KDE.news

A First - KDE and the Outreach Program for Women

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The KDE Community participated in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for the first time this year. It was more successful than expected. KDE got many great applications and mentored 4 students contributing to Free Software. The Outreach Program for Women encourages women to get involved in free and open source software. It provides a supportive community to begin contributing any time throughout the year, and offers focused internship opportunities twice a year with several free software organizations. Unlike the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), the Outreach Program for Women is open to non-students and non-coders.

KDE was glad to attract KDAB as a sponsor for one program slot. 2 other places were supported financially by the OPW sponsor pool that included many prestigious organizations such as Bloomberg, Google and several others. GNOME started OPW and has more information about the program.

Krita

One of the KDE projects that participated in OPW was Krita. Maria Far and Chinkal Naglpal did a great job for Krita this summer as OPW interns. They set up a webshop selling Krita-branded merchandise and helped manage the website. They created a coordinated system for the webshop, filled it with great items, created a database of artists who use Krita, integrated a variety of social networks, and fixed many issues with the website.

Mentor Boudewjin Rempt said:

I have really felt the results of their work both in terms of new contributors joining and in terms of new users. Financially, the shop isn't bringing in much yet -- drawing people there turns out to be tricky. I particularly enjoyed the series of artist interviews they did -- and are continuing with! It's been a learning experience for me, too!

Shop Krita

Artikulate

Another project that also offered opportunities for OPW participants was Artikulate. Artikulate is a young project, born in the KDE Education playground less than a year ago, and still on the way to its first end-user release. Despite its age, this pronunciation training application attracted two people, Magdalena Konkiewicz (OPW participant) and Oindrila Gupta (GSoC participant). Their projects had the goal to help drive Artikulate to the first release. Their mentor Andreas Cord-Landwehr said:

During the last three months, Magdalena and Oindrila did great work in polishing the user interfaces, establishing workflows for contributors, creating course material and documentation, and much more. With their work and successful recruiting of new contributors, Artikulate really made a big step forward.

The most visible contributions—though only a small piece of their work—can be seen in the new configuration dialogs, import mechanisms for courses, and learning statistics. As an immediate result of the work done in OPW, a preview release of Artikulate will be released soon.

Rewarding outcomes

The OPW participation was a very rewarding experience for the KDE Community. The close collaboration between interns and mentors also helped to integrate the new contributors into KDE's work and to create a pleasant team experience for them. All four participants want to continue contributing to their respective projects as they unanimously felt very welcome. Myriam Schweingruber, OPW coordinator for the KDE Community together with Lydia Pintscher, said:

It was a great experience to see the many interesting applications when the program started, and the contagious enthusiasm the four interns showed throughout the duration of the project. I am confident that all of them will continue to be great contributors to our community.

Amarok 2.7 "A Minor Tune" released!

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A New Year, a new Amarok! The Amarok Team is proud to present the new Amarok 2.7, codenamed "A Minor Tune".

This version comes with the following brand new major features, developed during last year's Google Summer of Code:

While originally scheduled before the end of 2012, our code monkeys enjoyed fixing bugs during the holiday period. So we delayed the release a few weeks to let them shine. It turned out great:

The File Browser's behavior and appearance was greatly improved.

Audio CD playback was resurrected (at least with the recent phonon-gstreamer).

We weren't lazy even before this. This release comes with an impressive number of bug fixes: a total of over 470 bugs were closed since the 2.6 release, of which exactly 100 are direct bug fixes (with a commit link). Over 30 feature requests were granted directly or indirectly as well.

We are also proud to ship a completely updated handbook, with updated screenshots and help pages for the new features. In this context, our thanks goes to the Google Code-In students who helped with updating the handbook. Several Code-In students helped test Amarok extensively, both with the 2.7 beta1 release and the development version. The students also helped move two old wiki instances to a new server, verifying the articles to be currently relevant with working links. In total, 10 students worked on a total of 47 tasks for Amarok. Great work indeed!

For more information about the changes with a detailed ChangeLog as well as download links, please refer to the release article on the Amarok website.

Roktober 2012

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Amarok music player is ten years old!
The Amarok team members are enthusiastic about sharing their plans for a bright future and accomplishments over the past year. This month they are celebrating 10 years of Amarok and asking for financial assistance to continue their great work.
In the last twelve months, the Amarok team has made over 1100 commits and closed more than 1030 bugs. Besides making quality improvements, they released 2 new major versions of Amarok, updated the Amarok Handbook, attended conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland along with much of the KDE Multimedia team. There were 5 successful Google Summer of Code projects and contributions to the Google Code-in. There is now a fully supported Windows version of Amarok that can be downloaded from the Amarok wiki. A lot has been accomplished.

Help create Amarok 3
The Amarok team is raising money to maintain the momentum and is asking for help from the Community, particularly including users and fans. The Roktober webpage has more about past year accomplishments, Google Summer of Code achievements, ambitious goals for the coming twelve months, and details about how to contribute. In addition, there is an opportunity for donors to be memorialized in the Amarok player.
Please visit the Roktober announcement to find out what's happening with Amarok. Get ready to be inspired. Rok out!

Amarok 2.6 "In Dulci Jubilo" Released

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Amarok 2.6 "In Dulci Jubilo"

New features

This version comes with a complete overhaul of iPod, iPad and iPhone support including Solid support for device playlists (however, the underlying library, libgpod, still doesn't support iOS 5 devices completely). Transcoding for iPod-like and USB Mass Storage devices is now provided that complements the transcoding features for the Local Collection. The Free Music Chart service is now activated by default and quite a lot of work was put into the album art support: Amarok now has embedded cover support for Ogg and FLAC files and album art is supported for tracks on the filesystem and USB Mass Storage devices.

Amarok now also includes a new Diagnostic Dialog in the Help menu, reporting versions of Amarok, Qt, KDE and Phonon libraries as well as the Phonon backend in use and the status of plugins and scripts. The Amarok developers have also refined their unit tests, and we use a continuous integration server which was of great help during the 12-week testing period.

Translations and bug fixes

Amarok 2.6.0 comes translated into 35 languages and more are being worked on for future releases. More than 110 reported bugs were fixed (of which 40 alone were reported and fixed in the testing period) and more than 20 wishes were implemented in this version. A total of 640 bug reports were closed; most were duplicates.

Did you know?

Amarok releases are usually named for Mike Oldfield (of "Amarok" fame) track names. We chose "In Dulci Jubilo" this time to celebrate Oldfield playing this in the XXX Olympiad opening ceremony.

Getting Amarok

You can download the tarballs for Linux and Windows from the KDE's mirror infrastructure. For the optimal sound experience we also recommend to use the new Phonon backends, released this weekend as well: phonon-backend-vlc 0.6 or phonon-backend-gstreamer 4.6.2