Welcome to KC KDE! Some showstoppers postponed the first beta of KDE 3.1. The release dude, who went ill these days, decided to give coders a week for fixing outstanding bugs. Get well soon, Dirk!
KOffice's Release Candidate has been delayed as well, giving us time to reflect a few out of many news from KOffice. The project didn't get the focus as it deserved in the last kernel cousins, so in this week's edition we are paying tribute to that. We think that the KOffice developers are really doing a great job there. !hint! You can join the KOffice team and get some of the fame /!hint!
The job of those working on the K for team green is considerably as well, as the last match was a great win.We hope you enjoy this week's summaries!
KWord 1.2 will not only be able read WordPerfect documents, but also save to this very format. The filter itself is still in development, so no fancy stuff (graphics, frames, etc) is supported, but in general, it works. Ariya Hidayat, eagerly hacking KOffice, marked his changes:
Can someone change the filter status page to reflect my latest commit on WordPerfect export filter ? The column 'Export' for WordPerfect now should be either Beta or Good (it's stable enough but not feature complete, so please decide).
[..]
Last but not least: helps, bug reports, comments, patches are appreciated.
wvWare2 is the future MS Word import filter framework for KWord from the KOffice suite. Werner Trobin, one of the authors, finally wrote a short but comprehensive documentation on wvWare2 design:
In the last days I found the time to remove the dust from the wv2 code, clean it up a bit, and fix a few bugs. I also wrote a draft of a design document and I'd like to invite people intersted in software design and of course in this filter thingy to comment on it, suggest changes and so on.
So take a look at the documentation, jump on board, and get starting help here.
Tomasz Grobelny has just began to enhance the RTF import
filter, starting with "document fields", saying
This patch starts support of RTF Fields in RTF Import filter (for now it has
only support for AUTHOR field). Please test the patch, read the code (I made
some hacks which could be implemented better but don't know how), comment on
it and apply if OK. Thanks.
If you know about a document describing RTF Fields, from MS Word and StarWriter for example, please contact Tomasz Grobelny.
Wouldn't it be nice to actually read the lyrics your favorite artist sings while playing it with Noatun? Ismael Orenstein just wrote that very plug-in saying:
Hey there!
I've almost finished the Lyrics plugin, but I wanted some user feedback to know if there is anything that must be done.
Currently it can search for lyrics in several different places (and those places are all configurable), can make it follow the playlist (so that when the music changes it automatically starts the search) and can attach a url to a song (so that it won't have to search again after the song is found). I think that it is working fine (except for the configuration dialog, whose buttons don't all work), but it is always good to get feedback/bug reports from others.
For those that want to test it, it is in the kdeaddons CVS module.
Didn't we all laugh when we read on Noatun's homepage that you could write a plug-in to make coffee with it? Who's laughing now?
Kivio, once donated to KOffice from theKompany, is now getting some needed attention from Eric R. Turner. While working on UML stencils, Eric noticed some problems with Kivio, he is likely about to fix:
The app has lots of potential, but lots of problems too. Here's a list of some things that I'd like to work on (not necessarily in any particular order):
- Fix the connector decorations so they work.
- Add smart connectors - both square corner and curved
- Add lots of stencils:
- UML stencils (already started doing this)
- Network diagramming stencils
- Electrical engineering stencils
- Office space stencils
- Org chart stencils
- Documentation:
- How to create stencils (perhaps create a stencil-building tool).
- Create the Kivio manual that's eluded to on the Help button.
- Add undo capability.
- Add scripting capability so Kivio could be extended to, say, automatically generate a diagram of your network or build an object-hierarcy diagram from your C++ source code.
- Fix general bugs.
Having this said, Eric went directly to work. Good luck!
Ramiro Tasquer just wrote a new applet for Kicker, displaying a well-known fish from GNOME's panel:
Hi!
I did a fish applet for the panel and i'm using the animate fish from the gnome fish applet, and its not too animate, so, i'm wonder if anybody wants to do me a better one.
you can check my applet in http://sourceforge.net/projects/scofmb/
thanks
Pupeno, the developer of Merkury, recently explained his new project:
Merkury is the dcop service in charge of voice synthesization that I'm writting (there will be also a class for other developers intending to use this system and a KCModule to configure it)
I just wanted to start the project by myself and then insert it into KDE somewhere, but I see that is really important where it's going to be. So I'm asking where should it be ? where should I start developing (kdenonbeta/merkury ?) and where is it going to be (kdebase/merkury ? kdemultimedia/merkury ?).
Due legal issues that were raised about the name, as Compaq is developing a project called Mercury it has been renamed to Proklam. The decision about it's name might not be final, the place where you can find Proklam (kdenonbeta/proklam)is temporary as well, as the author intends to ready Proklam for a release along with KDE 3.3.
Those regularly watching kde-look probably noticed backgrounds for Kicker pretending that the panel is transparent, or the hacked Keramik style with transparent background. Zack Rusin did watch this as well, inspiring him to write the feature requested by many, a transparent kicker. Early development shots can be viewed here, screeny one, screeny two.
After some more work, Zack Rusin wrote:
Hey everyone,
I fixed some problems with this patch and unless someones says "screw you hippie" I'm going to commit the "transparent panel" patch. I fixed the problem with the panel buttons not being transparent. So, what's transparent:
what's not transparent
- the panel itself,
- all panel buttons,
- tasklist,
- clock,
- applets.
Neither of the last three (maybe with the exception of the tasklist, on which I'm going to hack a little) is going to become transparent (unless _real_ transparency gets into XFree86 ). If you feel like testing it, patch your kdebase with the attached patch, or look at the screenshots below and drool/flame on/read another post.
http://vortex.bd.psu.edu/~mus11/img/kicker2.png
http://vortex.bd.psu.edu/~mus11/img/kicker3.png
http://vortex.bd.psu.edu/~mus11/img/kicker1.png
Due to the feature freeze of KDE 3.1 these changes will be applied to KDE 3.2, note that transparency will be optional, not forced. Replies metioned some minor problems, Zack promised to fix them unless it is ready for prime time.
The KOffice filter status site
is getting a redesign. Nicolas Goutte started the thread saying,
I am wondering if we should not introduce a new filter status between "beta"
and "good".
The problem that I have found is that you need to have at least the status
"beta" before users report bugs and that users consider that "good" means
that everything should function perfectly. However all these make "beta"
being very broad.
Clarence Dang proposed additional information about the filter, which features are already working fine, need more work or are lacking. Thomas Zander suggested to introduce a status bar displaying the current state of the filter in percent
While usefulness of several ideas was discussed, the new filter status is likely to distinguish soon between alpha, beta, good and perfect. A website describing the filter status of stable KOffice releases is underway as well.
