Many people prefer to use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible and so KDE developers pay a good amount of attention to how easy it is to drive the desktop using only the keyboard. Carsten Pfeiffer announced a patch to add a keyboard shortcut for "Show Desktop". While implementing this shortcut, Carsten came across a limitation of KGlobalAccel and noted this in his email saying: To avoid having tons of KGlobalAccel objects all over the place in kicker, I moved the existing object (for the K-Button) to PGlobal. Keep in mind you can also have multiple K-Buttons or Show-Desktop buttons, we don't want one KGlobalAccel object for every button. Ellis Whitehead responded saying, Doing it "right" will require redesigning kcontrol/keys and altering some KGlobalAccel member variables. It was too close to freeze to make such changes, though, so the insertItem() abomination is just a temporary solution. ;) Presuming that I don't get kidnapped by international terrorists or burned at the stake by rabid farmers (niether of which are common occurances in urban Michigan, USA), this will be on the top of my priority list for the next KDE release. This should make implementing keyboard accelerators in areas such as KWin less painful in the future.

During this same thread, Ralf Nolden announced the availability of a screen capture shortcut, saying: Rich and I want to add a screenshot function to kwin as well (on the PrtSc button, that function is heavily missing) including (I think) Ctrl+PrtSc for a screenshot of the active window including dcop interface so other apps can make use of that function from outside. Elsewhere Ralf expanded on the initial announcement saying, Richard Moore added the shortcuts for taking a snapshot of the desktop and one for the currently active window, including dcop interface. Now, first we had to struggle with the fact that we didn't have an application that makes use of the clipboard for graphics :) Then we digged out the kscribble example in kdevelop (updated that to 2.0 in kdevelop/kdevelop/examples/kscribble-2.0.tar.gz so it compiles and runs) that does that so we could test it. Now, with dcop everything works fine but it just doesn't with the shortcuts and we don't know why. As with many such oddities in the land of Unix GUIs, XWindow key mapping was to blame for the otherwise innexplicable PrtScr key problems.

Free software depends on copyright to ensure it is used and available exactly as the author wishes it to be. Unfortunately, copyrights can be very tricky and few programmers happen to also be lawyers. Questions on the topic are therefore quite common. Gioele Barabucci asked, I still see many (c) 1999 - 2000 around KDE, shouldn't this be updated to 2001? Michael Matz provided a succinct answer saying, If they weren't changed in 2001, then the above is correct. If OTOH they _were_ changed that needs an adjustment, correct..

Rob Napier supplied a more comprehensive answer:

A bizarre world indeed...

Proxy-related issues have been a hot topic on the devel lists lately. One such issue is related to FTP proxies, which are currently handled via kio_http. Michael Goffioul said, Following the small discussion about the problems when using a real FTP proxy server (not an HTTP proxy, but a real FTP server that acts as a proxy, like DeLeGate), and after being bored of changing everytime the '@' char to '%40'. I decided to hack kio_ftp to see if it was possible to add direct FTP proxy support. Indeed it's only a matter of redirecting the connection and using a processed login. This results in the attached patch, which could be commited to CVS if anybody finds it useful.

This spawned a long thread between Michael and Dawit Alemayehu regarding the correctness of various parts of the patch. After coming to some understanding of the issues on both said, Dawit posted a patch saying, Can update kdelibs/kio and try the following patch please. The patch assumes that the proxy FTP server does not require you to login, but the remote server can as needed. Michael tried the patch, noted some issues and Dawit addressed them before committing to CVS.

With the release of KDE2.2beta1, many users were confused at the lack of a kdesupport package. The question continues to be raised by users and casual developers alike. As a definitive answer to the "Where is kdesupport?" question, David Faure posted the following:

Those using KDE2 and accessing the network through a proxy will be happy to hear that Dawit Alemayehu finished work on the new proxy configuration dialog, which he announced by saying, Here is the new proxy config dialog I have been promising for a while now. It is fully functional and with the exception of few and perhaps annoying cosmetic bugs which can be worked out later :) It has quite few features that are not present in the current dialog. It also fixes the infamously missing config option for setting up HTTPS proxy servers. The intention of me providing it now is to have people try it and give me feedback. It probably would not be in the 2.2 release since it contains many new messages etc... etc... Anyways, I appreciate any feedback specially from those using the auto discover mode (Malte will also appreciate this as well :) ) Dawit also provided several screenshots:

• Main proxy config
• Manual proxy setup
• Environment variable based setup
• User feedback dialog

KWord has benefit quite a lot from using the QRichText widget that has been backported from Qt3 to Qt2. KPresenter will be the next office app to enjoy the benefits of this work, according to an email by David Faure outlining plans for KPresenter after KOffice 1.1. After listing in detail all the specific changes that would be need to made, David added, I suggest to put all those classes, together with the QRT classes, into a new koffice library called libkofficetext or something like that... Well, I have started splitting the basic classes (still in kword/ currently to avoid merging problems, but I'll create the kofficetext lib soon, moving that stuff into it) This was met with general approval and excitement.

Probably the biggest hurdle to getting involved in an already active software project is becoming familiar with the code base. The larger the project the larger that hurdle is, and KDE is a very large project. It takes new KDE developers some time to get acquainted with all the nuances and capabilities available to them in the KDE source. Anything a project can do to lower the learning curve will go a long way to helping those interested get involved. By allowing easy access to the structure and usage of the code base, experienced developers are also aided in visualizing and improving their own work. Kurt Granroth announced the availability of an exciting new online resource that goes a long way to furthering these causes:

In an effort to make HTTP protocol handling more efficient and secure in KDE2, kio_http is being ported to the TCPSlaveBase class that the other protocols that use TCP all use now. Initial work on this was announced by Dawit Alemayehu:

This is obviously a very important piece of work that has a far reaching impact on web browsing performance and capability. After some discussion Dawit committed a portion of the patch to CVS and asked Waldo Bastian, is there any way we can move some of these config initializations from kio_http ? For example the language settings, whether we should use the cookiejar etc seem to me to be things that we can move into the SessionData class I created for password caching or back out to the application level. This should make the instantiation of kio_http io-slave a bit more faster :) We also need that limitation on the number of io-slaves that can connect to a given site at a time. Is there anyway we can have this for 2.2 since it definitely have impact on performace (http and as David recently pointed out for tar io-slave as well) ? Encouragingly, Waldo "The Tireless" Bastian replied, I will make the maximum nr of slaves / protocol slightly more configurable. But not per host yet. (the tar stuff doesn't really has this host-notion anyway)

Mosfet made a splash not too long ago when he unleashed the Megagradient style upon the KDE2 world. Many people ooh-d and ah-d over the new eye-candy. Much has occurred since then, including people finding numerous bugs in the style. The current resident KStyle guru, Karol Szwed, took it to task and posted the following email for comments and opinions:

This inspired much discussion ranging in topic from the transparent menus in Megagradient, to overall stability of the style, to cross platform issues. Some favored disabling the transparent menus, others fixing them. Some thought that the code should be removed as Mosfet would be maintaining it outside of CVS anywas, others were of the opinion that people were already expecting it to be in KDE2.2 and should therefore remain. Nearly two weeks after the start of the discussion it was removed from the main build, though kept in CVS.

You know a system is becoming successful when a job market starts to form around it. We are perhaps seeing the beginnings of this with the following email from Mike Pilone:

Some suggested it would be useful for the KDE League or perhaps The Dot to start hosting a KDE (paying) jobs page. It will be very interesting to watch and see if more KDE related job opportunities arise.

KWord, along with many other KOffice components, has matured tremendously since the 1.0 release. However, there are still issues with hardcopy produced by KWord looking different that what may be shown on-screen. David Faure posted a status report on this issue, saying:

David noted that large changes to KWord should not be made until his work is committed after the KOffice 1.1 freeze as the changes are substantial. He also said that if there is enough interest, he would commit the changes to a CVS branch for others to compile and test.

Konqueror the webbrowser keeps getting more capabilities all the time. Java, Javascript (still a little buggy), Netscape plugins, sound file embedding and recently experimental ActiveX support. What's next? Embedded video of course! Nikolas Zimmermann posted his (rather large and sprawling) patch to supply a video play object for aRts and added, here is a patch, which adds support for Video Embedding, ie. into Konqueror. It's not stable, but this is a mpeglib issue! This patch is definately _not_ for KDE 2.2 but a kind of RFC and technology preview. There was some discussion as to the amount of code duplication that was occurring in the various Konqueror extensions and when this should be added to CVS. Of course, the answer was post 2.2.