Re: beta1 release next week
2007-08-01 11:44:50 GMT
Okay PPL.
Today, I will try to finish this thing. IT STILL NEEDS SOMEONE TO GO THROUGH IT. Most parts got their individual feedback, but really - this needs a review. Sebastian, I thought you might be able to do that? And everybody else as well - you're ALWAYS qualified to give comments, and it only takes a minute or two to go through this.
The sooner we can get this ready, the happier the translators will be.
About the translations, IMHO they can start, there will be minor changes but most is done. I still don't have any information about Akonadi (so I left it out) and the KOffice wiki, where I put the lines about KOffice, is unfortunately offline :(
But, besides a review and mabye some style enhancements & wording stuff, it's ready.
Attached is the latest HTML file. Not entirely ready:
-still getting feedback from the KDE-PIM guys and
- GRRR the KOffice wiki, which contained my release announcement text from the KOffice work (just a few lines, but nice) is offline :(
- Sucky html needs to be fixed. MS Wordpad isn't the best choice for HTML work
Aside from that, it still needs review and thought by other PPL, but then it's ready. At least, I'm happy with it
On 7/30/07, Giovanni Venturi < gventuri73 <at> tiscali.it> wrote:Alle lunedì 30 luglio 2007, Jos Poortvliet ha scritto:_______________________________________________
> And another question, who can 'ack' this (last line is new):
>
So at the end what is the final text of the announce? What we have to
translate? When is the deadline?
Giovanni
--
A KDE Italian translator and KSniffer core developer
Slackware GNU/Linux current version - kernel 2.6.22-1
KDE Italia staff - http://www.kde-it.org/
KSniffer Website webmaster/sysadmin - http://www.ksniffer.org/
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The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerfull new technologies included in the now-frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications. Read on for more details...
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.
Current status
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 widget being used in Qt Designer
Architectural
Marble is an application which shows a spherical earth, which you can zoom and rotate. It is a lot like google earth (and it is 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.
#
On July the 20th, the Icon/Pixmap Cache was merged by Rivo Laks into the KDE libraries. The iconcache speeds up loading icons when starting applications, and in the future, it might contribute to performance when using fully scalable icons and other scalable interface elements. The pixmap cache makes caching of images rendered by the application, such as from SVG files, easy for application developers. The result will be improved startup and (to a lesser extent) runtime performance, already seen in the games Kmines and Klines.
Akonadi ???
Applications
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, while adding features and other improvements.
Since the previous report on Kwin, a lot progress has been made. Most work has gone into new and improved effects and their configuration dialogs. Users of low-end hardware aren't forgotten, as Kwin will now automatically fallback to XRENDER or or even disable compositing in the absence of OpenGL rendering.
Further, Integration between Dolphin and Konqueror has been improved, and Gwenview recieved usability work and features.
Konsole showing off split-screen
and history highlight
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 also provides hints to the terminal about the colour scheme being used to allow programs such as Vim to adapt their palette accordingly. Okular introduced usability improvements, better multithreading and work on the print preview component.
The improved KRDC in action
System administrators will be happy to hear KRDC, our remote desktop tool, 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. Work in KDE-PIM is picking up, as features from the KDE-PIM Enterprise branch are merged. KOrganizer received a gantt-based timelineview and an Outlook-style view, and KMail incorporated the tagging patches.
KOFFICE **************************TODO*************************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'.
Not ready
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.
Porting
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.
Get it, run it, test it...
For those interested in getting packages to test and contribute, several distributions notified us that they will have Beta 1 packages available at or soon after the release. The new Ark Linux 2007.1 release can be expected any day now, and they'll have Beta1 packages available soon after that. Then, their development tree will also switch to KDE 4 as it's primary desktop. Likewise, Mepis Linux plans to have KDE 4 beta 1 packages available with their upcoming 7.0 release. As usual, Kubuntu packages are available, and OpenSuse also offers KDE 4 Beta 1 to it's users - additionally in the form of a livecd.
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