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Continued work in Plasma, including a KMLDonkey data engine, a RSS data engine and news feed applet, and a Virtual Desktop switcher applet. More interface work for Amarok 2.0, with progress on alternate music service integration. Support for webseeding in KTorrent. Support for network access of colour palettes in KolourPaint. An Akonadi resource for the del.icio.us bookmarking service. CMake support for PyKDE4 applications. Wider logging support in KSystemLog. SVG caching optimises usage, resulting in speed gains in many applications. KTeaTime rewritten for KDE 4, KPlayer ported to KDE 4. New game based on "Deal or No Deal" arrives in playground/games. More code reorganisation in KDE SVN. KAider translation utility moves to kdereview.
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Marijn Kruisselbrink introduces his successful Summer of Code project, Music Notation Support for KOffice:
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As part of this year's Google Summer of Code, I've been working on adding music notation support to KOffice2. The reason I came up with this idea is that in the past i've sometimes wanted to insert short pieces of music into (for example) a text document, but I couldn't come up with any better way to achieve this than to export the music from some existing music notation program to either a vector or raster based format, and inserting this into my document (I know know that there exists an OpenOffice.org plugin to add limited LilyPond integration, but I think that approach is still far from perfect, and not really easy to use).
This of course has the obvious disadvantage that everytime you want to make some change to the music fragment, you need to open it again in the external application, export it and insert it again, leading to quite an awkward workflow. I even remember some family member printing and scanning a piece of music to insert it into his text document!
Of course, when I started with this project I looked at existing Open Source music notation software to figure out if it might be possible to save myself a lot of work by not starting from scratch. Probably the best program currently available is Rosegarden, but one obvious disadvantage of using it is that it is still KDE3/QT3 based. Also, internally, Rosegarden seems to be centered around the various things needed for perfect playback of music, with notation support somewhat bolted on to it, while I wanted to focus more on the notation/printing side of music and keep playback as a nice, but not really required (and certainly not needed to be perfect) optional addition.
Another existing program I looked at integrating with is Canorus (the QT4 successor of NoteEdit), and in fact after one afternoon of hacking I already succeeded drawing music loaded from a Canorus file, but this approach also had several big disadvantages. For instance, Canorus is still a long way from being released (i'm not sure if a final/stable release has been planned even), but also Canorus isn't aiming at providing accurate renderings of music. For example, Canorus won't have printing support but will be relying on LilyPond for the final output.
Of course starting from scratch meant that I needed to write quite a lot of code to get anything to work at all (in its current state, the music notation in KOffice is 12,000 lines of code, with NoteEdit consisting of 54,000, and Rosegarden even having 260,000 lines of code), but it meant I could do things exactly as I wanted, and learn a lot doing it, implementing all the various (quite complicated) algorithms needed to create nice looking music. The very flexible design of KOffice's Flake framework also meant that I had to write very little code to get to some simple things to work, and also that it is possible without any extra code to embed music in any of the KOffice applications that use Flake (as can be seen in the screenshots).
In the current state of the codebase, it is only possible to input music with your mouse, by clicking at the position you want to insert a note, and also only very simple music is supported. There is no support yet for ties, slurs, tuples, dynamics and tempo markings, but you can write (or load from a MusicXML file) multi-voice, multi-part, multi-staff music. And also, since this week support for beams has been added (although many cases probably exist where the rebeaming algorithm will not make correct decisions on which notes to beam together yet).
One thing I would really like to see implemented before the KOffice 2.0 release is storing the music in some sort of pre-rendered format in ODF files, so that other programs can at least display/print something when they load a file. Also ties/slurs, tuples and some basic dynamics/tempo markings would be really nice, but I'm afraid there are too many nice things to implement them all in such a short time-span, so any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated!
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Tom Albers writes about the impending closure of the kdenonbeta module:
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kdenonbeta is closing. This means that all applications currently in /trunk/kdenonbeta will move to /tags/unmaintained/3 on Oct 28th.
If you are a maintainer of an affected application and you do not want this to happen, please contact me, we can arrange something else. This offer is also valid after the move has completed - in case you read this mail after the date.
If you want to continue to work on the application, the application will most likely move to one of the /trunk/playground area's. If you don't want me to do the move, you can always do it yourself.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
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