Blue GNU interviewed Frederik Gladhorn, of the KVocTrain Project. Frederik tells us about taking over the project and about KVocTrain's name change for KDE 4.

First, would you mind telling me a little about yourself, where you live and your interests?
Hi, my name is Frederik Gladhorn and I am an engineering student at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. I have quite a few interests, one of them obviously coding software. I also love to climb and do acrobatics. Meeting with friends and playing board games is also really great.

When and why was KVocTrain started?
This depends on what you define as my project. KVocTrain is very old. It started about 1999 and was actively developed until about 2001. I cannot tell you much about this period, but Peter Hedlund of
the KDE Education team stepped forward to keep it alive. He got me started on KVocTrain and just recently gave me total control over it. He keeps on contributing and fixing bugs though. I started getting actively involved after using KVocTrain in Madrid where I spent a semester studying at the UPM. After findings some usability weaknesses in KVocTrain I sent in my first patch...Just ten days ago and with the help of the Edu folks I took the liberty to rename it to Parley. So KVocTrain is dead but Parley is more than worthy to be its successor :)

Where does the project stand at this point?
It is becoming really stable and and usable after being torn to pieces because of some redesign decisions I took. A lot of things have changed internally that scream for new features to be implemented. Right now making it really stable and usable is the first thing. After the initial KDE4 release more cool features will come popping up.

How many active developers currently work on KVocTrain?
At the moment Parly is developed by me, but I get help from several people. Jeremy Whiting did a great job and rewrote the complete XML file format readers and writers to enable some advanced features and make the format more human readable. That helped a lot to get Parley into shape.

What is your primary development toolset?
Since Parley is a KDE4 application I stick with the ususal cmake for building it. It is part of the trunk edu branch of KDE so it will be widely available. I tend to use KDevelop since I like to have a nice class view.

Many projects depend on libraries, tools, etc. developed by others. What are some of the key external elements you rely on?
Well KDE of course and Qt which KDE is built upon. For our XML needs we use the Qt tools. It turns out pretty comfortable.

How does KVocTrain compare (in your view) to other projects?
KDE 4.0 will be out in December. That will be Parleys first step into the "real world". It used to have a terrible interface but still enough attractive points to have quite a few users. Now the horrible interface is gone. There are not many free vocabulary trainers out there, so Parley will
be a pretty good success I think. At the moment it seems that Parley is a little more active than some of the smaller Edu apps. There are still some features left to be implemented, sound and images will come pretty soon but not with the initial version. Right now is the time for bugfixes.

Can you give me any idea of how big and/or active the KVocTrain user community is?
This is really hard to tell for me, especially since I only got started. Parley itself is only ten days old and I have received feedback from more than five users, so there have to be quite a few people interested in it. I get regular feedback (about weekly or so) from one user who tests my latest
changes and got the KDE source version set up only for this purpose. And in the last two weeks more and more people showed their interest. So far I don't even have my email in the stable KVocTrain, still I get a lot of feedback from KDE 3.5 users. And there is no limit to KDE users of course, I got some feedback from people using Gnome, so don't let that keep you from using Parley.

What needs to be accomplished before the next release of KVocTrain?
Fixing all the little bugs that I introduced when using the "chainsaw" on KVocTrain. I rewrote huge parts of the code to have some old and rather cumbersome and redundant parts replaced. But seriously, the current state is really stable, the last reviews were more of a "well it would be nicer if the focus was on that button" nature, so I think it is going in the right direction. Polising some more is next. Than for the real next release sound and image. Better statistics and nicer graphics are also planned and the search function has some features that are not easily accessible through the gui.

What are the biggest obstacles the KVocTrain team faces in development?
Except time? None really, Parley for the win! Some of the old code was really horrible, so rewriting all that stuff before being able to implement all the cool features that I wanted was quite
tiresome.

Is there anything else about KVocTrain you think our audience should know?
If you liked KVocTrain you will love Parley. If you hated KVocTrain give Parley a try and see how nice and easy it got! And of course give me feedback!

Update (15:07 | 19-Sep-07 GMT-4):We have just been informed that Parley has a new web page.