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Furious last-minute application of polish across the board in preparation for the tagging of KDE 4.0 Final next week. Work towards threading GDB operations support in KDevelop. Support for media players employing the MPRIS standard in the Plasma "Now Playing" data engine, with the import of a Flickr Plasmoid. A style manager, support for Karbon gradients and lots of colourspace work in Krita. Various improvements in the Eigen2 math vector library. Continued progress in the KBugBuster rewrite. Revived support for .tar, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 files in Ark. More work on KCabinet, a library to support the MS Cabinet format. A printing framework in Okteta. System Settings moves from a custom view to Dolphin's KCategorizedView. Finishing touches in the Oxygen widget style and colour schemes. Work from the "newssl" branch is moved back into kdelibs. Various unfinished features hidden in Konsole for KDE 4.0. The Trolltech Phonon backends are moved from kdebase to kdereview for KDE 4.0. The unmaintained "regexpeditor" moves from kdeutils to playground/utils.
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Kåre Särs introduces Glimpse, a new scanning application for KDE 4:
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Glimpse is a basic image scanning application for KDE 4. Glimpse uses the new libksane library from extragear, instead of the old libkscan. Glimpse provides the file saving features while the scan dialog and scan options are handled by libksane.
I have been missing a good Open Source scanning application that would be easy to understand (Kooka and XSane don't feel right to me). I first planned to modify libkscan, but I could not figure out the code, so I made my own :)
Glimpse is actually a byproduct while libksane is the main target. For Glimpse, I want to provide easy saving of the scanned images, both providing a save dialog for every scanned image and a possibility to autosave the images in a specific directory.
My goal with libksane is to provide easy access to the most-needed scan parameters, while still giving the possibility to use the advanced (and not so common options) of the SANE backends.
libksane is usable, but can still be tweaked. Things that hopefully make libksane interesting are that it supports 16-bit colors (6 bytes/pixel) and that the UI is (in my opinion) a bit better than that of libkscan. With libksane you can also reach almost all options available from the backends (this is not possible with libkscan).
Things left to do:
- Doxygen documentation is needed :)
- The parameters don't yet have tooltips to explain what they are for.
- The names of the scan options come from the SANE library, so the translation is a problem not yet solved.
- The parameters are now grouped with a dropdown box into basic, advanced and 'All options'. This could be regrouped with a tabbed interface.
The things listed above are mainly short-term goals. I also want to improve the usability of the application - at the moment, using the libksane dialog without a mouse is not very easy, which could be improved.
I also hope that others will want to use libksane for scanning support in their projects.
As an aside, the name of the application (Glimpse) is found in over 20 milion web pages (Google) and there even is a glimpse.com. It might be that we need another name!
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Stephan Binner writes a reminder note about the upcoming KDE 4.0 release (in an attempt to reign in wildly over-optimistic expectations by some users):
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Before everyone starts to spread their opinion about KDE 4.0, let me spread some reminders:
- KDE 4.0 is not KDE4 but only the first (4.0.0 even non-bugfix) release in a years-long KDE 4 series to come.
- KDE 4.0 is known to have missing parts or temporary implementations (eg. printing, PIM, Plasma).
- Most changes happened under the surface and cannot be discovered in a "30 minutes usage" review anyway.
- User interfaces being unchanged in 4.0 compared to 3.5 may be still changed/improved during KDE 4 life time.
- KDE 4.0 will not be the fastest KDE 4 release - like for KDE 2 most speed optimizations will happen later during KDE 4.
- Most applications (many are not even fully ported yet) will take only advantage of new features which the new Qt/KDE libraries offer later.
- Don't measure portability success (eg. MS Windows) by current availability of application releases, they will come.
- KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt (which by the way is said to have only 6 months support for its packages)).
- KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big technology jump of KDE 4.0: expect KDE 4.1 later this year.
Last, again: KDE 4.0 is not KDE 4.
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I know it's traditional at this time of year to have a retrospective of the acheivements of the previous 12 months, but with the imminent release of KDE 4.0 (due to be tagged on the 4th of January), i've found it difficult to get contributions from developers who are furiously applying as much polish as possible in what is now the final lap of a several year development marathon. These last-minute changes explain the small amount of work on features this week in KDE SVN, and also the reduced number of selected commits in this Digest - such commits generally don't make interesting reading!
Still, although 2007 was not the most outwardly-visible year for the KDE project (with the last major release in November 2005), from an insider's point of view, it was certainly the most significant in the history of the project, with the foundation for around 5 years of future releases being quietly built (well, I like to make a little noise in this publication). And surely with KDE 4, 2008 stands to be yet more important.
Major highlights for me are the improved organisation and non-programming aspects of the project - features such as the "Road to KDE 4" by Troy Unrau, the emergence of Oxygen as a team which consistently rivals professional, commercial graphics designers, and the often thankless, invisible work of people like Sebastian Kügler, Wade Olson and countless others like them - are all things which I remember about KDE distinctly in 2007. And just as Time Magazine sometimes labels whole groups of people as their "Person of the Year", the KDE Commit-Digest Person of the Year would go to the KDE contributors who's work is not always immediately visible, but almost always vital - translators, documentation, and so many more.
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Massive thanks to all who donated over the past week to the "lets-get-dannya-a-new-laptop" fund. Though I said I had no expectations, I confess that I had a small target that I would at least like to have reached (like, say, $200) - and the donations not only reached that target, but exceeded it several times over. Waking up each morning to more donations really put a smile on my face.
So I will now be getting a new laptop, if not in time for the KDE 4.0 release on January 11th, at least in time for the KDE 4 Launch Party in Mountain View, California, where I should (just about!) be able to find someone to install the newly-released onto it. Despite the cautionary note of Stephan above, i'm really excited - not only for what KDE 4 currently is, but for what is possible and what it will become.
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