KOffice updates. Werner Trobin has implemented an OLE-stream decoder for KOffice. This is a big step towards decoding Microsoft Office documents and will be of great use to developers currently working on MS Office import filters. More information on the OLE structure of MS Office documents can be obtained at the LAOLA Homepage.
While the KOffice document format is generally stored as plain text in human-readable XML, documents are often accompanied by embedded binaries such as images or sound files. Torben Weis has tackled the problem by implementing tar read/write capabilities for KOffice with gzip compression support soon to follow. Hence KOffice documents may soon be stored as tgz-style files containing the XML document and any accompanying files or binaries.
The KOffice site is currently very much out of date and does not reflect the relentless progress of the KOffice project; if anyone would like to take the initiative to help maintain this site, please get in touch with Reginald Stadlbauer and Martin Konold.
Christian Esken has shed some light on the multimedia situation. As it turns out, there are currently 4 or more independent efforts to implement multimedia systems in KDE. This includes Christian's own kaudioserver, Stefan Westerfeld's aRts and Martin Vogt's kmpg. Unfortunately, while these efforts have similar goals, they are mutually incompatible and it will be necessary to agree on a common system soon. (ref: Last week's proposal from Stefan.)
Pietro Iglio wrote in with some proposed improvements for KPanel. In particular, he intends to make matters more transparent to the user by eliminating the concept of separate global and personal menus, and allowing full user customization while still enabling priviledged users to globally publish menu items. See the discussion for all the details.
KDOC. Sirtaj Singh Kang gave us the skinny on the history of KDOC as well as an update on the new and planned features of KDOC 2. It is hoped that KDE developers will stick to kdoc for class/API documentation and will help extend and improve KDOC when their needs are not met.
KDE Quickies. Mirko Sucker announced the addition of 2 new classes, DialogBase and KAboutDialog, to kdelibs. Daniel M. Duley has added diagonal gradient support to KPixmap (screenshot). Amir Michail announced the availability of improved KDE/Qt reuse patterns. Espen Sand announced version 0.8.1 of khexedit (RPM available thanks to Troy Engel).
Finally, if you're a KDE developer and you're interested in writing a book on KDE programming, you might want to get in touch with Miller-Freeman.
An archive for these KDE devel bits is available.
Navindra Umanee
Last modified: Thu Jul 15 02:36:14 EDT 1999
