August 2007

From KDE Dot News:

Gartner Webdev has published an interview with KDE's very own marketing renegade Wade Olson. Wade talks about KDE 4, what makes it special and what KDE's role in the software market is. He sheds some light on the user's point of view and discusses his vision about the way the computer and software industry is moving.

Trolltech Developer Days 2007 — Trolltech

Trolltech has extended the deadline for the "early bird" registration scheme for its Developer Days in October. Anyone who registers before 14th Sept will save $200 off the price of the Redwood City, CA, event, or E200 for the Munich event (reducing them to $399 or E399 respectively). The events themselves are to take place in California on 3rd and 4th of October and in Munich on the 16th and 17th.

From Qt Apps:

Version 0.5.4 of QTM, a blogging client for Movable Type, Wordpress and similar systems, has been released. Changes since the last beta:

• Security: no longer outputs passwords to the console when displaying XML-RPC listings
• New feature: now stores titles and targets for auto links
• New feature: ability to clear the console
• Improvement: now does base 64 conversions internally, with progress dialog, rather than the old method of using Qt's built-in converter which blocked the GUI.
• Bug fix: no longer outputs entire encoded file to console when uploading a file (caused crash)
• Bug fix: now detects faults in file upload responses accurately and displays "406" errors on console as HTML code, not as "displayed" HTML

Screenshots here, downloads (source, Ubuntu and Fedora 7 binaries with probable Mac disc image to follow) at Qt Apps as above. Requires Qt 4.1 (4.2 strongly recommended; binaries built with 4.3).

A research study on failure sampling in KDE is scheduled for September. We are now looking for skilled C++ developers to test one or several C++ classes. The developers at KDAB have already provided some code for the occasion from kdepim. Discussions have been held with the SQO-OSS project on adding the sampling method's basics to Alitheia, the successor to the English Breakfast Network, if the outcome of the study is promising. Volunteers will need to answer a questionnaire on their experience of C++, and then download a package containing the classes they need to test; tests last 4 or 8 hours. The questionnaire can be downloaded here and should be sent to the email address mentioned in the file.

From KDE Apps:

Version 3.1 of kAnyRemote, a Bluetooth and InfraRed connectivity application for KDE, has been released. Changes:

• New command Get(screen_size|model) was introduced. Set(image...) command was enhanced.
• In AT-mode nothing will be sent to phone after RemoteOff command.
• Java client was corrected to work properly with Nokia-E70.
• Configuration file for Mplayer, Quodlibet, VLC and Nokia-E70 were added.
• A lot of bugfixes.

Screenshots at KDE Apps (above); downloads (source, FC7 RPM, also console and GNOME versions) here. No KDE requirement info is available.

The LugRadio people have released Ogg Theora videos of presentations recently given at their LugRadio Live event in Wolverhampton. Among them is one by Ben Lamb, entitled Konquering the Desktop with KDE 4. (38Mb download, runtime 33:15.) Alan Cox (Red Hat), Chris DiBona (Google), Nat Friedman (Novell), and many others, also have talks among those videos.

From Qt Apps:

Version 2.0.0 of QGRUBEditor, a bootloader configuration program using Qt 4, has been released. Changes include:

• Complete rewrite, from scratch
• Reads /etc/mtab and /boot/grub/device.map and detects mounted partitions
• Various GUI improvements, including new icons
• Improved backup/restore dialog

Two screenshots, and source download, are available at Qt Apps above. Requires Qt 4 (not sure which minor version).

From Trolltech announcements:

Trolltech has issued a first maintenance release of Qt Jambi, its Java bindings for Qt. This release contains various bug fixes and optimisations, particularly to Juic, the generator and Designer; among the changes that stuck out were that emit, connect and disconnect (signal/slot-related functions) are now thread-safe. Full changelog is here; open-source downloads are available here along with downloads of the Eclipse integration package for Windows and Linux.

From KDE Apps:

Version 0.9.1 of the desktop client for WebIssues, "a system supporting team collaboration across the Internet" which can be used for bug tracking and the like, has been released. Changes:

• Start page, with list of recent connections
• Attachments can be opened directly using the default application
• Order of attributes in the details view can be changed
• Qt v4.3 now supported

Screenshots here; downloads (source, Windows installer) here. Requires Qt v4.2.