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Plasma applets can now be dragged from the desktop to the panel. More internet data sources for the Picture Frame and Comic Plasmoids. Configuration dialogs are added to many Plasmoids. The in-development "WorldClock" Plasmoid supercedes the KWorldClock standalone application. A new Plasma applet: Conway's Game of Life. KRunner becomes completely plugin-based. Support for editing GPS track lists in Digikam. More work on expanding theming capabilities across KDE games. A variety of enhancements in KOrganizer. Initial work on a web interface to control downloads in KGet. Work on paths and snap guides in Karbon. A HTML part plugin in the scripting application creator, Kommander. Mono (C#) KDE bindings reach a usable state. Python support in KDevelop4. A return to development work on Decibel. KMail gets a new maintainer, with already-noticeable improvements. KBluetooth and KRecipes begin to be ported to KDE 4. The game Kollision moves from playground/games to kdereview. A new game, KDiamond, is imported into KDE SVN.
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Aaron Seigo talks about recent developments in Plasma:
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This week has seen a several interesting turns in the code base, not least of which is the move to Qt 4.4. This brings a number of important improvements for KDE 4.1, and for Plasma in particular: WebKit which allows us to display web content on the Plasma canvas, Widgets-on-Canvas, or WoC, which allows us to freely mix traditional widgets with canvas content and many improvements in QGraphicsView that will allow us to do things like the applet handles much better. Over the next few months the Plasma team will be working on taking full advantage of these new features as well as implementing plasmoids that start to shape the Plasma workspace as we've envisioned it.
In April, several of us will be coming together in Milano, Italy, for a four day Plasma developer sprint codenamed "Tokamak" (continuing the tradition of bad high energy physics puns in the project ;).
We've also gotten the necessary permission from the translation teams to backport some of the more requested features from 4.1 into the 4.0 branch, so a number of features that impact the panel and other parts of the Plasma workspace have made their way into svn for 4.0.2. Over 80 commits have been backported thus far, and we'll be doing another batch of backports for 4.0.3 next month.
Plasma itself has continued to be refined with numerous bugs being squashed and configuration for things such as SVG Plasma themes appearing in the user interface. Speaking of SVG themes, the theme system now adapts automatically to non-composited environments as well as low color displays. This is driven in part by people starting to use Plasma in both thin client as well as mobile device systems.
Not to be left out, KRunner is also being improved. A number of performance improvements were checked in this week, and work is underway to improve the user experience including better ranking of matches, the ability for users to discover the syntax offered by the various runners (e.g. "spell <word>" checks spelling via Sonnet, but who knows that?) and an improved interface display.
As an interesting aside, with just two lines of code (one using Solid and the other Threadweaver), the number of threads used by krunner to perform matches with now scales along with the number of CPU cores available on the machine (with the abiity to set a hard upper limit on it via the configuration). This shows just how powerful and useful the new frameworks in KDE4 are.
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Stefan Majewsky, another new KDE developer, introduces a new KDE game, KDiamond (text updated):
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Put three physics students in a room, wait some days, and you get: a new game for KDE. Basically, this is how KDiamond began. These three students are Felix Lemke, Jeffrey Kelling, and me. As I'm the only one who's familiar with Qt and kdelibs, I had to do the main job while Jeffrey assisted with advice. Felix does not have any C++ experience (but has promised to learn it in the next months), so he helped out with an initial graphics theme which is now the "classic theme" for KDiamond. It was really basic, but was more than enough to test my rendering engine.
Except for Jeffrey, we are relatively new to Linux. We've all chosen KDE because it was already widely spread in our environment and while programming with Qt and kdelibs, I saw yet again that it was the right decision. Some years ago (in the Windows era of my life), I've worked with some Microsoft libraries. Compared to kdelibs, what I got there was quite uncomfortable and data-centric while the design of kdelibs is more based on what a developer actually needs. If you have some basic C++ skills, I really recommend you to try kdelibs for your next program.
KDiamond is a Bejeweled clone or, more generically, a three-in-a-row game.
KDiamond is available from KDE SVN in playground/games since last Friday, and has evolved quickly: Like most other games in KDE, it is now based on QGraphicsView, and includes some basic animations. It was imported to KDE SVN after its first release (with many help from the friendly guys at the #kdegames channel). What you're seeing here is not the mentioned classic theme, but the new default theme created by Eugene Trounev:
To make the list of contributors complete, many thanks to Dmitry Suzdalev, Albert Astals Cid, Riccardo Iaconelli, and Pino Toscano for their help on improving the code. Also, as I learned to develop with kdelibs by reading code from others, I think this is the right place to thank the developers of Klipper, KLines, KMines, and KNetwalk for your clean and readable code. Now the contributors' list is really complete!
If you always have wanted to play a Bejeweled game on your KDE desktop, this is your chance to contribute: the gameplay of KDiamond needs balancing, so tell me about your impressions of the difficulty of the different levels: Was the game too easy or too hard, and what about the difficulty levels? (Bug reports are also welcome!).
Send your reports to my email address, which you can find in KDiamond's about dialog.
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I would like to turn the "introduction" features (like the one above) into a regular series on the Digest - I know there are new developers and projects all the time (new KDE SVN accounts are also handled through SVN... you can't hide from me!) - Stefan emailed me after my request last week, and you can too!
I look forward to reading (and then publishing!) your introductions - send them to me!
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