February 2007

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.