 557559

Graphics
Wilfried Huss committed changes in /branches/work/kviewshell-0.7/kviewshell/shell:
Robustification. When the renderer has produced a null image, just fill the
page and thumbnail widgets with the background color as set by the current
accessibility viewmode.

This fixes a regression in the DjVu Plugin, when using DjVu renderingmodes other then "color".
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4 Revision 558065

KDE-Base
Maks Orlovich committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdelibs:
A bunch of DOM changes we'll need to support the new yahoo mail
and ATLAS stuff; this is neccessary but not sufficient, since they
also heavily use setters/getters, which I am not sure we want to support in 3.5.x...
(But this stuff is standalone)

1. Provide some emulation of mozillaisms like Node.prototype = ... .
These are incomplete, but should hopefully cover the important stuff.
Related to that, fix HTMLDocument to use a proper prototype.

2. Merge from Apple's tree: support the no-op debugger; statement,
it at least seems to be used by yahoo...

3. Readonly support for characterSet property.

4. Fix crash on reading some properties of mouse events that weren't
dispatched --- noticed on testing this stuff.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (+ 6 more) Revision 557310
Discussion

Andreas Kling committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdelibs/kate/part:
Make the current document's highlighting mode selected when the highlighting config page opens.

BUG: 123505
Diffs: 1, 2, 3 Revision 557593

Benjamin Meyer committed changes in /branches/work/bleedingedge/kdebase/apps/konsole/konsole:
Actual kde4 bug fix that isn't part of GetThe*$^&%ThingToBuild!

When scrolling with the wheel send the even straight to the scrollbar and not QApp
because otherwise when the scrollbar doesn't accept (can't scroll for example) QApp will try to
give it to the parent which ... is recursive and eventually blows the stack.

Also: Remove slot that just emited a signal
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 557731

Germain Garand committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdelibs/khtml:
-adapt work by Apple developers to get working overflow on
table-* displays.
-Some more clean-up and fixes on tables.
-Consistently account for border{Bottom,Top}Extra.

reference patches:
WC/r13372/#7841/
WC/r13366/
WC/r13346/
WC/r10566/

BUG: 121932
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (+ 5 more) Revision 559131
Discussion

Maks Orlovich committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdelibs/khtml/css:
Properly output 'transparent' for cssText. While at it, also output
rgba values, as we parse them (though we can't render them yet).

This centralization will also makes this easier to fully port to Qt4.
BUG:130225
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 559918

Kurt Hindenburg committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdebase/konsole/konsole/TEWidget.cpp: