KDE Archive

KDE Conference Celebrates Success and Looks to Future

"Ten days of presentations, workshops, and chaotic coding sponsored by Trolltech, Novell/SUSE, HP, the local governments of Andalucia, and Malaga can only mean one thing: aKademy 2005, the KDE community's annual conference. Held in Malaga, Spain, aKademy 2005 included a Users and Administrators Conference, a Developer Conference and a Coding Marathon. Users, developers, and local visitors with an interest in open technology were treated to a display of stable desktop software and glimpses of cutting-edge innovations to come."

Beauty and Magic for KDE, with Zack Rusin

One of the most anticipated presentations at this year's KDE World Summit, better known as aKademy, was Zack Rusin's intriguing 'Beauty and Magic for KDE developers'. Zack is a long-time KDE developer who has recently been hired to work full time at Trolltech. As the developer conference continued, more and more people heard of the amazing visual effects (.avi) that Zack was going to demonstrate. Here is an interview with him.

Loosely Coupled Desktop Integration Via RuDI

"RuDI is an architectural approach whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software components instead of linking to libraries. A service is a unit of work of the desktop done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a 3rd party service consumer. How does RuDI achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents? It does so by employing two architectural constraints: An extensible XML schema allows new versions of services to be introduced without breaking existing services. Second we send messages over a protocol instead of calling explicit individual member functions."

KDE and the Vision Thing

Just over a year ago, Tim Butler wrote an article which outlined why he thought the GNOME Project was clearly the free software desktop project with the best vision of the future. KDE’s Appeal Project, which has been brewing for some time now, looks to a different set of issues that need solving and has some very smart minds at work on solving those problems. In a few words, KDE’s got some of “that vision thing” too, according to Tim.

Appeal Website Launched

After a few months of quiet activity, the Appeal desktop project has rolled out a new project website that documents what everyone has been up to and discussing. Since the the last public announcement many things have occurred, including another Appeal meeting being held in Germany. The project is looking forward to sharing its experiences and gathering input from the general KDE developer community at aKademy 2005 later this month.

KDE Development News From SVN

This is the first of a new series of articles that keeps you informed of what's happening in KDE development. The hottest new features to hit SVN every month will be tested and sneak preview screenshots posted. Current issues are available from June and July.

Wikimedia / KDE Collaboration Announced

At LinuxTag, Wikimedia Foundation chairman Jimmy Wales has announced plans for a co-operation with KDE to create "The knowledge-integrated desktop". This will comprise two components 1) a Wikipedia web services API (applicable to any application / desktop environment) and 2) KDE APIs for easy integration of applications with Wikipedia / Wiktionary. This announcement follows news that the next release of the Amarok media player will incorporate Wikipedia lookup for instant access to band biographies.

KDE 3.5-beta Observations

A few screenshots of an early build of the upcoming KDE 3.5 release. Among notable features, Konqueror gets Adblock, and KDE gets some usability features that were introduced in GNOME 2.10. This will be the final release of KDE in the 3 series.

Konqueror passes ACID2 Test

KHTML Developer Allan Sandfeld announced that KDE's browser Konqueror now passes the ACID2 test from webstandards.org. While some patches were taken from the Safari fixes, a good part of the fixes have been written from scratch. Konqueror is the second browser to actually tackle the hard test.