Nightrose 

20 years ago today Matthias Ettrich sent an email that would mark the start of KDE as we know it today - a world-wide community of amazing people creating Free Software for you. In his email he announced the new Kool Desktop Environment and said “Programmers wanted!” In the 20 years since then so much has happened. We released great software, fought for software freedom and empowered people all over the world to take charge of their digital life. In many ways we have achieved what we set out to do 20 years ago - “a consistant, nice looking free desktop-environment” and more. Millions of people use KDE’s software every single day to do their work, have fun and connect to the most important people in their life. And yet we still have a long way ahead of us. Our job is far from done.

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 KDE Community is looking for a host for Akademy 2013.

Akademy is the annual gathering of the KDE Community, one of the largest in the world of Free and Open Source Software. At Akademy, KDE people gather to exchange ideas for development, plan for the future, and discuss other important issues. It is an extraordinary occasion for creativity, enthusiasm, commitment, close working relationships and innovation.

Image by D Sharon Pruitt

October is here in all of its glory! Whether you are seeing the leaves turn or the sun coming back, it is time to celebrate Amarok. We are nearing the year’s end and are ready to sum up our efforts, while we continue to develop and Rok the World!

Oh and a new Amarok Insider is out with some tips and tricks including how to search your music collection easily.

Head over to the release announcement, download it and enjoy rediscovering music.

KDE-based distribution Kubuntu has released version 9.10 which adds a new variant showcasing the up and coming Plasma Netbook setup. The release also adds OpenOffice KDE 4 integration and extra installer beauty thanks to artwork from KDE's Oxygen team.

Amarok 2.2

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.

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.

"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".

The Amarok team is getting ready for the release of Amarok 2.2 and is proud to release the first beta version of Amarok 2.2.

Work was put into all parts of Amarok to bring back old features like playlist sorting and new ones like a video and photo applet and the ability to rearrange parts of the program to make the layout fit your way of rediscovering music.

After 5 months of hard work the Amarok team is proud to announce the next major release, Amarok 2.1, codenamed "Let There Be Light".

Since the release of 2.0 we have gotten a lot of feedback and have already integrated some of it in 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. This new release includes a new look, many improvements, new features and brings back old favorites. The playlist can now be customized to only show the information you care about, matching the way you use Amarok. The layout of the Context View was changed, while navigation and applet management has been made easier. We added support for Amarok URLs to make it easier to share that crazy rock song you just found on Jamendo. You can now bookmark track positions, allowing you to save a part of a song for later or letting you start your audio book where you left off.

Another month has passed, and it's time to present the second beta release of the upcoming Amarok 2.1.

Besides the usual amount of bugfixes it also features some useful user interface improvements, for example the Context View has received some artistic love. More attention has been paid to detail and with the useful feedback from usability testing, tweaks have been made. From having the escape key clear the search box to standardizing the behaviour of the collection tree view to follow your KDE settings, the quirks are being ironed out. Check the release notes and grab your copy of Amarok for some testing and help us find and fix the remaining bugs before the release of Amarok 2.1.