The KDE Community are still looking for proposals to Host Akademy in 2013.

Akademy 2012

The hosting proposal needs a strong team of local volunteers who have an eye for detail that is able to organize and host our annual community summit.

The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce the fifth major release of the new KDE Instant Messaging suite. The immediately available 0.5 version brings polish in many places, better stability, 58 reported bugs fixed and some nice new features too, making the instant messaging experience in KDE Workspaces more pleasant and enjoyable. Special attention was given to the log viewer, which received improvements galore.

In this week's KDE Commit Digest:

In June 2010, KDE e.V. launched the individual supporting membership program, asking people to Join the Game.

There are many reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution. For one thing, it enables KDE e.V. to have a predictable income. This money is used to support events that accelerate development of KDE software, enhance promotion efforts and help grow the Community. KDE contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds, so their reasons for contributing are diverse. Claudia Rauch and Jayson Rowe from the Join the Game Team asked supporting member Gaurav Chaturvedi why he joined the game.

The SFLPhone team and Savoir-Faire Linux, a Montreal Open Source consulting company, are pleased to announce the availability of SFLPhone 1.2.0, the first version since the KDE client was moved to KDE infrastructure. Our team is proud of joining the KDE family as part of Playground, and looking forward to being part of Extragear soon. SFLPhone KDE and SFLPhone Qt have been in development for the better part of a decade, aiming to provide the KDE environment with a professional software phone app.

Let's rejoice and celebrate: Amarok 2.6 is here! The Amarok Team is proud to present you the result of their work over the last 7 months. With a reasonable set of new features, we focused this release on bug fixing and improving the overall stability, making this the most stable Amarok release ever.

Calligra—the productivity suite from KDE—has made its second release. The nine applications in the suite have all received new features and bug fixes, such as improved table editing in Words, neater cell editor in Sheets and a compositions docker in Krita for movie storyboard generation.

The KDE Randa Meetings are a small gathering of KDE contributors in the village of Randa, Switzerland. For the fourth year, the intense Randa sprints will include key KDE projects and top developers, all collaborating concurrently under one roof, isolated from noise and distractions. Funds are being raised to support the meetings.

Following the recent announcement that Digia will be acquiring the complete Qt business from Nokia, Digia has set out its plans in a letter to the KDE Community.

Digia Director of R&D, Tuukka Turunen, sets out their aims of securing the future of Qt as the best cross-platform development framework and seeking greater cooperation with KDE and other partners in the Qt ecosystem.

The full text of the letter is reproduced below.

Dear KDE Community,

A research team from the University of Maryland Baltimore County has launched an online study to explore the usability of KDE notifications. Participants are asked to describe a recent KDE notification experience to deepen the understanding of what makes a good or bad notification. Results from the research will help improve the usability of KDE notifications, and will make a contribution to the academic field of Human-Computer Interaction.