19th March 2004 by Derek Kite

This Week...

KDE integrates Mono with C# bindings. A PHP debugger integrated into Quanta. Work continues on eGroupware / Kontact integration. Kopete rewrites Jabber plugin. Plus, a new tool for monitoring application usage.
Jason Kivlighn wrote regarding some new features in Krecipes
Well, I'm Jason Kivlighn, a developer for Krecipes. Krecipes has been evolving very rapidly and there are two big additions in particular. I've added recently the ability to save and load recipe layouts to a file. We'll be including some layouts with the program, so I thought you might could get the word out that we'd accept any creative layouts users submit to us ;)

The other addition is the new field for inputting the "preparation method". This helps keep the database better organized, and also helps out a lot with making a shopping list or calculating nutrient info. For example, this way you won't end up shopping for both 'shredded carrots' and 'whole carrots' :) Also, you don't need to store nutrient info, for example, for both 'shredded carrots' and 'whole carrots'. Just load the nutrient for carrots and you're done.

This talk of nutrient info remind me of another relatively new feature added (within the past month). The latest Krecipes CVS now includes the USDA's nutrient database and allow users to load the USDA into the Krecipes database. With this information, Krecipes can automatically calculate all the nutrient info for a recipe.

Finally, I should mention that Unai recently finished an "Ingredient Matcher". In his words:

"Say you look at your fridge. You only have ham, cheese and eggs, and don't know what to cook with it.

Well, then choose in the list "ham, cheese, eggs" (all). It will tell you what's possible to cook using those ingredients."
Although not in the KDE repository, this announcement caught my eye. Jason Wood announced releases of Kdenlive and PIAVE:
We have the pleasure to announce the 0.2.4 releases of both Kdenlive and PIAVE. This primarily a bug-fix release over the previous 0.2.3 release, although several new features have been added.

Kdenlive is a video editing GUI for KDE. It provides dual video monitors, a multi-track timeline and clip list. Other features include customizable layout support, preliminary support for effects and translation into French.

PIAVE is a render engine and effect library. It can read DV video files, render effects and transitions between input streams. Streams can be displayed or piped to a file. Any project can link against libpiave and use the provided features. PIAVE also provides a server application which can receive commands from Kdenlive.

Editing in Kdenlive is possible with various tools via the timeline and video monitors, allowing you to move and resize one or more clips, and razor clips into two. All timeline tools can snap to clip start/ends and the current seek position.Kdenlive communicates via an XML based protocol to a render engine which handles the actual video data.

New Features Include:
================
  • Italian Translation by Daniele Medri
  • Initial support for importing Kino project files. (Seems complete, but not fully tested)
  • Preliminary support for snap markers
  • Play selected button on clip monitor.
Some important features are still missing, but Kdenlive is now useable for small projects. We would like people to test what we have and tell us which features they miss the most. We want to find out what is most important to people, and last not least we want to attract developers. There are many small and not so small things where people could help. Be it GUI development, XML/network development, development of plugins, or simply reporting bugs.

What you can already do:
  • Open files in raw DV and AVI DV format (e.g. from dvgrab)
  • trim / cut / arange the clips in the timeline
  • scroll / step through the project
  • play the project
  • load / save projects
  • export the project to a raw DV file
What you cannot yet do:
  • control your DV cam and grab clips (supported by piave but not available via kdenlive)
  • import or export other fileformats
  • handle sound and video separately
  • effects and transitions are not yet configurable via the GUI which means they are practically not available.
Additional Information / screenshots can be found in the following places:

Kdenlive
----------
Home: http://www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/kdenlive.html
Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kdenlive/
Peter Hedlund sent a note about KWordQuiz:
I would like to introduce my program KWordQuiz. It's a flashcard program that can be used for many types of learning. The program was imported into kdenonbeta a few weeks ago. The plan is to move it to kdeedu shortly as a replacement for FlashKard. KWordQuiz has all the functionality of FlashKard, but with additional features. Files created with FlashKard can be used with KWordQuiz. KWordQuiz has more a powerful editor and provides flashcard, multiple choice and question & answer quizzes. KWordQuiz can also print lists and flashcards.

At this point I would like for as many as possible to test the program so that it gets ready for kdeedu. The nice people at kde-quality have already helped to get rid of some bugs.

More information and screenshots can be found at http://peterandlinda.com/kwordquiz.
Last week Adriaan de Groot committed a perlconduit for KPilot. In response to a question, he explained his plans:
Here's the plan:
  1. Generic conduit factory that creates a ConduitAction whose exec() function does nothing more than start a QThread with another function to be called. I realize that this requires threading to work. However, I think that removing all the complicated QTimer stuff from conduits is worth it, and for this perl conduit case, absolutely necessary.
  2. The thread function sets up a perl interpreter and calls it with the text of a perl script to run. Parameter is just the fd of the socket to the pilot.
I hope perl Palm modules can work from that. And yes, the idea is then to use the existing perl code for Plucker.
I noticed Nicolas Goutte updating the www.koffice.org website with some tasks that needed attention. If you are looking to contribute towards KOffice, check out these two sites: http://www.koffice.org/developer/tasks/ and http://www.koffice.org/developer/tasks/nontrivial.php for more complicated work.
This site has been a regular weekly read for over a year. The page is generated by a script which takes selected commits and builds the html and links, producing a static web page. I have been working on a replacement, written in php, which generates the web views. The project is to the stage where I need testers and people with ideas. If you would like to assist, please send me an email.

Statistics

Commits 1836 by 200 developers, 147596 lines modified, 1136 new files
Open Bugs 6188
Open Wishes 6024
Bugs Opened 433 in the last 7 days
Bugs Closed 260 in the last 7 days

Commit Summary

Module Commits
kde-i18n
380
 
kdepim
221
 
kdelibs
185
 
kdebase
140
 
kdenonbeta
112
 
koffice
108
 
kdeextragear-1
86
 
kdeedu
77
 
www
76
 
kdeextragear-2
71
 
Lines Developer Commits
424
 
Dirk Mueller
90
 
3992
 
David Faure
79
 
1323
 
Laurent Montel
61
 
1426
 
Anne-Marie Mahfouf
56
 
817
 
Waldo Bastian
50
 
1398
 
Marc Mutz
44
 
449
 
Nicolas Goutte
43
 
1484
 
Pedro Morais
40
 
3138
 
Andrew Coles
39
 
7605
 
Mark Kretschmann
36
 

Internationalization (i18n) Status

Language Percentage Complete
Danish (da)
99.77%
 
Swedish (sv)
99.41%
 
British English (en_GB)
98.76%
 
Estonian (et)
97.33%
 
Spanish (es)
96.46%
 
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR)
96.3%
 
Portuguese (pt)
94.57%
 
Serbian (sr)
93.25%
 
Italian (it)
90.75%
 
French (fr)
90.43%
 

Bug Killers

No commits found