Today, KDE makes available two new releases of its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. 4.7.4 provides bugfix updates, new translations and performance improvments on top of the stable 4.7 series, while 4.8 Beta2 gives a glimpse at what is coming in 4.8, to be released next month.

KDE Telepathy 0.2

The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce its second release. KDE Telepathy is a suite of applications that form an instant-messaging client for Jabber, Gmail, Facebook, MSN and more. KDE Telepathy stands out from previous instant messaging solutions by being able to integrate into the Plasma Workspaces, and can also be used like a traditional application.

Over the weekend of 19 and 20 November, KDE contributors met in Berlin for the KDE e.V. Sprint—the first ever. KDE e.V. is the non-profit organization that represents KDE in legal and financial matters and provides funding to assist KDE development and promotion. We aimed to work on some key areas to form a strong foundation for KDE e.V.'s future development, including:

• The Individual and Corporate Supporting Membership Programs
• KDE's policy on providing public thanks to donors of money, hardware and services
• Budget and goals for 2012
• Setting up a better method for approving sprint financing, planning and reporting

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest, Boudewijn Rempt writes about the 2.4 version of Krita. In addition, the usual list of updates:

• Progress in the work to separate QGraphicsView from libplasma
• Calligra sees work on docx support and autocolor
• Telepathy sees UI refactoring; there is now extended away support and dialog-less setup for link-local XMPP

Over the last couple of years the KDE Mobile project has been evolving as it targeted many embedded platforms. Currently, the focus is on the shiny Nokia gadgets (N9 and N950) running the platform called Harmattan.

Plasma Active and the Mer OS have been installed successfully on the ARCHOS G9 tablet.

Plasma Active & Mer on ARCHOS tablet

In the weekend of November 11, more than twenty Calligra developers braved the fierce weather of Helsinki to meet up again! Well, the weather wasn't that fierce actually, but it could have been! We met up in the office tower that houses Nokia's research department during the weekdays for two days of hacking, presentations and meetings. For several attendants it was their first travel to a community gathering: welcome Smit Patel, Brijesh Patel and Dimitrios Tanis!

Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.8 include, among other things:

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest we have included a feature on updates in Plasma Active from Marco Martin.

In addition, the usual list of updates:

• Window Thumbnail support for QML in Plasma Workspaces
• Mouse cursor size is now configurable, Oxygen mouse cursors (pseudo) scalable
• Basic routing activity added in Marble

The KDE community is proud to announce that next year's Akademy will be held in Tallinn, Estonia from the 30th of June to the 6th of July. Akademy is the annual world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.

Akademy 2011 in Berlin ended a few months ago. It was part of the Desktop Summit, which was a great success. Next year's Akademy awaits us in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.