First KDE 3.0 alpha is released

The first official Alpha release of KDE 3.0 was made today. KDE, currently at version 2.2.1, is the premiere desktop for UNIX.

This release is primarily aimed at developers, 'to provide a framework for developers to start porting their KDE 2 applications to KDE 3 and to solicit developer feature contributions and feature requests before the KDE 3 API is frozen for binary compatibility'



Plans for version 3.0 include, among other things, improved support for Internationalization, including Unicode 3 and radically improved support for displaying non-Latin alphabets.

Other hilights are:

1. A new Regular Expression engine with a GUI that assists users in building regular expressions
2. Better integration of KDE preferences with 'pure' QT applications
3. Hardware accelerated alpha blending

http ://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-3.0alpha1.html