REMINDER: August 4th, 2004: Total Freeze

Just a short reminder, that you got enough time left in case you forgot: there is just a week left till KDE 3.3 is frozen for _everything_ excluding show stopper bugs. Yes, that includes translations.

Quanta is being extended to work better for teams of developers and to go into the enterprise space. Kommander is also being developed to be the ultimate tool for in house vertical market software. We want to address the needs of users and we also want to make our software an attractive choice in the corporate space. This should bring more attention, users and developers... and we hope opportunities for us to better fund our work so we can spend less time stressing and asking for help.

Quanta has had serious extentions of project capabilities in the introduction of our Team Projects and Event Actions features. Actually due to how much shorter the 3.3 release cycle is than 3.2 was this also helps us to enable greater functionality to be delivered too, but primarily it is consistent with our focus on user extensibility. Team Projects is all about moving project resources from a single user oriented XML file to a distributed set of files where information can be shared. A project can have a team leader and various subprojects and tasks entered assigned to various people. Event Actions extends our Action model from toolbars, key combinations and template insertions to just about anything that can happen in a project. You can save scripts in the script tree and use them with any of these actions. For instance you can use it to automatically add a file to CVS when it's added to the project. (A feature we did not complete but is now possible to have a simple script do automatically.) They integrate too, so you can have an email opened for edit when you commit a file in an area that a subproject manager needs to know about. There is a lot more functionality that we will be working on later this year for BE releases as this was done right before the freeze, but it's a very interesting and powerful start. With a little scripting almost anything is possible now.

Kommander too got some last minute features. Probably the most exciting is the new function wizard. (It's not wizard format but I don't know what else to call it.) You can look at it in kdewebdev/kommander/editor/functions.ui. Kommander has a number of useful functions for DCOP, general use, arrays, files and strings to make things easier for users that are not good scripters, and these functions are also faster then say using bash. The wizard has three parts above and the bottom is where the string is composed. It has the function group combo and function listbox on the left and the description of the function on the right. In the center is where the parameter entry widgets dynamically update as you select functions. It has a button to drop your edits into the main LineEdit so it can handle nested functions. Kommander makes creating mini applications and application extentions incredibly easy now. There was more we wanted to get done so we will be releasing more versions of Kommander this year. It is right at the threshhold of going from a nice little dialog builder to an incredibly powerful and easy to use development tool. We plan to make a release again early next week so I encourage people to try it out.

Now our focus is on getting the cleanest possible release of kdewebdev and getting our funding together to get three of us to aKademy. If people like the software I hope they can help us to stress a little less on this.

http://quanta.sourceforge.net/main1.php?actfile=donate

This beta includes a number of important bug fixes. aKregator is a internet feed reader for the KDE Desktop Environment. It supports RSS, Atom, and RDF feeds. It includes integration with Konqueror, the KDE web browser, and Kontact, the KDE PIM Suite.

A changelog between beta 4 and beta 5 is listed below.

Changes:

• Load last loaded feed list in kontact plugin (#84351) - smt
• Show regular akregator icon in tray if there are no unread articles. Based on patch from cartman. -berkus
• Implement session mangement (#82868) - smt

Bug Fixes:

• #82820 - Kontact crashes when fetching - smt
• #84272 - aKregator doesn't restore feed list after logout with running application
• #81995 - Don't crash when changing from/to combined view when folder selected -tpr
• #82024 - Fix drag&drop regression which made it possible have multiple top level folders -sg
• #84471 - Fix sorting of articles with no pubDates - smt
• #83102 - Fix handling of non-HTML web pages - smt
• #83187 - Reset scrollbar while switching feeds in combined view - smt

The Rosegarden team are delighted to announce the 0.9.9 release of Rosegarden 4, an audio and MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor for Linux.

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

This release is feature complete for 1.0 and marks the start of official beta testing. Rosegarden is one of the most comprehensive Linux music software projects, and is the only Linux application to offer full composition and recording capabilities to musicians who prefer to use classical notation. We encourage anyone who may be interested in using the 1.0 release to try out 0.9.9 and provide bug reports and other feedback via the mailing lists and bug trackers.

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/getting/
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/support/

New features of the 0.9.9 release include:

• Plugin synth support using the DSSI system (http://dssi.sf.net/). Rosegarden now comes with integrated sample-synchronous synth support, with LADSPA effects and mixer routing for synth tracks, and configuration both through the built-in plugin GUI and plugins' own native GUIs.
• Triggered segments for pattern sequencing & performable ornaments
• New menu layout, many new keyboard shortcuts for everyday usability
• Recording from multiple MIDI sources
• Cautionary accidentals and configurable key-signature cancellations
• Pedal marks, mordents, trill lines, repeat bars
• Fine positioning and visibility control of notation elements
• Visual metronome
• Several new example files Other features of interest include:
• Piano-roll, score, event list and track overview editors
• MIDI and audio playback and recording with ALSA and JACK
• JACK transport support for synchronisation with other software
• Ability to build and run without JACK support for MIDI-only use
• Audio plugin support using LADSPA
• Score interpretation of performance MIDI data
• MIDI and Hydrogen file import
• MIDI, Csound, Lilypond and MusicXML file export
• Clear, consistent and polished user interface
• Shareable device (.rgd) files to ease MIDI portability
• User interface in Russian, Spanish, German, French, Welsh, Italian, Swedish and Estonian, as well as UK and US English.