Month: June 2006

I came across another bibtex editor for KDE at kde-apps.org yesterday. KBib is a port of gBib to the KDE platform, written by Thach Nguyen.

Frank Karlitschek was kind enough to add an additional section on kde-files.org for
Tellico Entry Templates. I’ve uploaded three right now, one that modifies the default Fancy template to show two columns of fields, one based on Amarok’s reinhardt theme, and one that uses a CSS template from Roger Johansson.

The templates go in $HOME/.kde/share/apps/tellico/entry-templates/ which you may have to create. Don’t forget to uncompress the tarballs.

The next version of Tellico will include KNewStuff support for downloading and installing these templates directly.

It appears that mCatalog
has a new maintainer and home page. I’ll update the link on the Tellico web page.

I’m having trouble finding a version of libgtkmozembed.so for SUSE, so I can’t run mCatalog at the moment.

Hey, I just noticed that Tellico got mentioned in Dr. Dobbs Journal a couple of months ago, in an article about building a home-brew ISBN scanner. That’s kinda cool.

The Tellico collection manager, found at http://www.periapsis.org/tellico/, or included with your Linux distro, fetches book information by ISBN/author/title and handles database functions. It can export its database in Palm-DB format for my PDA, so we know what we don’t need when we’re deep in the used-book stacks.

Mathias Monnerville posted a script today for using Tellico to search the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s bibliographic database. It’s available from KDE-files.org.

Incidently, if you’re wondering what template he’s using in the screenshot for the book details, it’s called reinhardt, which is modified from the amaroK theme by the same name.

Tellico gets reviewed in the June 2006 issue of LinuxUser, a German magazine. LinuxUser was one of the first magazines to actually notice Tellico, back when it was called Bookcase.

The review is actually one of their articles that’s available in full, so if you’re German-speaking, check it out. It seems to be mostly positive, from what I can tell from Google translator. The article also includes a mention of the Tellico scripts available at KDE-files.org.

David Lurie reviews some book collection software and webapps and finds them lacking. He’s got some good points about user workflow, data availability and social networking. Tellico comes up lacking a bit, though I did point out a couple of things that he missed about some of Tellico’s capabilities.

I suppose I really need to buckle down and bolt Tellico onto a SQL database, using SQLite or KexiDB or QSql or something. Once the backend can support more, then the nitty-gritty details of figuring out how to build an iTunes for books can be confronted.