Hmmm... It sure has been a long time since I wrote in my diary...

I thought I'd take a revolutionary step today, and start working on Hebrew documentation for KDE. After experimenting with it a little I saw that it isn't as easy as I thought, as it seems that some changes need to be done with DocBook. So now I'm concentrating my efforts on adding the necessary support for right-to-left languages in DocBook.

Hopefully this would benefit not only Hebrew in DocBook, but also pave the road for other RTL languages such as Arabic to have support in DocBook, enabling us all to finally have documentation in our native language through DocBook.

An interview with me was published today on The People Behind KDE. Yay!

Recently there's been a debate on one of KDE's mailing lists regarding a string that appears in the title of dialog boxes in several applications of KDE: "Danger, Will Robinson!". This string, which we can all remember from Lost In Space, appears in the title of some error message windows, indicating that something went wrong. I feel that if KDE wishes to stay out of the user interface hall of shame, it should really avoid using this kind of strings.

If we ever wish to appeal to the business world as a true alternative business desktop to Windows, we should go with a serious and proffesional approach to writing our applications. We can leave all these charming messages to games and toys, but when it comes to productivity applications we must keep serious, and make sure that the messages we have in our applications can be understood and appreciated by all.

Just my NIS 0.0875.

In a message to the KDE mailing lists, Dirk Mueller, KDE 3.0 release master stated that KDE's switch to QT 3.0 will occur next Friday. QT 3.0 has full bidirectional language support, and with it the next version of KDE (3.0), will enable us to finally have a true Hebrew desktop for Linux.
What I currently plan is that once the switch is made, I will start converting all of KDE's Hebrew translations to logical Hebrew. If this goes smoothly, all will be ready for KDE 3.0 in terms of Hebrew support.

A patch of mine was commited to the KDE source today. This is all very exciting!