June 2007

From Qt Apps:

Version 1.0.0 of QGRUBEditor, a graphical menu editor for the GNU boot-loader GRUB, has been released. Changes:

• Added the "Copy Entry" feature
• Added the "location bar" feature
• Added auto completion in the location bar
• Added the completion mode setting
• Added browse buttons
• Added new icons
• Improved the GUI
• Did a general code cleanup
• Renamed some old icons to best describe them
• The "About Box" is now fully informational
• Fixed a major bug occuring when the user manually inserted a directory instead of a menu.lst

Screenshots and downloads (source only at present) are at the page linked above. Requires Qt 4 (which minor version is not stated). Note that this must be run as root.

From KDE Apps:

Version 1.4.6 of Amarok, the media player and collection manager for KDE, has been released. Changes include:

• New icon set, derived from KDE4's Oxygen icons
• Default database backend is a lot faster due to a new SQLite version.
• Numerous bug fixes and performance tuning
• Introducing rockbox support for iPod.

Screenshots here, downloads (source, with links to various third-party binaries) here. Requires KDE 3.3.

From KDE Apps:

Version 0.9.2 of digiKam, the KDE digital photo management application, has been released. Major changes:

• a light-table to quickly compare similar images side by side
• Thumbnail size in the album view can be adjusted continuously, details.
• Image Editor: reorganized menu structure
• Image Editor: new pan tool
• Image Editor: new Sharpness Editor (replacing Unsharp Mask, Refocus, Sharpen)
• DigikamImagePlugins have been merged into digiKam, details.
• Image Plugins: completely rewritten Red Eyes Correction
• Image Plugins: Color Effects pack: solarize, velvia (new!), neon, edge
• Image Plugins: improved Black & White converter
• Image Plugins : Speed improvements for Restoration, Inpainting and Blowup (update of the CImg library to 1.1.9), details.
• several keyboard shortcuts have changed to comply with KDE guidelines
• New dependency to libkdcraw to decode RAW file (uses dcraw 8.60 inside)

Screenshots here, downloads (source only) here. Note that the separate plugin tarball which was formerly a dependency is now integrated with the digiKam core. Full list of dependencies is on their README. Requires KDE 3.4.

From Qt Apps:

Version 0.5.3 of QTM, a client for Movable Type, Wordpress and content management systems using the same APIs, has been released. Changes:

• Removed feature: Blogger support. Blogger no longer supports the APIs that QTM uses.
• New feature: Abort, which stops the current network job (refresh blog or category list, blog entry posting or whatever)
• New features: New variants on Paste: paste as ordered/unordered list, marked paragraphs (with tags), normal blockquotes and Markdown blockquotes, and ability to mark up a block as an ordered or unordered list.
• New feature: Ability to set whether to submit a date and time or not at posting time, to avoid clock skews (problem on Wordpress and Textpattern, not on MT).
• New feature: Ability to set the post's remote categories explicitly, through action "Send categories" in File menu
• Build system: Fixed relinking issue at install time, in which (on sandboxed installs of Qt 4.3.0) the executable was relinked to the normal install of Qt, even if it was older than 4.3 (causing unresolved symbol errors).
• Bug fix: now saves entry numbers when saving entries, so that you can reopen a posted entry and have QTM post an edit, rather than a new post.
• User interface: removed (from view) the unused actions, Print and "Close and delete".

In addition, a beta of version 0.5.4 has been released. This also features the ability to upload files (in response to a feature request on Qt Apps); however, this blocks operations, which is particularly noticeable on large files like images.

Screenshots here, downloads (source, Ubuntu Feisty binary) here for 0.5.3 and here for the beta. Requires Qt 4.2.

A beta version of the new desktop client for Skype, the free IP-based telephone system owned by eBay, has been released. The new version uses Qt 4.2 on the X11 platform. Various packaged binaries can be found here (this is the British English version, to which it auto-directed me when I visited their site). New beta versions have also been released for Windows and Mac OS X; it does not say whether either use Qt.

The KOffice Project has announced the release of version 1.6.3 of KOffice, its KDE-based office application set. This release adds three new translations (Low Saxon, Nepali and Bulgarian), and has a number of bug fixes, particularly in Kexi. Release notes, with download locations and compile instructions, here. Requires Qt/KDE 3.3 or later, libxml2 v.2.4.9+, lcms v1.15+ and libxslt v1.0.7+.

From KDE Apps:

Version 2.01 of VariCAD, a 2D/3D design system for mechanical engineering, has been released. According to the announcement:

The new version brings many useful improvements, which include completely new tools for 3D shells, 3D pipelines and 3D wires, a substantially improved 3D editing function allowing more complex editing, significantly improved STEP file import, new 3D checking functions, an extended tutorial and quick demonstration with new Flash examples, etc.

Screenshots here, downloads (Windows installer and various Linux distro binaries) here. Note that this is a commercial product and that the binaries are on a 30-day trial basis; licences, per platform, start at $670 ($799 for one year's upgrades and support).

eric4 KDE-Apps.org

Version 4.0.0 of Eric, the IDE for Python written using PyQt and QScintilla, has been released. This is the first version to be based on Qt 4; I can't find any other changelog. Screenshots here, downloads (Python source only) here. Requires Qt 4.2+, Python v2.4+, PyQt v4.1+ and QScintilla v2.0+ (the latter two available from Riverbank Computing).

From KDE Apps:

Fedora 7 (they have dropped the Fedora Core name, integrating the Core and Extras repositories), codenamed Moonshine, has been released, with an installable live CD with a KDE desktop (version 3.5.6, although 3.5.7 will be available in updates). KDE in this release has the Plastik theme with Crystal SVG icons (replacing the old Fedora icons), a new KDM theme called Fedora Flying High with KDM integrated with ConsoleKit. Also in this release is GNOME v2.18, Linux kernel v2.6.21 and X.org v7.2 and Python v2.5. Note that this OS does not support proprietary codecs, including MP3, out of the box, although third-party repositories may provide them.