Marble widget being used in Qt Designer
Almost two months after the foundations of KDE 4 have been laid with the first alpha, KDE enters the stage of a full freeze of the library interface. From now on, the applications will focus on integrating the new technology refined during the last months, and the library developers will try to fix all bugs found during this process. No new applications will enter the official KDE modules, and usability and accessability work has been started. In the following weeks, KDE developers will be able to add features to their applications, until the next beta is released and the application features will be frozen as well.
At this moment, the codebase is still moving quickly. The new foundations are stabilizing, but applications are still in flux. Since the last Alpha, a lot of work has been committed. We've seen improvements all over KDE again, and in the next sections, we will try to highlight a few of them.
Marble is an application which shows a spherical earth, which you can zoom and rotate. It is a lot like google earth (and compattible with it's KMZ files), but more lightweight. Marble uses wikipedia for it's geographical data, and offers easy downloading of new maps, views and other data. Inspite of using a combination of vector and bitmap data, it is not slow, even without hardware accelleration in the form of OpenGL. Google sponsors three students working on Marble through their Summer of Code project.
Marble also doubles as a generic geographical map widget and framework. It will allow developers to easilly show a person's location or let the user choose a timezone by embedding it into their application. Of course, the educational applications and the games will make use of this.
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On July the 20th, the Icon/Pixmap Cache was merged by Rivo Laks into the KDE libraries. Dolphin also had it's share of Nepomuk integration. The pixmap cache is meant to make disk caching of e.g. pixmaps rendered from SVGs very easy for app developers. The result will be improved startup and (to a lesser extent) runtime performance.
Status Akonadi TODO
Slowly, the many changes to the foundation of KDE are starting to become visible to the users. Applications are starting to capitalize on the new architecture.
since the previous report on Kwin, a lot progress has been made. Most work has gone into (mail to kwin list send, I hope for a screencast and 2-3 lines text) Performance: http://rivolaks.blogspot.com/2007/06/kwin-performance-and-shadows.html
Integration between Dolphin and Konqueror has been improved, Gwenview recieved usability work and features.
In addition to various user interface improvements, Konsole has improved automatic tab titles, support for random background colours per-tab, clickable URL's and a new default colour scheme. Konsole now provides hints to the terminal about the colour scheme being used to allow programs such as Vim to adapt their palette accordingly.
System administrators will be happy to hear KRDC has been adopted by Google-sponsored Urs Wolfer. He is rewriting KRDC, solving many longstanding issues and adding features like tabbed view and KWallet support.
More Google sponsored code went in KOrganizer's theming interface by Lo�c Corbasson, who is extending the theming and plugin interface, and writing some example plugins like a Wikipedia 'this day in history'.
Despite the growing maturity of the KDE libraries, some of the most user-visible things are still very much works-in-progress. One of the most notable components is Plasma. While the developers are pretty much ready with the infrastructure for the plasmoids, most of those still reside in playground. Thus, you will still see good old Kicker when you boot up KDE 4.0 Beta 1. Javascript support has been added to plasma, and according to it's lead developer we will soon support the Mac OS X Dashboard widgets. Superkaramba applets are supported already, Opera widgets might follow soon.
Extragear applications like DigiKam and KPhotoalbum are busy porting to KDE 4, and we encourage all application authors who haven't started this yet to get going with the porting guide.