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| This Week... |
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Substantial work and improvement in the font installation KControl module. Support for OpenDocument annotations in Okular. New Interface ideas and consistency work in Amarok. KTabEdit gets better support for the 'Guitar Pro' file format. Iceland map added to KGeography. Work starts on a new keyboard rendering engine in KTouch, and on a model/view interface implementation for KVocTrain. Early work on a Phonon backend for KsCD. Speed optimisations in Strigi, with experimental probing for the feasibility of leveraging the inotify daemon. Experimental code sees Akonadi become searchable through Strigi. Kross, the multi-language application scripting framework, loses its dependency on KOffice and moves into kdelibs as the cornerstone of scripting in KDE 4.
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Jos van den Oever concludes a recent developmental release of Strigi by writing about the recent developments in the index-and-search powerhouse:
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Strigi has seen a lot of work in the last few weeks. Progress was achieved mainly in two areas:
Behind the scenes, the code has been reorganised to make the indexing of data highly configurable. This reorganisation has allowed one of the programs that comes with Strigi to receive a significant increase in speed. The program 'deepfind' is a program that lets you find files within emails, ZIP files, DEB and RPM packages, and a wide variety of other formats. It uses the streaming classes of Strigi to handle these formats. Users of deepfind quickly find that they become dependent on it and cannot live without it anymore! The new configurability of Strigi allows deepfind to be significantly sped up, because Strigi's indexing code will no longer extract all possible information, as it does while indexing, but will recurse into nested files and only extract filenames.
Even though using D-Bus makes it easy to call Strigi from any program, so far, uptake in KDE applications is not what I had hoped it would be. So I have written convenience classes for integrating Strigi into external applications. Developers that want to make calls to Strigi from their application can simply link to a small library that takes care of communication and provides a nice queue which makes querying fast and ensures it does not block the GUI. What is required now is for KDE developers to start playing with Strigi and incorporate it into all programs where they deem it useful. Currently efforts are underway in enhancing Akonadi, KHelpCenter and Kerry in this way. Strategically, the most important application to enhance is Konqueror and I hope someone will pick up this gauntlet soon.
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Aaron J. Seigo reinforces the arrival of the integration crossroads within KDE 4 in a recent rallying cry:
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...as a side note, what we need now are application developers taking employing things like solid in their apps to be aware of events like network link droppage or phonon for simple multimedia support. these may end up being post-4.0 release features for some (many?) apps, but they need to happen to expose the power of these frameworks in a practical way to users (e.g. us ;) and app developers should start thinking about them sooner rather than later.
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With the highly-anticipated movement of the Kross application scripting framework into kdelibs this week, the time is rapidly approaching where all neccessary fundemental technologies - including the pillars of Akonadi, Phonon, Solid, Decibel and Plasma - are finally in place, allowing developers to implement the functionality of the future desktop which KDE 4 has been repeatedly defined as.
The next few months should be an exciting realisation of maturity, functionality and integration.
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Bug Fixes |
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Optimise |
Security |
Other |
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Accessibility |
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Development Tools |
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Educational |
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Graphics |
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KDE-Base |
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KDE-PIM |
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Konqueror |
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Multimedia |
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Networking Tools |
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User Interface |
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Utilities |
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Other |
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