Just a very quick update: KDE's release team has made available the last release candidate before 4.5.0 comes out next week. Please give it another whirl and tell us about problems with this release. Tagging will happen in the next days, so be quick doing that!

Troy: Peter, to begin, as a first time attendee of Akademy, what was your initial impression of the event?

Peter: Okay, there were a lot more people than I expected. When I arrived at the university grounds, I met a guy who was also looking for the entrance, and we started talking. This was the starting point for talking and it just continued from there - talking and talking and meeting people everywhere. It was really nice that I could talk about an issue I was having with KMail. Many other people also use KMail and knew what I was talking about.

At Akademy, we ran in to many interesting people, including "random motorcycle adventurer" Henri Bergius, who is also a board member for Akademy co-organizers COSS among his many other free software related activities. Read on for the full conversation.

KDE software features on the cover of this month's Linux Magazine as Marcel Gagné explains how easy it is to create your own custom Plasma Desktop experience by crafting Plasma widgets using JavaScript.

Today, the KOffice team presents a contest to create great KPresenter slide templates, offering t-shirts for the winners and of course inclusion in the next KPresenter releases for all good submissions. Read on for information on the contest!

Akademy is a great time to meet people and understand some of the exciting new projects and buzzwords in KDE. One project that has been generating a lot of interest recently is ownCloud, the KDE cloud computing project launched by Frank Karlitschek. We caught up with Frank to understand ownCloud better, find out about the current status, and plans for the future.

Last time in the KDE contributor interview series, we talked with the KDE developer Stephen Kelly from KDE PIM. We've been digging around in the KDE interview vaults and found this interesting discussion we had with Albert Astals Cid on 12 May 2010. Albert is well known in KDE from his work with KDE España, as maintainer of Okular and the KDE Edu applications. The original interview in Italian is also available.

At Akademy in Tampere we interviewed Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist (we would call him 'dude') at Intel. He was present representing Intel and checking out what the KDE community is up to. As he sacrificed spending the 4th of July with his family for this, we were anxious to talk to him.

KDE met for its yearly flagship conference, Akademy, in Tampere, Finland. The event was kindly hosted by COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions. Akademy started last weekend with a two-day conference attended by more than 400 visitors from all over the world, which then blended into several days of designing, programming, discussing and working on the future of the Free Desktops. Important topics included mobile devices, community topics and many others. Read the full press release for more information.

On April 23rd, developers from various finance-related KDE applications gathered in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, Germany for the first ever KDE Finance Sprint. The fellowship was composed of developers from KMyMoney, Kraft and Skrooge. This was a week after the ash cloud stopped all flights over Europe. Until the last minute, it was not clear whether those who were coming by plane would be able to make it. Fortunately, the airports opened just in time. Read on for a report for the meeting.