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February 27, 2007

Trolltech Australia moves

Trolltech yesterday announced that its Australian subsidiary had moved buildings: its new address is Level 1, 53 Brandl St., Eight Mile Plains, Brisbane Technology Park, in Queensland. The site opened in 1999, and is the development hub for Qtopia with a staff of around 50. An open house is to be held on 9th March, when the new building is officially opened by the MP John Mickel, Minister for State Development.

Scribus v1.3.3.8 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 1.3.3.8 of Scribus, the open-source desktop publishing application, has been released. Changes:

  • Translation updates
  • Improvements to SVG and Open Document Draw import
  • Improvements to PDF forms
  • Bug fixes

Screenshots here, for downloads (source, Windows, Mac and OS/2 installers, SUSE RPMs) here. Requires Qt 3.

February 26, 2007

Trolltech launches Trolltech Labs website

Trolltech has announced the launch of Trolltech Labs, a website dedicated to sharing code Trolltech is in the process of developing and to establishing dialogue between the company and its customers and the open-source community. It includes:

  • Experimental and R&D software and components
  • Proof of concept projects
  • Code snippets
  • Collected Trolltech developer blogs
  • Discussion forums

Code shared in the Labs may end up becoming part of Qt, Qtopia or Qt Solutions, or may not be otherwise released at all. The developers' blog site (QDevBlog) has been moved to the labs: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs.

QSvn v0.5.0 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 0.5.0 of QSvn, a Subversion client, has been released. Changes:

  • Switch to CMake build system
  • Add, commit, delete and revert dialogs now modeless (i.e. do not block other operations)
  • Ability to copy, move and rename files and make new directories
  • Store encrypted passwords with CryptAPI (Win2K+ only, not Unix)

For full changelog, see the release notes. Screenshots here, downloads (source, Windows installer) from the release notes page. Requires Qt 4 (what minor version is not stated, but the Windows installer uses v4.2.2).

February 24, 2007

Qtopia v4.2.1 released

Trolltech has announced the release of version 4.2.1 of Qtopia, its Qt application platform for embedded Linux devices with its own integrated windowing system. Besides bug fixes and performance improvements, this release introduces the Helix DNA multimedia framework, the software behind RealPlayer. Other changes (listed in the release notes) include:

  • Bluetooth support (technology preview only)
  • Ability to sync with Google Calendar data
  • GCF compliance improved in the telephony component
  • Qtopia's footprint reduced by reduced use of non-scalable images

Open source downloads (which do not include the Safe Execution Environment or anything related to telephony) are available here.

February 22, 2007

Third KDE 4 snapshot released (with Ubuntu and OpenSUSE packages)

A third snapshot release of KDE 4, the Qt 4-based desktop to be released some time this year (one hopes) has been released. As yet, the KDE website has not been updated (this page will have it when they do), but packages for Ubuntu have been released and can be downloaded with APT as usual. There is also a YUM repository for OpenSUSE 10.2, which can be downloaded through YaST.

February 21, 2007

KOffice v1.6.2 released

The KOffice Project - KOffice News

Version 1.6.2 of the KDE office applications suite KOffice has been released. Changes include:

  • Security fix for KWord PDF import filter
  • Half Toning filter, new Colorify filter and Smudge Paint operation in image editor Krita, along with improvements to Transform tool
  • User Mode for the desktop database app Kexi, for ease of database application deployment, and much extended "Assign action" command for buttons in a form
  • New Farsi, Irish, Galician and Khmer translations
  • Bugs fixed in most of the other components

Announcement here, full changelog here, release notes, with downloads and compilation instructions here. Requires KDE 3.3.

More events: Spain and India

From KDE Dot News:

A joint KDE-Gnome meeting is to take place in Spain (Faculty of Computer Science, A Coruña, 23-25 March) with a KDE 4 update from Aaron Seigo and Albert Astals Cid will talk about Okular.

Also, at FOSS MEET at NIT Calicut (I can't access the site to get the date, but I presume this is in what is now Kozhikode, Kerala), Pradeepto Bhattacharya of KDE India will talk about KDE 4 and why you should develop with Qt.

KDN also have a report on KDE's presentations at SCALE 5x in LA earlier this month.

KDE and CMake in depth

The Road to KDE 4: CMake, a New Build System for KDE

KDE Dot News has an in-depth article on why KDE has chosen CMake as its build system for KDE 4 in place of the old system, the GNU Autotools (in short, ease of use, portability, need for fewer tools and speed). Scribus, Rosegarden, PlPlot and my own QTM have also switched.

February 20, 2007

KDE Italia at OpenMind 2007 this week

From KDE Dot News:

There is to be a KDE booth at OpenMind 2007, a Free Software and content event, in San Giorgio a Cremano in Naples, Italy from this Thursday to this Friday. Giovanni Venturi, KDE Italia webmaster, KDE Italian translator and KSniffer developer will present KDE 3.5 and will give an update on the state of KDE 4 and Qt 4 on Saturday.

Syntext Serna v3.2 RC released

From KDE Apps:

A release candidate of version 3.2 of Syntext Serna, a WYSIWYG XML editor, has been released. Changes:

  • Fixed a number of stability issues, especially DITA-related ones
  • DITA enhancements, including support of and metadata elements, ability to switch localization on-the-fly
  • Docbook enhancements, including Docbook V4.5 support, element support, numbering figures & tables as in publishing stylesheet
  • Functional enhancements, including extensions for redlining handling and for document() function, support of and extension-element-prefixes

Screenshots here; downloads (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows binaries) here. This appears to be a Qt 3 application and is under a commercial licence, although some of the software is free for non-profit use.

February 18, 2007

cb2Bib v0.7.3 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 0.7.3 of cb2Bib, "a tool for rapidly extracting unformatted biblographic references from email alerts, journal Web pages, and PDF files", has been released. This version "fixes several issues related to DOI and URL encoding, HTML character encoding in PubMed import, and dynamic bookmarks generation" (full changelog here). Screenshots here, downloads (source, Windows, Mac and Fedora Core RPM binaries) here with requirements list here. Requires Qt 4.2.

February 16, 2007

RKWard v0.4.6 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 0.4.6 of RKWard, a KDE-based IDE for the R-project, has been released. Changes include:

  • fix crash after changing storage type of an object in the data editor
  • new plugin: import SPSS files
  • new documentation pages: console
  • new plugins: distribution plots: beta, binomial, cauchy, exponential, gamma, geometric, hypergeometric, logistics, lognormal, negative binomail, tukey, uniform, weibull, wilcoxon (and several others)
  • add ability to search command history context sensitively
  • add possibility to use dropdown lists in plugins
  • numerous bug fixes

Screenshots here, downloads (source with DEB binary) here. Requires KDE v3, R v2.1.0 or later and PHP with command-line interface.

February 15, 2007

aKademy submissions deadline extended

From Adriaan De Groot's blog, via Planet KDE:

The submission deadline for aKademy 2007 has been extended, due to a systems failure yesterday which left people unable to make submissions. The new deadline is Friday 23rd Feb.

KScope development version 1.5.1 released

From KDE Apps:

A new development version of KScope, a KDE source browsing and editing environment for large C projects which uses the Cscope analysis engine, has been released. Changes in version 1.5.1:

  • Improved: Support for recursive builds (make changing directories)
  • Improved: Show build errors/warnings on a separate list
  • Bug fix: The main window was not activated when requesting a source position in a child window (call tree or the make window)
  • Bug fix: Maintain Call-tree child item order (by line)
  • Bug fix: Build output occasionally mixed standard output with standard error

Screenshots here, downloads (source only) here. Requires KDE v3.3. Stable version is 1.4.3 (download here).

February 14, 2007

LyX v1.4.4 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 1.4.4 of LyX, the word-processor for LaTeX, has been released. Changes include:

  • Outline support: it is now possible to move around parts of documents in the Table of Contents dialog.
  • New UI settings, allowing user to define which toolbars are visible
  • Improved documentation
  • Speed improvements, especially on Windows
  • Various bug fixes

Full changelog here. Screenshots here, downloads (source, Windows and Mac binaries) here (requirements list here. Requires Qt 2.3 or 3.x.

Qt v3.3.8 released

Trolltech today announced the release of version 3.3.8 of the Qt toolkit. Changes include:

  • Bug fixes and minor improvements to various classes on all three desktop platforms
  • Now possible to build a universal Qt/Mac lib on a single machine
  • Security fixes in freetype and PNG support
  • Support for Catalan language
  • Oracle support building on HP/UX

Open-source downloads are available here. Qt 3 reaches end of life on 1st July this year.

February 13, 2007

Akademy 2007: call for sponsorship

From KDE Dot News (by Jonathan Riddell):

The organisers of Akademy 2007 have put out a Call for Sponsorship. Akademy is the KDE World Summit, this year taking place in Glasgow at the end of June. Sponsorship is an opportunity to promote your company or product to the developers, users, deployers and consultants who will attend the conference. It will also provide a marketing avenue for your company to the thousands who read our website and publications. Most importantly, it gives vital support which ensures that hundreds of KDE contributors can meet together to plan the future of the free desktop. If your company would like to sponsor Akademy contact us at akademy-sponsoring@kde.org. If you know any companies in your local area who could also be potential Akademy sponsors please let us know too.

digiKam (and image plugins) v0.9.1-beta1 released

From KDE Apps [1], [2]:

A first beta of version 0.9.1 of digiKam, the digital camera downloader and image collection manager for KDE, has been released. New features:

  • New native JPEG2000 image loader
  • New optimised layout, showing comments & tags sidebar contents
  • Preview uses a memory cache to speed up loading, and has a context menu
  • Keyboard settings in line with Photoshop
  • New advanced options to show under/overexposed pixels

And much more - see the KDE Apps link 1 above. Screenshots here, downloads (source only; main program and plugins are two separate packages) here. Requires KDE 3.4.

WebIssues server v0.8.4 and client v0.8.2 released

From KDE Apps:

New versions of the client and server for WebIssues, a team collaboration system for small development groups, has been released. Changes:

Client (v0.8.4):

  • Greatly improved history view, combining comments, attachments and comments into a single view
  • Comment editor improved, with own window
  • "More comfortable" uploading and downloading of attachments, with progress bar

Server (v0.8.2):

  • Can now store attachments as files rather than just in the database
  • Script for upgrading from v0.8.1

Screenshots here, downloads (source with link to SUSE repository) here. Client requires KDE 3.4; server requires PHP v3.4 or newer and MySQL or Postgres DB access.

February 12, 2007

BasKet Note Pads v1.0 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 1.0 of BasKet Note Pads, a note-keeping application allowing various types of objects (text, images, sounds etc) to be dropped into "baskets", has been released. No changes are listed since the third RC, but changes since 0.6.0 include:

  • Exporting baskets in files and opening them on other computers
  • "Welcome baskets" at first launch
  • Easy importing from text files
  • Easy back-up and restore of data
  • Global keyboard shortcuts no longer interfering with BasKet shortcuts
  • Five crash bugs fixed
  • Free-form baskets no longer growing in width
  • Kontact integration restored in KDE 3.5.6
  • BasKet no longer saves every time a single character is changed, for better performance

Screenshots on home page and here. Downloads (source only at present) here. Requires KDE 3.

February 11, 2007

Kmando v1.1 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 1.1 of kmando, an application enabling interaction between webcams and projectors developed at Sheffield Hallam University (in England), has been released. The changelog only mentions build issues, namely the removal of QRC, MOC and UIC files when making clean. A screenshot, pictures of the app in use, and a source download are available on the home page. Requires Qt 4 (it does not say which minor version).

February 10, 2007

H-FTP v1.0.0 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 1.0.0 of H-FTP, an FTP client which uses Qt 4, has been released. (Not to be confused with this HFTP, it seems.) One bug has been fixed since the last version, namely "uploading files by drag and dropping files into listView". Screenshots and source code download from KDE Apps page.

K3b 1.0: sixth release candidate

From KDE Apps:

A sixth release candidate of version 1.0 of K3b, the CD and DVD ripping and burning application for KDE, has been released. Changes:

  • Some device handling fixes (speed issues should be solved)
  • Unmount before every burn operation

Screenshots here, downloads (source, links to third-party binaries) here. Requires KDE 3.2 (other requirements here).

February 9, 2007

Linux.com interviews KDE Sonnet developer

Linux.com has interviewed the developer of the Sonnet library, which is to replace KSpell 2 as the spell-checking library in KDE 4. The new library is to provide grammar checking, multilingual tools and possibly translation, dictionary and thesaurus functionality. The interview also discusses the new feature of language detection, which would eliminate the need to manually switch the spell-checker's language whenever a writer switches language in his writing.

February 7, 2007

Qt Jambi beta released

Trolltech has announced the release of a beta version of its Qt Jambi product, a Java binding for Qt 4. Jambi uses Qt 4.3, a snapshot of which, "guaranteed to work", is included with the beta; an Eclipse integration package (for Linux and Windows only) is also available. The beta is provided under a non-free single-user licence. A second beta is expected in the second quarter of 2007, with the 1.0 release in early Q3.

February 5, 2007

Amarok v1.4.5 released

The Amarok team have announced the release of version 1.4.5 of their music player and collection manager. Changes include:

  • Easy shoutcast browsing and playback
  • Support for track labelling, assigned manually or synch'ed with Last.fm
  • Fixes for Magnatune support
  • Re-download manager, for easy reacquisition of previously purchased tracks
  • Enhanced equaliser
  • Lyric searching
  • Context browser shows album covers
  • "Update collection" button (see here for details)

Screenshots here, downloads (sources; binaries, not necessarily this version) here. This is a KDE 3 app although I cannot find exactly which version.

Tellico v1.2.8 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 1.2.8 of Tellico, the database front for managing collections of books, videos, stamps or whatever, has been released. Changes:

  • Fixed bug with secondary and tertiary sorting.
  • Fixed bug with some z39.50 search results not showing up.
  • Fixed bug with comparing relative URLs when importing a file catalog.
  • Fixed “ISBN Not Found” dialog to have selectable text.
  • Fixed “busy cursor doesn’t go away” in the download stuff dialog.
  • Fixed the newstuff download to uninstall cleanly.
  • Fixed compilation error in yaz include, patch from Markus Brueffer.
  • Updated CDDB import to grab extd data as comments, and category as keyword.
  • Updated audio file importer to take disc number into account for mp3, ogg, and flac files.
  • Changed IMDB rating to allow float values.

Screenshots here, downloads (source with links to various binaries) from home page. Requires Qt 3.3 and KDE 3.3.1 or later (for other dependencies, see left column of home page).

KTorrent v2.1 released

From KDE Apps:

Version 2.1 of KTorrent, a BitTorrent client for KDE, has been released. Changes include:

  • µTorrent compatible peer exchange
  • IDEAl-style interface (like KDevelop)
  • RSS feed and WebGUI plugins
  • Up/download performance improved
  • Improved search plugin, allowing multiple searches
  • Bug fixes

Screenshots here, downloads (source, Ubuntu Dapper/Edgy and Arch binaries) here. Requires KDE 3.

February 4, 2007

BasKet Note Pads v1.0 RC2 released

From KDE Apps:

A release candidate of version 1.0 of BasKet Note Pads, an application allowing notes and media of various types to be drag-dropped into "baskets", has been released. Changes include:

  • Opens welcome baskets at first launch
  • Global keyboard shortcuts changed so as not to interfere with those of other apps
  • Several new translations
  • Five crash bugs fixed
  • Bug causing notes containing animations to "randomly grow in width" fixed
  • Kontact integration restored for KDE 3.5.6
  • Now compiles with GCC 4.2

Full changelog on the development page, along with source downloads. Screenshots (of earlier versions) here. This is the version previously numbered 0.6.1 and requires KDE 3.

Update: a second RC has been issued, correcting errors in translated Welcome Baskets, particularly Portuguese and where character sets other than UTF-8 were used. See development page linked above.