July 2008

The British Linux magazine Linux Format has given a negative review (4 out of 10) to C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 by J Blanchette & M Summerfield, the official Trolltech book on programming with Qt 4, in the most recent edition (LXF109, Sept 08). They register disappointment with the content given the Trolltech endorsement and Matthias Ettrich's foreword, alleging that it will put anyone used to Python or .NET off Qt for life, that "even simple tasks take on gargantuan complexity", and that despite being comprehensive, it "reads like a Croatian train time table". They attach to the review an image of the first edition of the book, and quote the ISBN number of the first edition, making it obvious that they reviewed the first edition despite an update having been published in February. This is a theme we have seen before with this magazine, which has reviewed unfinished versions of certain products and rubbished them on stability grounds. I must say that I found the original (Qt 3) edition immensely helpful in learning Qt.

From Qt Apps:

Version 1.0.2 of cb2Bib, a tool for extracting bibliographic references from emails, PDFs and journal webpages and encoding them in BibTeX, has been released. Changes:

• Fixed problems with window flicker and LaTeX encoding
• Optimise approximate searches in document files
• New 'Edit reference' functionality with search results

Full changelog here. Screenshots here, downloads (source, Windows installer, link to Mac binaries) here. Requires Qt 4.3.

From Drupal website:

Version 0.9.4 of digiKam, the digital photo download and management application for KDE, has been released. Full changelog here; major changes include:

• Inclusion of SQLite library in source code (removing external dependency, but external SQLite can still be used)
• CImg library updated to 1.2.9
• New dialog to list all RAW cameras supported
• Simplified tag creation
• Colour themes applied throughout the app, for more professional appearance
• Capability to display items count in all Album, Date, Tags, and Tags Filter folder views
• Decoding RAW files in 16-bit colour depth without using Color Management
• Thumbnails in the "open" and "save as" dialogs
• New timeline sidebar in the album GUI, allowing easy date-based searching
• Auto-completion in all search text filter (in album)

Screenshots here, downloads (source only) here.

K Desktop Environment - KDE 4.1 RC1 Release Announcement

The KDE project have issued a first release candidate of KDE 4.1, expected to be the last milestone release before the final release of KDE 4.1 on 29th July. This is an opportunity for any last-minute bug fixes; there is a freeze on any other changes. Source downloads (with links to binary packages) are available from the info page and binaries for some systems are being made available also.

From KDE Apps:

A second release candidate of version 0.9.4 of digiKam, the digital photo import and management application for KDE, has been released. New features over version 0.9.3 include improvements to the decoding of RAW files, colour theme support, thumbnails shown when opening and saving image files, a new timeline tab, and simpler creation of tags. This RC has a number of bug fixes; see this page (with screenshot) on the digiKam website. Source downloads here; dependency list here.

From KDE Apps:

Version 0.44 of KlamAV, the KDE front-end for ClamAV, the free Linux anti-virus software, has been released. Changes:

• Apply a selection of upstream Debian patches.
• Update scan options to be compatible with ClamAV 0.93

Screenshots here; source downloads here with links to various binaries here. Requires KDE/Qt 3.3 and ClamAV.

From Qt Apps:

Version 4.1.6 of Eric4, an IDE for Python based on PyQt, has been released. This is a bug fix release. Screenshots here, downloads (plain tarballs only) here with requirements (Qt 4.2 and Python 2.4 among other things).