A while ago I blogged my thoughts about future KDE releases. I promised to post the list of some of the things I have in mind for KDE 3.5 and 4.0. So here it comes. It's a long list and if I do it all myself it will keep me busy for years. So if you want to help or pick something up, please contact me, you are very welcome.

Usability is one of my favorite buzzwords. It sounds great, people get emotional about it and it even has some real meaning. In addition to that it's a very interesting area to work on in KDE. With initiatives as OpenUsability or APPEAL it gets more and more focus and we have structures in place which enable us to actually succeed in making KDE the most usable desktop one can imagine.

KDE is used all over the world. We have a truly international community. Our desktop is translated to 79 languages. KDE is everywhere.

It's interesting to observe KDE development these days. Since the 3.4 code was branched from the main line, the repository is open for new development again.

Found on Planet GNOME:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

The result: "To a novelist, there is no such thing as a 'good' sentence.". Can you guess, which book this was?

If you want to learn something about developing software look at Jamie Zawinskis funny story about Hula. I know I'm not the first one to reference Jamies blog and I'm also not the first one to mention Hula, but I still have the hope that I will get a bunch of flowers and a voucher for three free downloads for being the one millionth. Other than that I'm serious, Jamie's lesson is one of the most focused contributions about software development I have ever read.

One of the cool features of KMail I discovered while running the current development branch is the support for X-Faces. These are small black-and-white pictures which are sent in the mail header. They are popular on the Usenet and when reading mailing lists it's fun to see who sends these X-Faces with which mails. In KMail it looks like this:

It's getting colder. KDE CVS now is in deep freeze for 3.4 beta 2. All messages are frozen so that translators can start to strive for the perfect translation in 79 languages. The day before the freeze saw some frantic activity of people to complete their last-minute feature or to sneak in the messages required for fixing certain bugs. On the kdepim front we got a new Kontact welcome screen and were able to break compilation because of our wicked intra-module dependencies.

It's cold. Fortunately I rediscovered my tiger boots.

Over Christmas I wrote a new recipients editor for the KMail composer:

[image:808]

The old one was really annoying because of two big problems:

First, when having multiple recipients the line edit used for the To/CC/BCC fields wasn't really suitable because it only showed a part of them and when trying to get an overview about who gets the mail, you had to scroll around a lot with the cursor keys.