Okular

As I already said, I wanted to work a bit on okular again and I am nearly done now.
Today and yesterday I added support for djvu-files and for Microsoft's Compressed HTML Help (chm) to okular. For both libraries there are now two patches for making them build with CMake ;-).
The library of djvu seems to work fine, chm has some problems with zooming though. I am not sure whose problem this is, but definitely that will need a clear head so I won't look at it now.

Another new feature will follow tomorrow: I asked my distro to package libopenjpeg for me and that guy was really nice and will make the openjpeg packages available tomorrow. Right after that I will follow with new poppler packages I think.
For all those waiting already, I am planning to make up a tutorial of how you can easily build a custom CD with your favourite KDE on Windows applications so that they are installable on their own.

Why Google will not achieve world domination (and why marble will do so instead)

Just some seconds ago I realized fully that this very blog was not listed in any search engine. This was due to Google's blogspot team being incapable of writing the correct description to a button. Instead of hiding my blog on the front page, the button simply set the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW tags, which made it impossible for me to google myself!!!!11!!1

This of course doesn't happen in Marble, which can only lead to the correct conclusion that Marble will dominate the world instead.

Besides searching for my own blog I am not idle: I tried to get some opensuse packages for libepub, the library hidden in the ebook-tools which, as the name says, is used to read ebook file formats. There is some support for that in Okular, that's why I decided to make packages for everybody.
Since I am working on some more Okular-related stuff, you will probably hear more about that soon.

Amarok 2.0

With a certain delay due to my Iceland visit, the Amarok 2.0 release packages are out now. There are some more bug fixes in it which will hopefully also work under windows;-). Packages are available for both 4.1.3 and 4.1.80.
Packages can be installed in the usual way via the installer.

xmas

just today I got told that boost libraries now use cmake.
There is hope for others too, the world is not that bad.

binaries and a trip to Reykjavik

Right before I will fly for 4 days to Iceland, I finished building recent Amarok and digikam packages and uploaded them to our mirrors. This wouldn't be possible without Christian who devoted more than a complete weekend to fix most of our packages again and now it is there - we reopened the "unstable" releases again with KDE 4.2 beta1 (version 4.1.80).

As a decision, we will from now on try to provide pre-release snapshots of software solely for the unstable part (as some software might be in need of newer versions of libraries anyway), so we currently have digikam beta6 only in 4.1.80 and Amarok in both (for a last time I think).

So if anybody is in Reykjavik area in the coming days (and likes to have a presentation of KDE on Windows or Marble) simply leave a comment...

<update>I didn't say what I wanted to say: Amarok now contains lastfm support in the msvc builds and digikam hopefully can show pictures in the msvc binaries as well.</update>

some updates

As you might know, I have been working on digikam a lot lately and today I uploaded the new beta6 packages for the 4.1.X release series; included are of course kipi-plugins beta4. Now Digikam on msvc should not crash anymore and both mingw and msvc builds should be able to add images to albums.

To improve digikam even more, I am trying to lower the start up time needed, and of course I know the marble widget best. So I can now tell you (even though this was a rather easy task) that I cut down the startup time needed by the two marblewidgets by about 19%. This is not the end yet, and until the release, tackat and I hope to get this even further down.

One thing that is rather fresh from my desk is that I succeeded to compile kile (and fixed some builderrors). This means that you can look at this wonderful latex-editor, but of course this doesn't mean anything: As I have no latex environment and neither to much time & space nor to much knowledge of latex itself, I search for somebody interested in these topics and who could try to build kile on windows as well, look how to get all things needed to run kile decently and write some tutorials and file some bugs. Somebody interested?

crashfixing

As I was working on digikam porting recently I made some first packages - and of course those were not even starting up. Well, to be a bit clearer: the packages build with msvc (Microsoft Visual Studio) crashed both in

png_read_info

for png images and in

jpeg_read_header

for libjpeg. This seemed to be rather odd I thought, as there seemed to be a lot of applications using these libraries for image i/o. But as I found out, most don't use our dll but instead a static version of it. That wasn't an option for me though.

To understand the crashes a bit more I found a good explanation here. Basically the problem is that msvc will link to different runtime environments (our libpng/libjpeg dll against msvcrt and our digikam binaries against msvcr80) and each of those runtimes has a different idea of what a FILE pointer is. When trying to actually do something with your FILE pointer, you will get the crash.

The solution to the png problem I found in a french forum, I did what they said and now it works (diff). The solution to the jpeg problem is a bit harder as it requires some rewrite/addition. You might have to replace my QByteArray with whatever you use to store the complete file content but essentially it is everywhere the same (changes): I got it from here.

It is tall! not great...

I am back already since sunday evening from the KOffice meeting; I have to say it was a rather great success. The KOffice folks could get two of my koffice errors fixed, one even in qt-copy (patch 0258), and while looking we even found a crash which got fixed too. So all in all a rather good amount for a weekend.

Yesterday I formulated some bugfixes and features I would like to see in KDE 4.2 release on Windows. The first one I basically fixed myself right away, and today I tried out something new with plasma. As you all might know there is this concept of desktop shells, where plasma seems to fit into really well - and now I can say that it is true and it works on windows too. Still we have tons of stuff to do before it is slightly usable: we have no list of tasks (in progress), we have no system tray, there is no integration of the native windows menu into the plasma menus(planned). Even worse is that if you start explorer.exe while running plasma as shell, the default shell will appear again(to be fixed soon).

As you can see, there is still a lot of work to do, we are open to all new people and if you want to lend a hand, simply drop by on irc or have a look at our mailing list kde-windows[at]kde[dot]org.

KOffice Meeting Day 1

After I missed slangkamp at Berlin Hbf. due to my train being 40 minutes late on a 1 hour trip, I arrived at KDAB Berlin Office and started to look around a bit. After some minutes I got jaham and slangkamp interested into a special KOffice bug which only existed on windows: one of the color choosers simply was showing a black rectangle instead of painting the color gradient it should show. So we started to investigate this, first within KOffice (KoColorSlider) - it was no KOffice bug. Then in KDE (KSelector) and it was no KDE bug as well. But at least we could have worked around it in KSelector. But then again Jaham had the idea to look into the Qt sources - and there we found the bug. It was simple, 3 additional lines in qtgui4 and this was one of the points where you can definitely see why it is pretty important to have open source software: we could really fix the bug instead of working around it and hoping that the implementation will stay the same for future Qt versions...
The downtime was: 3-4 people were looking for this bug for roughly 3 hours - so much work for such a "small" issue.

graphics week again

Just as a short note:
Today I fixed both a small bug in gwenview where the jpeg-thumbnails would crash gwenview on windows due to some strange issues and I build digikam and its kipi-plugins and made binary packages of it. So these can be used now (they reside in the 4.1.2 stable branch). Also in some days the 4.1.3 packages will have a whole lot of windows related bug fixes (I will blog about those later as all the people need to be mentioned). For now I just want you to point to digikam, find the bugs that are still within it (Gilles Caulier and I can try to fix the bugs, as he is brave enough to fight the demons of windows) and lets make it better and better.

Another thing I have to mention is that Torsten Rahn, Magnus Valle and Henry DeValence made some new quite awesome maps for Marble and none of them did blog about the results yet. This gives me the possibility to leak those pictures to all planetkde readers:

The Earth in Marble in 1689 (made by Magnus(wiscados) and Torsten(tackat)):


The moon of the earth (made by Torsten):


and "that's no moon!" (well it is the moon mimas of saturn done by Henry (hdevalence)):

portability

This is a short rant about how portable code shouldn't look like:

        else if (not defaultServerList.contains(server))

.
Those C99 boolean operator keywords(not, or, and) break here on windows and are not worth the annoyance.
I already had discussions about that once and I am not keen on doing that again. Thus I beg you to use the standardized operators !,||,&& from now on, so that I will never have to complain about that again.

I will add another post about the second biggest annoyance (export macros) soon, but this requires a longer post.

graphics week

Recently I looked over our packages again and I just remembered that KDE on Windows still misses some good picture viewers (No, Marble is not yet good for that task ;-) ). So I decided to look at kdegraphics a bit more as gwenview was still not building. I just recently wiped out most errors out of my exiv2 cmake buildsystem patch and now I wanted to try that out. And so I did - the result is that along the windows 4.1.2 packages you will find gwenview.

If I find some time in the coming days, I will try to work on digikam; we won't be able to get the gphoto support on windows in the near future, but I hope I can get that part optional so that we can have at least a starting point.
p.s.: The packages won't be ready before sunday evening I guess.
p.p.s.: Here is the proof:

Dependencies

You might have heard me complaining about that issue already, but it is still an issue.
Every once in a while I come around checking the dependencies of a KDE package and then I find out that they are 1) either available, 2) available but not buildable (a lot of foss software on windows is hacked together, a.k.a. patched heavily) or 3) not even available. Availability means available for both of our compiler flavors (we currently use mingw 3.4.5 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2003/2005/2008). If the library builds and if it is not to much messed up we normally fix this case by finding a CMake patch for it. The latest library that took this way is exiv2 and I am glad to say that this patch will go upstreams for version 0.18. This is the good side.


Another dependency I have come across was mysql. It is used in several places throughout KDE, on of its use cases is as an embedded database for amarok. As a nice packager I made myself on the way to find this stuff. If you look at the MySQL page and you search for embedded, you will find "Thinking about using MySQL as an Embedded Database? Contact us online." with a link to the sales department. Ok, no money for that over here, so maybe they provide it somewhere else. Searching through the download section I found the rpms for red hat for the embedded db but the windows packages don't contain anything resembling the embedded library. And after searching a bit more I found the confirmation: Mysql doesn't provide the embedded library.
Hm, since it would benefit multiple packages, I thought, why not try to compile it myself. Ok, I downloaded the package and on the Build Instructions page they spoke about cmake which made me happy at that point. Even though I need to build the stuff myself, I just need to run

cmake && nmake && nmake install

and then I have my library. But it should get even more painful:
Before running cmake you need to run a javascript configure file.
Then you get a batch script which copies the CMakeCache.txt and then runs cmake for you - nothing more.
Then you have a Visual Studio project file.
Going through all available targets I couldn't find libmysqld.
There was no libmysqld. Ok, searching through CMakeLists.txt files gave me - nothing.
Their CMake build system doesn't contain that library. Only the autotools stuff as I found out - so autotools for Linux, a crippled CMake for Windows.


Is it really so hard to find somebody which knows enough cmake (or can read enough to understand the cmake help) to get a decent CMake buildsystem for mysql? Or is this simply a way to sell even if mysql is GPL?
I am pretty sure I will fix this in the future, but this is the point where I definitely will not contribute to GPL licensed code without a paycheck.


What this means:
- Gwenview will be hopefully enabled in the next windows packages for trunk and 4.1
- Amarok's mysql collection plugin will have to wait.
- All other users of mysql embedded will simply have to use the client with a server.

MarbleTalk: The result of my summer of code

I have never really written about my Google Summer of Code project, but now that I got the first really cool and visible feature in, I can't wait anymore.

As you might know Marble is not only a Qt/KDE application but also a widget that you can use in your application to provide the user with geographical data.
You can simply generate a KML document with QDomDocument and then use the addPlaceMarkData to load this file into the widget. You can check the implementation of digikam which has been the first application using this.

This part is not new, it was possible to load and display Placemarks (simple Points which contain a name and a location) before. But in my Summer of Code I reworked the KML parsing so that any KML file could be parsed and saved in an internal data structure and at the very end I made a model and a view for that. This view now went into a plugin (the geodata plugin), the model is now integrated into the structure and thus if you go within Marble to File->Open Map and you choose kdeedu/marble/src/plugins/marble/geodata/Marble writing.kml it will show you this now:



You can of course do a lot more with this, I am pretty sure. Here is a small draft of how to use the marbleWidget:

#include "marble/MarbleWidget.h"

using namespace Marble;
...
MarbleWidget *marble = new MarbleWidget( parent );
QString yourKmlData;
...
marble->addPlaceMarkData( yourKmlData );
...
delete marble;

But, you might ask, what has this todo with Vector Tiles for Marble? The basic idea of vector tiles is to render the data at the client rather than at the server side as it is done now. With the above said, we are ready to do this - rendering basically works and we now need to generate the data, implement some caching algorithms, etc. So you might not see this for 4.2's version of marble, but there is a good chance that this will be ready for 4.3.
p.s.: This all wouldn't have been possible without my mentor Torsten Rahn (tackat), so I want to thank him for this too at this point.

Lubos made it true:

For all people not in Belgium here is a picture of Seli with blue hair:
(Seli with blue hair).

Sweet Dreams

After not having written for a longer time I can say that I spent the time on a very interesting and usefull matter:

In the beginning of the week I worked on some missing packages for our already some weeks old release 4.0.83 which still is the most recent release before the next major version 4.1. I rebuild kdegraphics and added new packages for kdeutils, kdemultimedia and kdepim. Especially interesting is kdemultimedia as I fixed phonon the weekend before and so KDE windows platform supports sound output now. Kdepim was really easy since KDAB has fixed nearly everything (except the packaging bugs that I introduced;-)).

Then somehow Carlo Segato (_Brandon_) came to the idea that he could take another look again at plasma. I tried this before but I didn't invest a lot of time and so it was still unknown which wonders were awaiting us there. After _Brandon_ came through really well and most of the problems I hit last time had magically vanished (thanks to aseigo probably) _Brandon_ showed me the first picture of the analog clock on windows:



This was just the start and after working for two more days, a lot of plasmoids have been built. The most interesting thing was that even the plasma desktop(the containment) was not very hard to fix and so only two days after we started the first efforts "the world's coolest geek toy(tm)" is available on Windows too:



There is still a lot to do as e.g. the panel is still not at the place where it should be and some of the classes have been simply disabled. Some obvious bugs are existing as well:
Rotating plasmoids doesn't work, some of your favourite plasmoids might be missing etc.
Nevertheless I put up some preview packages for kdebase-workspace(which contains plasma desktop), kdeplasma-addons and kdeplasma-playground (which both contain additional widgets). To get the desktop, simply run plasma.exe from kderoot\bin.

Please keep in mind that those packages are previews; Bug reports in bugs.kde.org are still unwanted!

As this was a really historic moment for me, I want to thank all those Persons that made this post possible for the one reason or the other!

(to be naming some that come to my mind: Aaron Seigo, Carlo Segato, Pau Garcia de Quiles, Christian Ehrlicher and Ralf Habacker, Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Jeremy Whiting, our users and all those of course that didn't came to my mind).

test the best!

As you might know we're currently fixing all kinds of bugs until the release and this time we even fix the unit tests under windows.
This hasn't been a high priority for us but taking the new cdash-server (thanks Alex!) for kdelibs Christian started to submit some first reports for it. I will follow tonight hopefully and I hope more people will follow, especially on the "other platforms" ;-).

Next I fixed some tests in Marble here on windows and now they run fine at least here. I think I can go over to writing more tests and improving marble even more.

One of the bad things that happened to me is a bug in either subversion or putty: I generated a new ssh key with puttygen and asked sysadmin@ to change it. But commandline subversion doesn't want to use this key now and I am not sure what I am doing wrong. The special problem is that both logging in with putty to svn.kde.org and checkout with TortoiseSVN (with the new key) work. The problem about the key seems to be an irregular length of 2047 vs. 2048 Bits. But probably the only way to solve this issue is to ask sysadmins to change the key again.

The last thing is that slowly but steadily amarok on windows comes back: Pau (pgquiles) is currently investing quite some efforts on it and I hope for the best and for neverending success!

Python: subprocesses after all

Back in September 2007 I was sitting with dipesh until late in the night on a very interesting problem:
We wanted to implement a "tee"-like class in python which would work as the same command under unix: get input via one stream, double the input and give it out into a file and into a stream (like sys.stdout). This shouldn't be a big problem but when you try to give this class to subprocess.Popen as one of the streams you will find out that Popen doesn't use the write function but instead uses the fileno() function of the fileobject. But there would be a workaround for that:
We use subprocess.PIPE for the wanted input stream, then we check regularly for any stuff within the pipe - that this will not work on windows one could expect.
The problem is that all available read processes will block execution if not enough bytes can be read.

The solution is called pywin32 and is a python package for windows. Mark Hammond from starship has made them and they include a function called PeekNamedPipe which does exactly what we need: peek into the pipe without blocking it. I should leave the rest as a homework to the reader, but for those who don't want to invest any more research, I'll give a first solution from where you can start (look at the class Popen).

Friday on LinuxTag

As some of you might know, I attended the LinuxTag in my parents' town Berlin.
I arrived on thursday to meet some people from KDAB and Intevation who announced the first release of Kontact on Windows as well.
I have been meeting a lot of new people from all over KDE project, but especially three people I was rather surprised about:
First was of course Aaron who was the party bundle all day but fell asleep just one minute before we had to leave the S-Bahn-train ;-) -
then of course the new employee from KDE e.V. Claudia who is really a win for KDE community -
and Alexander Neundorf (yes the one who always rejects the cmake macros;-)). Alexander really will look into every detail for you and I think that besides that cmake improves our productivity a lot I think that Alex is doing a great job as well.

Ok, and as usual to give a small impression:

MarbleTalk: How to build Marble on Windows

As you all might know I am a marblehead since some time now. As I am working most of my time on windows and I have put quite some effort into improving the build system I will now give a short introduction of how to build Marble here.

1) Set up the build environment according to the techbase wiki page. This needs some thoughts and a bit of free space (measuring in GB!!!).
2) If you're ready just emerge one of the three packages "kdeedu", "marble-kde" or "marble-qt" e.g.

emerge marble-kde

The emerge scripts will take care of all the dependencies for you. If you only need the qt-only version, just use the "marble-qt" package.
3) Look at Marble, look into the far remotest parts of the world and of course have a look at the OpenStreetMap maps in Marble (go into the Map View part on the right side and switch to OpenStreetMap).

KOffice the second

As I have not thought about linking the way to get KOffice on Windows in the last post, I will change that now:
First get the kdewin-installer from winkde.org, then choose the package KOffice and all its dependencies will be installed automatically. As I haven't checked the install location of the libraries (thanks Jarosław for fixing that) you have to set your PATH to both the bin\ and the lib\ folder of your install directory (or you copy over all the dll's to the bin folder).
So far for now, for all other questions I am available on irc and on the mailing list of course.

KOffice Alpha

A bit late but together with the new 4.0.74 snapshot Christian built the KOffice alpha 7 package for the first time now.
This is especially important to me as I was working on that part already for a longer time now. And because the KOffice release is still some time ahead, I think we can get ready to build every release of KOffice from now on - Windows is going to be just another platform and become more and more supported (and of course less and less buggy;-)).
Amarok will be the next hard case but I hope I can fix that maybe until akademy too.

One step beyond(*)

Ok, after roughly one week out in the countryside again I came home yesterday and today I started my efforts again to bring KDE to compile with the brand new mingw-gcc 4.3 alpha version. Even though it has been feared that mingw-gcc might lag even further behind, the new maintainer Aaron William LaFramboise brought out a rather new release. As Aaron is a GSoC-student as I am, we can work together even better.
But now towards the facts that might interest the KDE on Windows Community:
I could build Qt with two patches and I had to disable webkit.
This first patch was due to a missing extern declaration in one sourcefile, the second one was a bit strange since it required using uint instead of quint32. The errors with webkit were not easily solveable so I will investigate them further especially as strigi fails on a similar error too. Currently I think that this is a more a mingw error but I might be wrong in the end.

To give you a more general outline:
I plan to work on mingw4 from time to time so that I will have a running KDE from mingw4 by the time KDE 4.1 gets released. KDE 4.2 should be buildable with mingw4 too and probably for KDE 4.3 we will switch completely away from mingw 3.*.

Right now I will start my GSoC project on marble so most of my time will be coding again.

So long for now, new posts will probably come in more regularly.


(*) 'One step beyond' is a song by the british ska formation Madness and just came to my mind after I got Qt building.

far away

I haven't posted for a longer time now, so here is the update. In the last weeks I have been working both on my summer of code applications (for marble) and on my university stuff. Kdegraphics is already within the KDE on windows stuff for some weeks - just some little problems in the fontconfig and poppler packages stay (the configuration files are not in the correct place).
Right now I am on an island at the Baltic Sea called Hiddensee in a small village called Vitte. I needed nearly two days to get my computer into the internet (I have written this post offline) since there is currently only one internet cafe (Sanddorneck) and one T-Online hotspot (Cafe Sundevit/Hotel Töwerland). Both are quite expensive so I always have to be quite fast.
On the other hand I have no stress and I can enjoy the beautiful landscape (and eat fish). Just to give you a small impression:

Who is first on the Planet?

This is the KDE booth if no people are around:



we are playing now: who is first on the planet - it is so great!

UPDATE: since not everybody might know all the faces and since Dakon already said he doesn't know them - here the names in the first picture:
A visitor, Franz Keferböck, Rolf Eike Beer, Frederik Gladhorn (with the long hair), Andreas Hartmetz (part of the solution), Sven Krohlas and Manuel Nickschas from Amarok, above my free laptop, and again only from the back Eckhart Wörner.

CeBIT 2008: Intro

This is the first post from CeBIT - We are here in the LinuxPark at the very end of hall 5. Currently we are 4 people - danimo, tackat, eckhart and /me.

Today in the morning I entered the train and the first handouts were already given in the train. Then I meet tackat in front of the exhibition center and we got into our small booth. The booth box arrived at around 13:00 and danimo arrived only shortly after that ;-).
People really want to know a lot from the basics of FOSS to the features of KDE on Windows. We try to give as much as we need - since KDE is so cool...
Btw. kind regards of the amarok folks, they don't have network access;-)
Some more fotos will follow as soon as I get my camera back...

Okular on Windows

We are shortly before the first distribution of the kdegraphics package from the snapshot sources 4.0.63 with support for pdf files using poppler.
I have worked most of my time on the buildsystems of poppler, freetype and fontconfig - since poppler is integrating the cmake buildsystem thanks to Pino Toscano (who wrote the cmake files) I got even more work as I have to merge the patches to their git repository. This brings a lot of fun when you do not have a native git (until now I haven't found a usable native git version) and some changes needed for msvc cannot easily be brought upstreams.
I have to admit that I have stopped providing new packages on my own server - this makes no sense in the moment since Dirk Mueller is providing snapshots of KDE roughly every week which makes my own packages not needed anymore.
I will probably set up the mirror again in the next weeks so that extra packages that are freshly available can be used with the last snapshots. Looking into my crystal ball I can see that even though koffice isn't in a good state yet, it has reached the state where it builds most of the time and where we can provide a package.

Btw: I will not attend Fosdem since it is over 1000km away - I will be at CeBit on tuesday and probably wednesday though. If you're there too, you want to see how good looking KDE on Windows is and want to chat a bit, just come around to the KDE booth.

kgpg: saroengels->beercounter++;

First of all I have to tell all those that do not know it:
I come from Germany and I don't like beer.
I drink wine and most other 'alcoholic beverages' but I don't drink beer. That means it is only of theoretical value if you promise to give out a beer.
But if you do, I will take that as a sport - and hopefully find a way to do what you want:
I was asked how well kgpg of kdeutils worked and as it wasn't on my build list before, I added a script and tried it out: and it crashed.
So far I couldn't really get something useful out of kgpg so I took out gdb and tested a bit: and it turned out that right after running gpg through a QProcess kgpg segfault'ed. I didn't had gpg installed at that time, so I thought that a test for existance could be the problem. And yes - after I installed it, kgpg worked like a charm (although import of keys doesn't work).
I haven't yet made a patch, maybe the QProcess should be ported to KProcess and obviously the existance of gpg and the path of gpg should be searched for in advance. Maybe this is already within the code, I don't know.

But a beer I have earned anyway! ;-)

fontconfig and poppler

As I already stated earlier, I was recently fixing the buildscripts for freetype, fontconfig and poppler. For all of them I have a patch now which gives them cmake based buildscripts instead of autotools+derivatives and which fixes some errors so that they compile on both compilers.
Of course there is plenty of room for improvement left - freetype and fontconfig should be able to use the system zlib as a dependency (that is disabled for now), fontconfig and poppler have a lot of if(MSVC) parts now and poppler is linking against kdewin32 - which should not be the case - according to Christian. Plus I want to integrate poppler-data into poppler-src - even if that is not the original intention of the author.
Note:
It seems there is a lack of communication sometimes - direct as well as indirect (via a blog e.g.).
I hope this improves within the next time.
SE

free type

For Okular one needs more or less poppler, this requires again fontconfig and freetype.
Thanks to Pino, poppler has a cmake based buildsystem, fontconfig got one as well and today I finished freetype. So what should I say - fontconfig doesn't build yet under msvc, but I am currently at it.
Freetype works now though - and I think that was the major problem until now.
So look forward to a package release of kdegraphics soon.

good night
SE

kplato missing

I haven't forgotten or disabled kplato of course - I only thought that those pictures are enough.
Wished by one reader, here comes kplato:


and here some more stuff:



Just some more answers:
kexi is just slightly different - and about looks one can argue (a free translation from german). I find the new look kexi introduces quite good - and it integrates far better to windows imho.

Koffice - kool and unstable

Ok, here are the screenshots from my recent windows build of koffice (kdepim might follow).
Some notes:


kspread died when I entered '!' instead of '1'


kivio cannot delete objects - this probably doesn't work in other koffice apps too.


kexi looks wonderful, but is the only app from the kde project that does not detach from the cmd.exe window - why I don't know.


and last: kword does not like @ signs - this was fixed in kate already by chehrlic (function keyPressEvent) but I couldn't find it in koffice (I haven't looked a lot).

I will post the kdepim screenshots later - kmail isn't working anyway, kaddressbook has severe problems and kontact doesn't like me.

So far,
SE

Release Party

I just came home from my clausura now, and I should have gone to the Release Party at KDAB - that would have given me more.
I haven't written in a longer time now; please forgive me.
After the release of KDE 4.0 the kde-windows project decided to stay in trunk - most applications like koffice, amarok and kdepim aren't released yet anyway so no need to make other releases of the branch. Be aware that this might decrease stability - people might work more and change the codebase again.
That said - I will hopefully restart releasing new packages for mingw on my server again on monday night. There is some new stuff that works now:
Finally kdepim works again - that means applications like akregator, kleopatra and kontact work now. Kmail is built but has a big error which isn't solved yet - the checking for a running application are useless under windows. There is just one small thing for users of emerge: you have to build kdepimlibs first and then install kdepimlibs-test (from testing) over it.
then you can build kdepim.
As I said, koffice is working too, after I fixed some minor problems with the export macros.
For those of you who like some screenshots, I will post some before I go.

Truly, our responsibility to spread the Gospel of the Gnu is weighty.
Cleave to what is good. Remember the words the prophet Stallman
brought down from the Mount MIT, graved in Lisp on tablets of
crystalline lambda calculus.

Only this true: Emacs is pure.
All else is false.
Do not be misled by false gods like Vi, the Editor of the Beast.
Do not be seduced by Word, the Scarlet Woman of Babylon.
Do not be driven to madness by Xcode, the Blind Priest of the Children of Asherath.

When the wild winds of chaos blow, stay pure.
When the universe collapses in shards around you, stay holy.
When the gibbering hobgoblins of apostate Editors attack with shards
of broken syntax, seek the crystalline stillness within you.

Brethren, ensure that you (Meta-x-say-[[hallel]]-to-Emacs) daily for otherwise you will be lost.
When the Beast comes, only Emacs can save you.

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