KDE 4.0 Beta 2 released

BANGALORE, INDIA: The KDE (K Desktop Environment) Community has announced the second beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the feature freeze and the stabilization of the current codebase. Simultaneously, the KOffice developers have released their third Alpha release, marking significant improvements in this innovative office suite. Both KDE and KOffice have benefited from the Google Summer of Code, as most resulting code has now been merged.

Since the libraries were frozen with the first Beta, KDE developers have been adding features and functionality to their applications. Now it is time to start polishing these features; writing and translating documentation, improving the usability and completing the artwork. As KDE 4.0 is feature-frozen now, going into bugfixing mode, major ideas and changes will be held off until 4.1. However, some KDE components, such as Plasma, are exempt from this freeze and will still see significant improvements, says a release.

Many parts of KDE have seen improvements over the last month, thanks to the inclusion of the results of the Google Summer of Code, adds the release. In the following sections, some of the most visible changes and improvements have been highlighted.

Architectural:

Work is in progress on Blitz, a graphics library designed to fill the gap in the KDE libraries while, the work on Quasar is in the pipeline. Efforts are also on to enable support for several different backends for the KDE configuration, including a SQL database.

Meanwhile, several developers are busy in providing better support for BSD and OpenSolaris in KDE. And Strigi now has XESAM support. XESAM is an effort initiated by the strigi developers, and now continued on freedesktop.org with the purpose of creating a cross-desktop interface for searching and metadata-usage in applications and tools.

Avogadro graphical goodies Marcus continued to work on the Avogadro 3D molecule visualization library and its integration in Kalzium. Chemical data is in good hands on the KDE desktop these days, seeing how also Strigi also received support for chemical files.

Experts are spending time on Kate, KDE's advanced text editor (or lightweight Development Environment). The way search works in Kate has been improved, both making it more powerful and easier to use, says the release. Now the component used in Kate to edit text is used throughout KDE for almost every text input widget, thus applications like Kwrite but also Konqueror will benefit from these advancements.

Another area where Kate inspired some improvements with broad effect is the plugin dialog and then integrated in other applications like Kopete.

Applications:

The applications have received a lot of attention from their developers, says the release. For example, Kolourpaint saw many features merged. And not only has it seen usability work and new effects, but the application has become a lot more robust. Better handling of text, improved scanning support and session management are just a few things that have been improved in this easy-to-use image editor. Features have also been upgraded in KGPG. And Okular has received further usability work. Amarok saw integration with plasma, where plasma will provide the infrastructure for the now much more central Context View. The items can be dragged and dropped from the context view on the desktop or to and from the panels on the side of the screen.