Current events
From BibleTime
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2008-01-12: 1.7alpha1 release
BibleTime 1.7alpha1 has been released as a source package. Much work has been done to make BibleTime work under the new KDE 4 environment. There are many known and unknown bugs left but this alpha version is actually almost fully working. We want to encourage you to download the source code as a tarball or using svn, build it and test it. After finding bugs you can report them in our Prerelease Bugs page as long as you remember that it is for 1.7 branch prerelease bugs only, not for 1.6 bugs or feature requests.
Translations
We have changed our translation system, it uses the Qt i18n framework. The translatable strings have already changed and will still change so much that thorough revision of existing translations is necessary for high quality user interface experience.
Packages
We don't expect the alpha version to be packaged for the OS distributions though packagers are of course free to do that. For the final release we want to make packaging as easy as possible; if you have suggestions for that, please contact us. We could for example add some distribution specific files to our svn tree and add scripts for building packages. Packagers should also notice that if KDE 3 and 4 live together in the distribution BibleTime can also have 1.6.x and 1.7.x versions simultaneously.
It is noteworthy that 1.7 uses new configuration files (~/bibletime/) and the 1.7 can run side by side with the 1.6 without problems.
New features
Besides porting the existing functionality to KDE 4 we have also added some new features, especially the main Bookshelf index has new functionality. You can change the grouping of the modules and hide rarely needed modules.
After KDE 4
Though the KDE 4 port is good news for the KDE fans out there we have also bad news for them: we will abandon the KDE platform and move to a Qt-only solution. Our purpose is to make BibleTime platform independent so that it can be used under Windows and MacOS X without installing KDE. This is of course good news to many who have not been using that great but bulky desktop environment.
This change has already been started and at the moment it can be seen in many small details. Even some major functions like keyboard shortcut editor have been disabled. It will take time to write them again using Qt only and some of them may never come back. One critical part for us is the HTML renderer which we use to display the text. We hope that the QWebKit will be enough for our needs but currently it doesn't have adequate API and we have to continue with KHTML.
We will continue the 1.6.x line for KDE 3 in bugfix mode, there will be no feature additions.
At the moment we don't have any schedules for the new versions. Even the final 1.7 (or whatever the version number will be) may take several months, not speaking of the platform independent version. We welcome any help you can give including C++ coding, HTML/CSS, translations, graphics, documentation etc.
-- The BibleTime development team
