Stephan Kulow announced that he has started work on a new speed/size optimization feature for the KDE configure scripts. Based on his preliminary analysis, this option has the potential to more than halve the size of the resulting binary as well as to significantly decrease CPU usage. Kurt Granroth has done a little analysis of his own.
KAbiWord. Andrew Wansink briefly announced that he has started work on a port of AbiWord to KDE.
This announcement sparked a little controversy, bringing about the realization that KOffice has been quite usable at several stages in the development, yet no interim user release has ever been made and the lone Freshmeat announcement dates back to last October. The fact that the KOffice codebase has now been ported to KDE 2.0 makes the matter of an interim release a little trickier. Fortunately for Debian users, and thanks to the formidable efforts of Ivan E. Moore II, debian packages for kde*-cvs and koffice-cvs will eventually be available.
A replacement for the Gimp? In light of various difficulties involved with a KDE interface for the Gimp, there is talk of developing a new easy to use and powerful image manipulation tool for KDE. Developers interested in such an effort should contact Michael Koch.
More KDE Quickies. In other news, Kurt Granoth has written an interesting article on the future of KDE; the KDE team has made the move to the latest and greatest MICO 2.2.6; Bo Thorsen gave us this update on KodeKnight development; Antonio Larrosa announced and implemented a new controversial feature for Konsole and other applications: background transparency; Stephan Kulow declared -- and executed -- intentions of revising the KDE file hierarchy standards with an eye to enabling better compliance with the FHS; and finally, for a cheap laugh, you might want to see how aggressively the KDE developers have been porting over to QString in light of the Unicode support in Qt 2.0.