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List:       kde-announce
Subject:    Progress Report
From:       Matthias Kalle Dalheimer <kalle () dalheimer ! de>
Date:       2000-07-24 6:23:07
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Hi KDE enthusiasts!

A number of KDE developers met in Trysil, Norway during the period July 10-19 
to fix bugs and generally improve KDE. Below, you find a text version of the 
status report that explains all achievements that have been made there. For a 
full version with screenshots, please see 
http://www.kde.org/announcements/k3b-announce.html.

For the KDE team,

Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Rik Hemsley, and all other authors of the report

-------------------------------------------------------

Pre-2.0 KDE progress report

Sorry, Konqi the KDE dragon is busy working very hard on the next release,
but Katie his girlfriend is here to tell you what's going on.

A lot has happened with KDE since the last beta. The developers have been
extra productive, thanks mostly to having the opportunity to work together
face-to-face. For ten days a collection of core KDE developers met in
Trysil, Norway. The main purpose of the meeting was to fix as many KDE 2
bugs as possible and to make any important changes in functionality,
appearance, and behaviour.

The feedback from the early betas of KDE 2.0 has been incredible. Bug
reports don't sound very pleasant, but there's nothing developers like
better. Thanks to the efforts of all those who have tested previous betas,
KDE 2.0 is now more stable, efficient, coherent and consistent than ever
before.

To all those who contributed bug reports, we extend great thanks. KDE works
as a project only when each aspect of the system is supported. The
developers write software so quickly they don't have time to find all the
bugs, so contributions are invaluable.

Note to those who reported bug(s): If your bug was closed but the developer
responsible did not send you a personal message, we apologise. The time we
have had recently to work together we have had to use wisely and getting the
bugs fixed first has been top priority. If you want further information from
a developer, please get in contact and we will do our best to find time to
help.

Listing all the fixes that have been made since the last beta on this page
would be dull, so instead we present a summary of changes that may interest
the user and a few (important) notes for developers. Rest assured that we
have worked most on improving stability, so if the list of changes presented
here doesn't impress, you should find that the improvements in stability are
reason enough to upgrade. No-one likes working at a desk with wobbly legs!


The desktop in general

The first thing you will notice when you start the new KDE is that the
introductory screen has changed. If you have an older machine, you will
welcome the introduction of extra feedback, showing you what KDE is doing as
it starts up.

The overall look has changed slightly. After some consideration, we changed
the default colours and made minor adjustments to the way controls look. We
hope you will agree that the new look is fresher and easier on the eye, but of
course KDE is highly configurable, so feel free to exercise your right to 
disagree!

The new window controls should be not only easier to see but also more
consistent and attractive. A nice new feature is that when a window is not
active its contrast is reduced This makes it easier to see which is the
active window.

You might notice that our Unicode (international text) support has been
further improved. Window title bars now show Unicode text correctly. The
whole window border design has changed considerably. The new style is
prettier, faster and easier to use.

As those of you who used KDE 1 should remember, it was possible to move the 
menu bar of all applications to the top of the screen. While this may not 
seem very useful, it's designed to make it easier to work and to save some 
desktop space (you only have one menu bar instead of one per window.) To test 
it out, try moving the mouse to the menu at the top of a window. If you're 
not a good shot with the pointer, you have to adjust your aim. With the menu 
bar at the top of the screen, you can 'throw' the pointer to the top and be 
sure to hit the menu bar every time. This feature is configurable via the 
control centre.

When you move the mouse pointer into a text editing control and start
typing, the mouse pointer now disappears until you touch the mouse again.
This stops the pointer getting of the way of what you type.

Anyone who has a large monitor or less than 20/20 vision will welcome the
addition of a set of larger mouse pointers.

All applications that use tool bars are enhanced by an improved mechanism
for layout. When there is no room to show the entire bar at once, it shows a
pop-up menu at one end. This helps most on KOffice applications such as 
KWord, where your screen can rapidly fill up with tool bars.

If you are used to using one of the extra mouse-focus settings (where
windows are activated by moving the pointer over them rather than clicking)
then you will be pleased to hear that some extra features have been provided
that make these modes easier to use and more configurable.

There is now a single point of configuration for all system notifications.
This means that you can turn on and off sounds, choose to see pop up
messages instead of sounds, etc. This feature is great if you are deaf or
prefer to have a quiet computer (or simply can't hear your computer's sounds
over your music!)

Drag and drop functionality has been extended. Where you expect to be able
to drag something, it's quite likely you now can. You can select a wallpaper 
image by dragging pictures from the Konqueror web browser directly to the 
desktop. You can set the colours of the buttons of your calculator. Just try 
it and see!

There is now a new international keyboard manager. This sits in the 'system
tray' (a place for applications to 'dock' in the panel.) and is based on the
'XKB' standard.

FreeBSD users will be pleased to hear that extensive platform-specific fixes
have been carried out and that KDE 2 works almost without (FreeBSD-related-)
problems.

Applications now start faster. More intelligent design of startup sequences
reduces the time needed before you get to start using the program.


The desktop panel ("Kicker")

The clock has been reworked and sports a stylish new LCD-style face. Of 
course, the look can be configured to your heart's content.

The utility named 'Klipper' has been moved to the base package. It appears
on the panel 'system tray', represented by a picture of a clipboard. This
excellent little tool watches your desktop and whenever you select some
text, it will save it for you.

This means that you can go back and find that email address you selected but 
never got around to saving, but Klipper is a little more intelligent than 
that. It notices when you select an Internet address, and will quietly ask 
you if you would like it to browse to a site for you.

The desktop pager has been cleaned up and given life. It can show your
desktops by number or name, or by showing a miniature picture of the screen. 
You can set the number of desktops too, for those people who can cope with 
working on sixteen virtual screens.

Your task bar doesn't look much more exciting than usual, but notice that
when your modify a document in a KDE application, the task bar button shows
an indicator to remind you (together with the window title changing to
include the word '[modified]'). This can be highly useful when you're
shutting down and need to see in which applications you still need to save 
your work.

You will also see another new 'applet' (or mini-program, running inside the
panel.) This allows you to type commands, in practically the same way as the 
dialog that pops up when you type Alt-F2. It's not just for command line 
freaks. If you're a faster typer than a mouse clicker, you will find you can 
start your applications faster and open web sites with less energy-wasting 
hand movement.

The icons on the panel have a new addition, which allows you to show the
desktop background on top of all your windows. Quite handy when you have
dropped a file onto the desktop and want to read it, but don't want to sort 
through a stack of windows.

In the last beta, you might have noticed that you could add icons to your
panel by dragging them from the 'K' menu. This has been extended to allow
dragging a whole 'group'. To avoid sticky situations, this function has been
moved to the right mouse button. You can choose whether to add the group to
the panel as a file manager URL, which opens a Konqueror window to display
the group contents, or as a 'Quick browser', which uses a menu.

Your 'K' menu has another new feature. It can be edited to contain anything 
you like. Don't like the default ordering of items ? Fancy some better icons 
for your applications ? Fire up the new menu editor (available in the 
'System' menu) and drag some entries about.

Other enhancements to the panel include extended configurability and a
feature that allows you to select which 'applets' you trust to run inside
it. If you download a new applet and it crashes, taking the panel with it,
you can tell the panel to stop trusting it, which means the applet will only
be able crash itself in future!


The file manager and web browser ("Konqueror")

In file manager mode, you will notice a new set of icons, designed to be
easier to recognise more easily recognised and easier on the eye. When you
activate an icon (by clicking it) you get instant feedback via a tiny
animation (you have to see this in action to understand how useful it is).
If the click launches an application, a button appears in the desktop task 
bar immediately. If the application takes time to start up, you at least know 
that it is on its way. These features also apply to the rest of KDE, for 
consistency.

For those who find themselves annoyed by web sites that use tiny, unreadable
text, you should be pleased to hear that you can now set a minimum size for
text when you browse web pages. You can also set the text styles used for 
each type of text that a web page may specify.

Web browsing should now be smoother and pages should be drawn a lot more
quickly. Badly drawn pages should be drawn better and be less likely to cause 
a crash.

A brief security audit has been made, to catch any potential weaknesses 
before release.

Last but not least for Konqueror, Java applet embedding support is now 
working. This should fix a lot of web pages and improve playing 
Internet-based games.

You can now browse an archive (tar file, even compressed ones) in Konqueror.
You can extract files by simply dragging them elsewhere. You can even enable
the 'image preview' mode !

It's now a lot easier to associate applications with file types. For example, 
if you want to view PNG images with XV instead of within Konqueror itself, 
you can right-click on a PNG file, select "Edit File Type" and pick "XV" from 
the graphics section.


Applications

A new application named KSysGuard has been integrated into the base system.
KSysGuard gives you complete control over the programs you are running, and
provides useful statistics to help you discover what is going on 'behind the
scenes'. For those with a taste for power, you can even ask KSysGuard to
monitor and allow you to control a machine running at another location, via
the Internet. Displays can be freely configured on any number of worksheets
by simply dragging them from the sensor browser onto a worksheet. Worksheets 
can be individually saved and loaded and will be restored automatically when 
ksysguard is launched.

A new news reader named KNode has been maturing rapidly and officially
replaces in the network package the two readers included with KDE 1, which
are both no longer maintained by their authors, in the network package.
KNode makes a great companion to the system news manager called leafnode. It
has a beautiful user interface, makes full use of the new features of KDE 2,
is feature packed, and even manages to pass much of "The Good Netkeeping
Seal of Approval" test.

KWrite, the standard KDE text editor, is now network transparent. This means
you can drop a text document onto its window from Konqueror and it will be
loaded automatically, in exactly the same way as if you had dropped a file 
from your hard disk. Of course, saving works the same way, but you need 
permission to save to other people's machines, so don't expect to be able to 
save to www.kde.org!

The two mail monitor applications from KDE 1 have merged into one. The new
version has the features of both and an improved look and feel.

The Control Center modules have been much improved. The layout of many 
modules has been made more logical. Keyboard navigation has been enhanced. 
Many modules have new features. The place in which you configure certain 
values has been rethought, so you should find the option you want in the 
place you expect to find it. The help is also greatly improved. There is 
'quick help' for many items, which allows you to find out what a switch, 
slider etc. does before using it.

KMail's support for the standard kde address book library (libkab) was
finished. Choice from a variety of different address book GUIs is 
implemented. In KMail's "Configuration" dialog, in the section "Appearance",
the tab "Addressbook" lets user select between traditional kmail addressbook, 
kdeutils/kab and kdepim/abbrowser.

ABBrowser, the addressbook browser part of the kdepim package, is a new
addressbook application chosen to be ready for inclusion in KDE-2.0. It
makes use of libkab (the central KDE addressbook library) as a backend, has
unlimited undo/redo, and exciting Drag'N'Drop functionality amongst other
features.


KOffice, the KDE office suite

KSpread, the KOffice spreadsheet application, has undergone some major
internal work. Spreadsheets should now flicker less, memory consumption has
dropped, and the whole application is faster. There are new formulae
available, together with documentation on how to use them. Multi-row cells
work correctly now. Another new feature is that KSpread can now perform
calculations using times and dates.


KPresenter, the KOffice presentations application, has a new 'rich text'
editing facility. This powerful feature makes it easy to change the way that
text looks and see the results as you type! The text selection mechanism has
been much improved and indentation is more powerful. Now you can even use
rotated text!

KIllustrator, the drawing tool, has now been converted to the new KOffice
architecture, which makes it more consistent in use, and is much improved in
many areas.

KChart, the charting tool that accompanies the office suite, is much
improved. It offers a larger selection of chart types, together with a
'wizard' to guide you through the steps needed to create a chart.

Printing has been generally improved. The main advantage you will see is
that you can now print a document which is embedded within another.


Development information

Most memory leaks in the KDE libraries have been tracked down and fixed,
with the help of a professional memory debugging tool.

A new set of DCOP tools have has been written that allow you to inspect and
use the interface of an object belonging to another application.


There is a graphical tool and a shell tool for DCOP. Here's some examples 
with the shell tool. See if you can guess what they do !

   * dcop konqueror qt/.*mainwindow#1 iconify
   * dcop konqueror qt/.*mainwindow#1 show
   * dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface setWallpaper mywallpaper.png 4
   * dcop konqueror KonquerorIface openBrowserWindow http://www.kde.org

Signals and slots now work over application boundaries via DCOP!

The KOffice core libraries have been extensively cleaned up. The old
custom-written XML parser has been removed and replaced with calls to Qt's
built-in DOM parser. The file format used by KPresenter has been cleaned up
to make it easier to work with. It is of course backward compatible with the
old format. KSpread uses a new advanced system for runtime cell referencing,
making it orders of magnitude faster and use much less memory.

KWrite has been ported to the new KDE 2.0 style for applications, using the
XMLGUI application framework and is now translatable. This editor is an
important component of the system so developers should feel more confident
in its suitability as a standard editor part.

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