Nstevens 

The aRts/KDE Video Roadmap Meeting ending up having a fairly large turnout, peaking at 26 participants on the IRC channel. There was so much turnout, in fact, that participants could not agree on a single line of strategy for video development in aRts and KDE. Some wished for a successor to mpeglib, something that would work within aRts but with the optimizations necessary for high framerate video. Others saw no need for aRts itself to be extended for video, and proposed using one of two external video systems. Fortunately, there were volunteers willing to code for each approach, so development will commence on multiple paths concurrently. In time, when the results are mature and ready for use by KDE, one will be chosen to be part of the KDE Multimedia standard. Read on to find out more about the teams and the code already produced. Read More

The KDE 3.0 Release Plan has been updated, with the KDE 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (likely to be renamed Beta2 shortly) now scheduled for February 4th, followed by a "deep freeze", and the announcement of KDE 3.0 on March 18th. A list of KDE 3.0 planned features is available as well as a list of features postponed for KDE 3.1. Read More

All aRts and KDE developers (or would-be developers) are invited to an IRC meeting in order to draft a short- and long-term roadmap for the future of video in aRts and KDE. Why? aRts is a solid base, and it would be a shame not to build a good video system on top of that, taking the best from the already existing video projects. Read More

Why does KDE work so well? Benjamin Meyer thinks he knows why, and he explains his thoughts in this Tribute to KDE. Benjamin is the lead developer of Kaim (screenshots), and has been working hard at porting this application from being Qt-only to a fully-fledged KDE application. In doing so, he has come in contact with the KDE development community and processes. Benjamin's experiences have led him to conclude that KDE's CVS culture, release strategy, and focus on consistency lead to polished, mature applications. Read More