Aseigo 

Submissions for the Plasma Javascript Jam Session closed at the end of March and the judging commenced, with the community joining the judging panel as a collective "5th member". Every Plasmoid that was submitted was a success and a joy to try out: congratulations to all of those who participated. Read More

The Plasma Javascript Jam Session is a friendly competition that aims to reward creators of original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition. The competion concluded on March 31st with 11 successful submissions making the deadline. Judging has commenced, and it will not be easy: many excellent submissions were sent in ranging from the entertaining to the highly useful. Ranging in size from a few dozen lines to a few thousand lines of Javascript code, the submissions showcase a variety of ideas and possibilities. Read More

We are pleased to announce the Plasma Javascript Jam Session. This friendly competition will reward creators of the most original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets (Plasmoids) written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition. Read More

Today, Nokia and Trolltech announced that Nokia will be purchasing Trolltech. Nokia will continue with Qt's dual license model, which was updated to GPL 3 only last week. In an open letter to KDE, the chief Trolls and Nokia VP asked for ideas and comments on improving their relationship with the open source community. Nokia will be applying to become a patron of KDE e.V. and the FreeQt foundation is being maintained to guarantee the continued freedom of the toolkit KDE depends upon. This change should help ensure both the continued longevity of Qt and KDE as well as give the platform a boost in industry, particularly in the consumer electronics industry. Read More

When picking a media center solution for your PC, it tends to be a matter of compromise. There are solutions that are visually attractive, solutions that are Free/open source software, solutions that are more complete than others and solutions that integrate well with a desktop environment. In the past there have been few, if any, that have been all of these things. After an extensive beta testing period a new version of LinuxMCE, release 0704, was recently made available to the public that shows how we can indeed have our media center cake and eat it too. Read on for details of this release and future plans for KDE integration. Read More

KDE's new technical documentation library, TechBase, hit an important milestone today when it served up its one millionth page. In step with the KDE 4.0 development cycle, TechBase is rapidly maturing into a central hub for high-level technical information related to KDE and the Free software desktop. Read More

During FISL 8.0 I caught up with PostgreSQL contributor Josh Berkus who was there to present on PostgreSQL and meet up with the local PostgreSQL community. Josh is a member of the PostgreSQL core team and works at Sun Microsystems as part of their open source database team. Over lunch, Josh shared how KDE plays an important role in the release coordination process which Josh oversees. Read More

With over 700 attendees and a speaking track packed full of goodies, the one-day Ohio Linux Fest held this past Saturday in the city of Columbus was an unqualified success. KDE had a booth at the event which was kept exceedingly busy the entire day. Most of the people who visited the booth mentioned that they use KDE and several asked that we pass on their appreciation to the entire KDE team for all the work that they have put into it over the years. Read More

Following yesterday's rousing KDE e.V. meeting, aKademy 2005 officially kicked off today with dual presentation tracks filled with content designed for users and system administrators. At the same time the hacking rooms were full of busy developers from morning until evening at which point everyone went to a party sponsored by Novell. Read More

After a few months of quiet activity, the Appeal desktop project has rolled out a new project website that documents what everyone has been up to and discussing. Since the the last public announcement many things have occurred, including another Appeal meeting being held in Germany. The project is looking forward to sharing its experiences and gathering input from the general KDE developer community at aKademy 2005 later this month. Read More

Trolltech, makers of the Qt application development framework used by KDE and the Qtopia application development platform for embedded Linux devices, is proud to announce their full-time sponsorship of KDE developer Aaron Seigo. This arrangement will enable Aaron to devote his full time and attention to KDE software projects such as Plasma, which aims to reshape the desktop, as well as to engage in greater Open Source community participation and support. Read More

Registration has begun for those wanting to attend the first Open Source Desktop Workshop to be held on October 13th and 14th in San Diego, California! Open Source Desktop Workshops are affordable educational events that bring top-flight Open Source desktop developers together with those who are looking to gain the skills necessary to join them. With presenters from around North America speaking on a variety of practical topics this will be an exciting and worthwhile event. Read More

Break out those digital paint brushes! Revelinux Gear is sponsoring a contest this weekend over at KDE-Artists.org which challenges the artistically inclined to come up with visual concepts for Plasma's desktop buttons. These themable buttons will be used for all clickable file and action icons on the desktop, applets and panels. Being such a critical part of the user experience, they must be usable and stunningly beautiful. This contest aims to find out what they might look like. Winners will receive an autographed Plasma t-shirt and may also have their artwork appear in KDE 4.0. Read More

Recently, our very own Fabrice Mous asked if I might write an article about usability and KDE development. At first I was hesitant, and not just because I have a lot more hacking to get done before KDE 3.4 is released (which is soon). I often get asked about usability and the Open Source process, and even I sometimes get tired of having the same old conversations over and over. I thought that this time it would be refreshing to ask someone else these questions and see what they had to say. So I arranged to meet up with several people on IRC who are involved in software usability and the KDE project. Here's what ensued... Read More

As the leading Open Source desktop, many from the private and public sectors have expressed interest in KDE and are currently using it on a daily basis. A message consistently received from those users has been that KDE's usability could be better. While the need for greater usability is not unique to KDE, what is unique is our ability to directly and positively affect the usability processes in KDE via the same Open Source methods that have been at the core of its success. Read More

Adding WhatsThis Help To KDE Applications is the first installment in the Non-Programmer's Guide to Participating in KDE tutorial series. This series is designed to aid those who would like to participate in the KDE project, but for one reason or another can't do so by contributing source code. Fortunately, there are many tasks in KDE that don't involve writing code, and many of them don't require much investment in the way of time, either. Adding WhatsThis help in KDE is one such task. Read More

The KOffice developers have been making outstanding progress towards their goal of creating a useful, powerful and reliable KDE office suite. But whereas the technology in KOffice has been steadily improving, its visual appearance has not been keeping pace. To address this issue, the KOffice development team is pleased to announce the KOffice Icon Contest. This contest is being held to ensure that KOffice 1.3 not only works better but also looks better than any previous release. Read More

As recently announced, an effort has been started for closer cooperation between the KDE and GNOME usability teams. The effort was announced in a message sent to the open-hci@freedesktop.org mailinglist that was created for this purpose. Read More

A feature article on KDE that appeared in the November edition of Linux Magazine is now available online. The article concentrates on deploying KDE in business environments and showcases a few of KDE3's newer features. It outlines how to lock down and configure a KDE3 installation using the KDE kiosk framework and how to set up KDE to use centralized resources for configuration and data. Read More

The ability to select mimetype-specific actions from Konqueror's context menu is an oft-requested feature. The pleasant surprise is that this is already possible. The even more pleasant surprise is that you don't need to be a software developer to do it. This article, the fourth in the dot tutorial series, details step-by-step how to quickly and easily add new actions to Konqueror's context menu. Read More

After 36 issues and over 300 mailing list thread summaries, I have decided to take a semi-permanent break as editor of the Kernel Cousin KDE project. KC KDE was taking up quite a bit of my available time outside of work and family and, as enjoyable as it was to put KC KDE together, I have had to reprioritize things a bit. It would be a shame to see KC KDE simply go away forever, though. If anyone is interested in taking up the role of editor, I would be more than happy to get them started and co-edit the first few issues until they are confident and comfortable with the process. Read More

Issue #24 of KC KDE is available. Summaries include coverage of KDE language bindings, Synchronous KIO, ALSA and aRts, KPilot, CSS Media support, the new DCOP tools and more. Read More

This week's issue of KC KDE is devoted to the exciting events surrounding the start of KDE3 development and the Qt3 porting efforts. Topics include new applications such as Cookbook, KTouch and Kompare; large file support; S/MIME, EMail templates and KNode/KMail integration; advanced web shortcuts; KMenu plugins; new KDE email lists and websites; KRegExpEditor; KWinTV and more... Read More

This week's issue is momentous as it marks the growth of the editing team from one lonesome soul to a whopping two people! Rob Kaper joins the KC KDE effort this week with a summary of the kde-games list. He will also be following the konq-e list which tracks development of Konqueror for the frame buffer (non-X) and the kde-promo list. This brings the total number of lists summarized each week up to an even dozen. Check it out here... (includes coverage on thesaurus support in KWord, fax support in KDE, and much more). Read More