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User-visible functionality added in Plasma. Support for animated SVG images in SuperKaramba. Kanagram becomes the latest application to adopt a scalable, SVG-based interface. Initial code imported, as a statement of intention, to support interaction with Exchange servers and the Akonadi PIM data store. Small, incremental improvements in KTorrent. A new round of Coverity fixes, particularly in KOffice and Amarok. Work on loading ODF shapes through Flake in KOffice. KDevelop gets improved support for .ui (user interface layout) files. Branches of KMail, KPPP, Konversation and Kopete created to enable the integration of Solid-based connection management and notification. KDE 3.5.7 is tagged for release early next week.
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Torsten Rahn announces the recent progress in Marble, the desktop globe:
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I've moved Marble Desktop Globe into the kdereview module in KDE SVN. Please have a look if you have the time since I'd like to get this application into kdeedu before the end of the month. ;)
There are two ways to compile Marble: As a KDE 4 version and as a Qt4-only version (you need to invoke CMake with -DQTONLY="ON" for the latter).
For the KDE-Edu evaluation, please compile it as with any other KDE application. The docs are available as usual in kdereview/doc/marble.
I'd like to thank everyone who has been involved with the development of Marble so far.
There are two known issues which I'll fix pretty soon: the coastlines don't display properly at high zoom levels (for reasons I'm aware of) and the Wikipedia browser doesn't display images (for reasons I'm aware of). Apart from that it should work as advertised.
Of course there are more things on the TODO:- Further Wikipediaization
- Automatic tile downloading (which is close to done)
- Adding D-Bus support to KAtlasView (soon to be renamed to MarbleView) and adding KPart support to KAtlasControl (soon to be renamed to MarbleWidget).
- Adding Get Hot New Stuff support for custom maps.
And of course our GSoC projects:- Improved KML support
- GPS support
- Flat 2D View (Equirectangular projection)
Thanks for your time & cheers,
Torsten
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In the ensuing discussion, Torsten also answers a few questions about Marble:
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> * are there plans to have (the ability to get) better resolution "fill"
> at higher zooms?
Yes. Partially (in terms of textures) that's what the "Automatic tile downloading (which is close to done)" part of the TODO was about.
Don't expect wonders though - you won't be able to spot your house any time soon. However as you might have noticed, that's not Marble's ultimate goal :-) See the FAQ in the docs for more info.
> * are there plans to have (the ability to get) more detailed info about
> smaller towns/villages etc?
Yes. You might have noticed that there is very basic Wikipedia support there already. In the future there are plans to create a "Marble Almanac" which will contain a small database of offline data (Probably based on the Qt4-based Wikipedia Offline Reader by Daniel Molkentin).
> I can imagine this would be a very cool way to select "where I am" when
> setting up KDE, for things like timezone stuff.
That's indeed the plan. See my blogs about Marble at
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2412
and of course the MANIFESTO document in the source tree.
I actually have some free timezone vector data available. However it will take some time to adjust the vector backend to display it properly.
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Benoît Jacob feels the need to explain the recent import of an external molecular library, Avogadro, into KDE SVN for the benefit of Kalzium:
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This week saw the import of a snapshot of a new library, libavogadro, inside Kalzium's source directory. I feel that it is useful to say a few words here to explain what's going on.
Avogadro is a new, advanced Qt-based 3D molecular editor. It is developed together with a library, libavogadro, which is meant to be reusable in other projects.
Communication took place very early between Avogadro and Kalzium developers to determine how to work with one another. libavogadro reuses rendering code initially written for Kalzium, and much improved since. Among the 6 Avogadro contributors, 3 are also Kalzium developers.
It has long been decided that Kalzium should eventually ditch its own 3D code in favor of a libavogadro-based implementation. The problem is that libavogadro's API is not yet stabilized, and the KDE 4.0 feature freeze is coming very soon. So, for 4.0, we have put a snapshot of libavogadro inside Kalzium's source tree. For KDE 4.1, we'll remove this snapshot and make libavogadro a dependency instead (of course optional).
The porting of Kalzium to libavogadro is a work in progress which has to be completed before the KDE 4.0 feature freeze, so we're currently working hard. Marcus, our SoC student, has already done the ground work in commit r665641.
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Jan Hambrecht discusses his latest work on ODF shape loading in KOffice:
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At the KOffice ODF sprint last weekend, the KOffice developers discussed and laid out the basic infrastructure for loading shapes from ODF documents - saving is already designed and partially implemented. Meeting all the other KOffice developers at the ODF weekend was a great inspiration, and it really got me going. The last few days I have been busy implementing loading of different Flake shapes from ODF in KOffice applications. So now, the basics for loading of lines, polylines, polygons, regular polygons, circles, ellipses, rectangles and custom shapes are working. To prove that there are the obligatory screenshots, one showing the ODG file loaded into OpenOffice.org Draw and the other shows the same file loaded in Karbon.
Note: For the observing reader, the moon which is mirrored in the Karbon screenshot uses a not-yet-implemented feature which means that it is not yet displayed correctly in Karbon.
To provide a nice starting point of my implementation of the shape loading, I started with the loading of the shape properties/data that determine the outline of a shape, i.e. the kind of an ellipse-like section, arc, cut, or the path data of a path shape. By doing this, I had visual clues during testing to see what works and what needs more effort. This work is taking place in the libraries, so all of KOffice will benefit from this ODF shape loading work. The next tasks are implementing loading of transformation, borders, backgrounds etc. So there is a lot more work to do, but at least it is a start.
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KDE 3.5.7 is due to be released in two days, on Tuesday 22nd May.
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This week saw the triumphant arrival of user-visible work in the Plasma interface effort. The digest of next week, issue 60, will feature more on these developments.
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