KDE 3.0 Alpha1 Available for Developers

Dre writes: "Just a few weeks after the release of the rock-solid KDE 2.2.1, the KDE Project today announced the release of KDE 3.0 Alpha1. Targeted at developers who want to get a head start on porting or writing applications to KDE 3, the release is pretty much a straight port of the KDE 2.2 branch to Qt 3. However, for developers this brings an impressive array of new features to KDE, including new database classes, new data-aware widgets, improved RAD development with a much-enhanced Qt Designer, a new powerful regular expression class (with full Unicode support), improved internationalization support (including the ability to mix different character sets in the same text), bi-directional language support (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew), multi-monitor (Xinerama and multi-screen) support, better integration of pure Qt applications into KDE, and hardware-accelerated alpha blending. With the Qt port out of the way, the KDE developers can now focus on the planned KDE improvements. Read the full announcement here, or go straight to the source (alternative link)."

Comments

the tree and the forest

[mj6798]

Microsoft is already technologically much more cutting edge than KDE: they are moving towards a safe, reflective runtime and a higher-level language with a built-in component model. KDE is still based on a language and runtime with virtually no built-in support for components.

The forefront of desktop technology is happening with Java (OSX, pure Java) and C# (Windows); C and C++-based efforts are widely deployed (Windows, KDE, Gnome), but they are already falling behind.