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The KOffice team is happy to announce the third beta of the upcoming KOffice 2.1. This extra beta has been added to ensure the highest quality for the final 2.1 release. The KOffice team has worked overtime and can show a longer list of fixed bugs than ever. See the full changelog for the impressive details. You can grab the source or install packages available for your distribution.

Linux Pro Magazine has interviewed Alex Spehr about her work on BugSquad and promoting KDE. The interview reveals what she's doing to help North America catch up with KDE promotion and what the most scary thing is about working with free software.

The KDE community today proudly announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2. As with any minor release, there are no new features but a strong concentration on further polishing the 4.3 series, which has been widely received as a release suitable for end users of all sorts.

KDE 4.3.2 brings a nice number of bug fixes including crashers. UI issues have been ruled out in KMail, and KWin effects have become more stable. There is also a good number of fixes in KDE's core libraries, which are beneficial to all applications using KDE libraries. More information can as usual be found in the changelog. Most distributions will have updated packages available shortly, so do not hesitate to update your KDE. KDE 4.3.2 is a recommended to everybody using KDE 4.

Last week Adriaan de Groot, Claudia Rauch and Kenny Duffus visited Tampere, Finland representing KDE. This gave a chance to meet face to face with members of the local team and talk about next summer's Akademy 2010 conference.

Amarok 2.2

The Amarok team is excited to announce the release of Amarok 2.2. In three and a half months, Amarok has made a huge leap forward, gaining many new features and a lot of old features from 1.4 have returned.

Amarok 2.2 brings back support for sorting and shuffling the playlist, for an external MySQL database as well as for playing audio CDs to name a few. It brings a new video and photo applet to show media related to the current song. The layout can be modified to suit your needs thanks to dock widgets and the sidebar has been changed to be easier to navigate with bread crumbs.

Read more about all the new exciting features in the release announcement.

Today, the KDE Community Forums, in collaboration with "People Behind KDE", have launched a new initiative to give the community an opportunity to get to know each other a bit closer: KDialogue.

Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Thanks to all students and mentors for their great work! Below you will find a short interview with each of the students, asking them about the cool things they have been working on for the past few months.

On October 29 the dutch NLUUG will organise a conference about 'The Open Web'. In 18 talks and one keynote we hope to give you the best from a wide range of topics. Things you can expect are cool stuff you can do with HTML5, integrating geoinformation in applications with Geoclue, comet, the social desktop (integrating information from web services and all contacts into applications and your desktop) and much more.

There will be quite some talks related to KDE. Accidental? We don't think so. It shows that KDE is on the forefront of integrating open web technologies into the desktop. It also means that KDE is exciting and cool.

The complete program and details about registration can be found on the conference website.

The last few years has seen the company formerly known as Trolltech open their arms to one of the largest parts of their supporting community, KDE, in a new way: By offering a few members of the KDE community free admittance to the Qt Developer Days conference. This year is no different, and they have invited a number of people to attend this year's conferences. Yes, that's plural: There are two conferences. One from the 12th to 14th of October in Munich, Germany and one from the 2nd to the 4th of November in San Francisco, USA.

Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

"This shows that KOffice has one of the best technical foundations", says Jan Hambrecht, one of the core developers of KOffice. "It is both lightweight, flexible and very fast, which makes it perfect in embedded environments like a smart phone".

Nokia has created a customized GUI based on the Maemo 5 touch screen interface on top of the KOffice core. It has also worked on making the support for MS Office documents more mature. Thomas Zander of Qt Development Framework and KO GmbH worked on fixing bugs and enhancing support for MS Office formats.

The first presentation of this work will be at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam from October 9th to 11th.