XPde 0.5.0 finally is here

March 22, 2004. The XPde Team today announced the immediate availability of XPde 0.5.0, a complete rewrite of the XPde desktop environment, this release may not include all the features from previous releases, but it features the base code for the upcoming 1.0 release.

This release has been focused on rewrite the code from scratch and do the things as it should be
XPde includes a desktop environment, a window manager and several other tools to make your desktop experience easier. It's available for free under Open Source licenses, you can download the sources and binaries from http://www.xpde.com.

Major Enhancements

*The desktop now fully uses PNG+Alpha channel, so you can use the icons of your choice anywhere

*The icon theme has been updated to the latest crystal svg, but not all icons are included, just the needed ones

*The used font now is Bitstream vera, which looks very similar to tahoma

*Now, I'm using QTheme from Andreas Hausladen: http://mitglied.lycos.de/AndreasHausladen/Delphi/Kylix/CLXPatches/unitcomp.html#QThemed
Still some work to do on this field.

*The desktop now is a XPShellListView control, that means that is based on the XPListView control will be used to build the explorer and that uses the XPDirectoryMonitor, a component that maintain an update list of files from a directory and it gets notified about changes without polling or using FAM

*The desktop now repaints significantly faster, I have spent most of the time optimizing the code to make it work faster in lower resources machines

*The taskbar is also completely new, is built using bitmaps, as you can see in the shot and can be themed very easily

*The window manager is mostly new, it also allows you to use themes, including rounded window frames.


About XPde

XPde aims to recreate the Windows XP desktop environment on Linux in order to allow Windows users to "feel at home" in front of a Linux computer. Check out the FAQ at http://www.xpde.com to know more.