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Saturday, April 12th, 2008

    Time Event
    7:01a
    KDE Commit-Digest for 23rd March 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1206954953/

    In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for "undo closed windows" in Konqueror. GetHotNewStuff support for Plasma themes. Konsole, Konqueror, and Kate session selection added in Plasma applet form. New Plasmoids: "Generic Folder View", "System Command", KNotify-based "Popups", "Quick Launch", and to display data from Kalzium. Digikam now uses Phonon for video and audio previews, with improved use of Phonon in Dragon Player. Start of NEPOMUK support in Gwenview. A NEPOMUK "Social Query Daemon" for viewing storages across a network, and work on tagging GUI's for NEPOMUK using Dolphin. Work on services and queries, with the removal of the engine system (now using Phonon only) in Amarok 2. Continued development in Konsole. Various functional improvements in KTurtle. Support for synonyms in Parley. Support for custom themes in KNetWalk. A system tray application for Akonadi. Initial implementation of a remote desktops dock widget for KRDC. Work on the "reports" functionality of Kexi. Several long-awaited improvements in KCron. KDiamond moves from kdereview to kdegames. KAgenda moves to playground. Initial import of Palapeli, a jigsaw puzzle game. Read the rest of the Digest here.
    7:01a
    KDE's ISO Delegate Votes Yes to Office Open XML
    http://dot.kde.org/1207000153/

    This week saw the International Standards Organisation vote on adopting Office Open XML as a standard for office documents. KDE gained a representative late last year through our legal body KDE e.V. realising that the only way to ensure a fair process was to be part of it. Today our delegate voted yes to adopting the format as an international standard. "We have studied the standard hard and many changes have been made to it," said KDE's Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo "and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source we realised the market should decide the best formats to use, not technical bureaucrats".







    The KOffice developers confirmed their support with Cyrille Burger saying, "The level of detail in this standard is very impressive, previous standards we had to deal with were less than half as expansive in their documentation. Working with a standard that makes such good use of previously established standards was also a main reason for the quick implementation in KOffice".



    KDE founder Stephan Coolio was unavailable for comment because he was changing nappies.

    7:01a
    Digikam Plans for KDE 4
    http://dot.kde.org/1207150254/

    Readers of the KDE Commit-Digest have probably noticed that Gilles Caulier is again on top with number of commits. On what does he work so furiously? Gilles is the main developer of Digikam which is under transition from KDE 3 to KDE 4 whilst simultaneously adding new features. Read more to know more about the future of advanced digital photo management for KDE and Linux.

    There are many improvements including a cleaner user interface, improved performance, a new thumbnail bar, XMP support, ability to run on Mac OS X, GPS tagging using Google Maps, multiple album collections supporting collections on network shares and removable media, and auto gamma and white balance with RAW. Digikam is also the first open source photography tool with 16-bit colour depth support. Gilles Caulier tells all.



    We have plans to release 0.10.0 in September, if all goes well.



    Regression tests will take a while. I would not provide a "stable"
    release full of bugs.



    As you can see, porting of Qt 3/KDE 3 application like Digikam, K3B or
    Amarok to Qt 4/KDE 4 is not a simple task. Because changes in the API are huge, all elements must be tested, and some parts even re-written. The advantage of this approach is review of all old code with refactorisation,
    simplification and various other improvements.



    Digikam 0.10 is still in alpha. I advise against use of it in
    production, at least until the first release candidate.



    There are also kipi-plugins
    and all shared libraries where Marcel and me are working hard to port to
    native QT 4/KDE 4:




    • libkdcraw (including new 16 bits color depth auto-gamma/auto white
      balance)

    • libexiv2 (including new full XMP metadata support)

    • libkipi (partially re-written and cleaned).

    • 7 kipi-plugins fully ported by me (SendImages, RAWConverter,
      JPEGLossLess, FlashExport, TimeAdjust, MetadataEdit, and
      AcquireImage).



    I present here a few screenshots of Digikam for KDE 4 in action.





    As you can see, a lot of work has been done to design a clean
    interface, moving away from the traditional dialog requiring to build a search
    step-by-step with comboboxes, and towards a page which offers the available
    options at a glance, at the same time retaining the ability to create
    complex searches. With this approach we hope to create something more
    user friendly. It is not finished yet, the UI in the screenshot can be
    considered a preview, but we want to finalise this interface for the Beta 1 release.



    The need to redesign the search interface came with the rewrite and
    improvement of our database schema. Now, much more photo metadata
    information will be stored and will be available for searching. For
    example, GPS information will now be stored in the database, which means
    that read-only files (think of your RAW images) can as well be
    geo-coded.








    In Digikam for KDE 4, thumbnail kio-slave disappears. All thumbnail images are now generated using multi-threading (another part implemented by Marcel)
    If you have already played with Showfoto, you have certainly seen
    a thumbbar. The KDE 3 implementation used kioslaves without a memory cache
    mechanism. It was slow. The new mechanism is faster and can be included everywhere in Digikam without a decrease in performance. I have
    included the thumbbar in the Image Editor (F4) and in the AlbumGUI with Preview mode (F3). The same cache is used everywhere.








    In KDE 4, XMP is fully supported. I have improved the Metadata Editor
    kipi-plugin and rewritten all dialog pages to be more user friendly, and
    to be more similar to other tools available under Mac OS X or Windows.





    Gustavo Boiko, have ported some parts of Digikam to compile as a native
    application under Mac OS X.





    For KDE 4, I have fixed libkipi to become a pure image collection
    interface: no widgets, no dialogs, no translations. All GUI components
    have to be re-implemented in kipi-host using the right model/view
    implementation. For Digikam, I have already implemented all of them. The
    advantage is really visible here: the tree view used for all
    physical/virtual albums in Digikam can be used as well with all
    kipi-plugins (KDE 3 only provide a flat albums list, which is not really
    suitable).





    For KDE 4, I have also implemented a new tool to edit a GPS track list of
    several images at the same time. This tool uses Google Maps, but there are plans to use Marble if necessary, especially when the user does not have
    network access.





    With KDE 4, multiple root album paths are supported, including
    removable media and network repositories. There will be no problems with using Digikam with a NFS server to host your images.








    Full colour theme interface: this was also backported to KDE 3. Now
    colour schemes are applied everywhere within the GUI. With dark themes (my
    preferred scheme), Digikam looks similar to professional software available commercially.





    This is a very important feature: auto-gamma and auto-white balance
    with all RAW file format using 16-bit colour depth! Before, 16-bit
    colour depth support required use of colour management to have a suitable
    image in the editor. Without colour management, the user would see only a black hole image. This is due to limitations of the dcraw library, which does not provide a homogenous interface between 8-bit and 16-bit colour depth workflow.



    In these screenshots, you can compare the same RAW image decoded:




    • On the left by dcraw in 8 bits colour depth and converted to PNG.
      Auto-gamma and auto white balance is performed automatically by
      dcraw.

    • On the middle by Digikam in 16 bits colour depth using libkdcraw with
      a dedicated auto-gamma and auto-white-balance performed in Digikam
      core.

    • On the right by the LightZone... As you can see, Digikam is
      not bad!



    Digikam is now able to play with all RAW images in 16-bit colour depth
    without to use complex colour management settings: in your workflow RAW
    pictures can be handled like JPEG files. This is a very productive and fast
    method: for example, LightZone uses this style of workflow. Note that this feature was also backported to KDE 3.



    I would like to remind to everyone that Digikam has been the first suitable
    open source photo-management program with support for 16-bit colour depth
    pictures as well! Even GIMP or F-Spot do not support it! Cinepaint can do it, but seriously, who will use it to play with pictures? Of course we have
    Krita to also work with layers. We want Digikam with Krita to be considered the perfect photo suite.



    On a final note, we would like Digikam to take part in Google Summer of Code: here is a list of potential projects.

    7:01a
    KDE 4.0.3 Released With Extragear Applications
    http://dot.kde.org/1207154042/

    The third bugfix release of the KDE 4.0 series is available. KDE 4.0 is mainly targeted at users who live on the bleeding edge. As a dot-oh release it might have its rough edges. The KDE Community releases a service update for this series once a month to make those bleeding edge users' lives easier. The changelog for KDE 4.0.3 is, although not complete, quite impressive. Especially KHTML and with it the Konqueror webbrowser have seen great improvements in both, stability and performance.




    Since KDE 4.0, some Extragear applications form part of the release. Extragear applications can choose to follow their own release cycle, which is what for example Amarok and K3b do. There is also the option to have extragear applications released with KDE. Applications such as RSIBreak (a program to save your health), KGrab (an advanced screenshot-taking tool), KPovModeler (a 3D modelling application). Tom Albers, responsible for the release of the Extragear package says, "The new item in this release is kio_gopher. It's really great that this protocol is still not dead and we now have support for it in KDE4. New technology meets ancient protocol ;-)".



    The KDE Team also uses this release to highlight some gems of the KDE package. This time, a closer look is being taken at the KDE Educational software. The KDE Edu project has also recently done some work on their website, which is surely worth a visit. We hope you enjoy this release and notice our commitment to making progress in stability and usability of the KDE 4.0 series while development of KDE 4.1 is going on at more than full speed.

    7:01a
    openSUSE Packaging Days II Tomorrow
    http://dot.kde.org/1207232250/

    Ever run into the issue that you saw a cool new app on KDE-Apps.org and could not find a binary package for your favourite KDE version on your favourite KDE distro? The openSUSE Build Service allows creation of binary packages quite easily, so you can do the work yourself and help other KDE users who run into the same problem. If you are interested in learning how, the openSUSE community are organising Packaging Days II, which starts tomorrow.




    Members of the openSUSE team will be available for any help with packaging from Australian morning on Friday, April 4th to American evening on Saturday, April 5th in the #opensuse-buildservice IRC channel on Freenode.



    We will help new packagers to create packages for software that is not currently available for openSUSE. We invite people to roll up their sleeves and get involved. If you have this fancy application or tool that is not packaged yet, and you are not afraid to learn how to do it yourself, then this is for you. The openSUSE Build Service has KDE 3.5.x, 4.0.x, and 4.1.x packages updated weekly, so it is easy to package software that requires the most recent KDE.



    This will be a good opportunity for people who have hitherto done little or no packaging to learn how to do it, with helpful people available to answer all the questions you might have related to packaging.

    7:01a
    KDE and Wikimedia Collaborate
    http://dot.kde.org/1207303599/

    KDE e.V and Wikimedia Deutschland have opened a shared
    office     in Frankfurt, Germany and have hired a joint employee for administration.
    As two charitable organisations that share similar cultural goals and organisational challenges, they
    hope that working out of the same space will strengthen and expand their links to
    the Free Culture community, as well as allowing them to share resources, experience
    and infrastructure.










    "We believe that the combination of Free Software and Free Content is not only
    beneficial,    " remarked Sebastian Kügler, a KDE e.V. board member, "but the
    next logical step towards a mature, organised Free Culture community.    " Kügler
    explains the idea behind opening the shared office, "Being able to tap into the
    expertise of an organisation in a different field, but with very similar goals
    and principles, provides us with an opportunity to grow and gain experience that
    I hope to see more often, both within our projects and those of our peers.    "




    Kügler added that the shared office space is not the only organisational
    improvement under way for the KDE e.V. The founding of the office in Frankfurt
    coincides with the hiring of an administrative assistant, the e.V.'s first employee.
    "This will help the KDE e.V. become more efficient in our work of supporting
    the KDE community. With eight developer meetings and presence at many events
    already planned for 2008, a dedicated administrative assistant enables an even
    faster growth of the K Desktop Environment.    "




    Wikimedia Deutschland (the German Wikimedia chapter), which established its office
    originally in October 2006, is also happy to be able to expand its activities
    together with KDE. "Back then, we were the first national section of the
    Wikimedia Foundation to open its own office. Before that, we were a purely
    voluntary-driven organisation. Opening an office was new and unchartered territory
    for us    ", says Arne Klempert, Wikimedia Deutschland's executive secretary.
    "We're now glad to share the experiences we've made during that first period
    with KDE e.V. That said, due to the collaboration with KDE it is also much easier
    for us to extend our office and activities. Both organisations can share a lot of
    resources this way, resources that both would have had to carry individually if
    we weren't collaborating.    "



    The new address is on the KDE e.V. website. A big welcome to Claudia Rauch, our new administrator.

    7:01a
    KDE Commit-Digest for 30th March 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1207571674/

    In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The menu item styles of the KDE 3 "Classic" menu return to Kickoff. GetHotNewStuff for KDE colour schemes. "Recently Visited" listings in Konqueror. A new simplified hotkeys configuration module. The ability to print a "cheat sheet" of shortcuts. Automation plugin for scheduling checks, and GetHotNewStuff support in KLinkStatus. Support for Synonyms, Antonyms and False Friends in Parley. Improved online play (through GGZ) in KSquares. "Photocopy" functionality in Kooka. Various scripting improvements and integration in Kross and Plasma. Ability to monitor the input and output of processes, and support for pausing and resuming processes in KSysGuard. The ability to scale remote VNC desktops in KRDC. On-the-fly spell checking comes to Kile. Work on a knotify-dbus-plasma bridge. A fullscreen KDE splashscreen, without flicker. Printer-applet (written in Python) replaces KJobViewer. Kubrick and Glimpse move to kdereview. KTip has retired. Various anticipated sanity enhancements to the default settings of a KDE desktop. The bugfix edition KDE 4.0.3 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
    7:01a
    Qt Centre Programming Contest 2008
    http://dot.kde.org/1207596739/

    Qt Centre is announcing its second edition of their Qt Programming Contest. This contest is focused around the Qt and Qtopia communities and starts today and continues until September 30th. This year's categories include collaboration, education, project management, automation, demo, plasmoid, and newcomer. If you are interested in reading more about this contest then please review the contest page and the contest rules.
    7:01a
    Australian School Reuses Old PCs with KDE
    http://dot.kde.org/1207652481/

    A secondary school in Melbourne, Australia, is using KDE on Kubuntu, with KDE's own Kiosk tool to lock down its library workstations. Implementing a kiosk mode Kubuntu setup allowed Westall Secondary School to save money, exact greater control over security measures, and extend the life of older and previously abandoned hardware without sacrificing performance. The school's IT support manager said the Kiosk admin tool was chosen as there was not enough flexibility with other desktops to allow "decent" lockdown. He was also surprised to discover that Kubuntu desktops ran some applications faster on Linux than when they ran on Windows.
    7:01a
    KDevelop Team Meeting Agenda
    http://dot.kde.org/1207838434/

    The KDevelop Team Meeting Organisational Head Committee is happy to announce the agenda for Saturday and Sunday's KDevelop event in Munich. While enjoying some breakfast accompanied by a USB cup warmer, you can grill Harald with all your Qt related questions, watch Aleix present a live demo of KDE 4 and finally discuss what KDevelop 4 really should be. Sunday is reserved for in-depth KDevelop topics. Highlights include Roberto talking about language support, Andras on Quanta, Andreas on project management support, Hamish on editor integration and Vladimir on debugging. And of course there will be plenty of space for discussing your favourite KDevelop module directly with its creator. All the details, including a visual guide on how to get there, can be found on the KDevelop wiki.
    9:31p
    Amarok Insider - Twelfth issue released
    http://dot.kde.org/1208034881/

    The next issue of Amarok Insider has been released, along with lots of screenshots. It takes an in-depth look at Amarok's visual theme, Plasma-centric technologies, Web services, and MacOS X integration. It also discusses pending Amarok releases, talks about past and future events, and interviews some crazy Amarok fans. Enjoy!

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