KDE.news 

In Oslo, Norway, the second KOffice developer sprint this year has started. The KOffice developers must be getting used to seeing each other regularly - besides the two sprints there were many other meetings and events with a handful of KOffice developers present. However, their 'own' sprints still are special - dedicated to some team building, designing and hard work in a cooperative and positive atmosphere.

The 4.0 release of the KDE software compilation marked a major milestone for the KDE community. While the underlying development platform has seen a modernization to better work with increased demand of applications, the community also saw a shift in its development methods. Interaction design has become much more important, and hence the need to collect feedback from the user in a structured manner. Ultimately, this leads to more understandable user interfaces and simpler handling of the underlying complexity of modern computers and portable devices. Nuno Pinheiro, a well-known artist and icon designer in the KDE community and engineering psychologist Björn Balazs from the Open Source Usability Labs and director for analysis, design and testing at Apliki decided they wanted to help with this.

The KDE-Edu team is looking for feedback from their users, to help drive development in directions that best suit their needs. All users are welcome to have their say. A short five-minute questionnaire has been created, asking for three key points where you think the KDE-Edu applications could be improved, as well as to gather general feedback. We look forwards to hearing your responses.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul.

CBS' geektastic sitcom sensation "The Big Bang Theory" has joined a long list of KDE television outings with main character Leonard Hofstadter wearing Konqueror on his chest in last night's episode, "The Vengeance Formulation":

KDE has changed over the past 13 years. The application framework has grown, matured and gone cross-platform, as have the applications. Strong growth in our community has created an increasingly diverse and large set of high-quality applications.

digiKam developer Gilles Caulier hacked with Kåre Särs on the Acquire Images Kipi plugin and found some problems with the libksane Twain implementation. Working on cross-platform support, he reported a lot of problems with digiKam on Windows to Patrick Spendrin, who immediately went to fix them, shared his experience to compile digiKam under MinGW and MSVC, and tested compilation under Mac OS X on Kåre's borrowed MacBook. Some problems in the liblqr library are waiting to be fixed.

If you read PlanetKDE, you may have noticed that there was a combined Booth, Web and Marketing Sprint in Stuttgart last weekend. While those blog posts discussed the fun to be had in getting a load of KDE contributors together in one place, the event was really about having some important discussions and getting a lot of serious work done so that our presentation of KDE matches the quality of our products. Read on for details of the many things we got up to.

Do you have a special story about how you or your organization has used KDE to break free from proprietary software? If so, enter the Camp KDE "Be Free" Contest and tell us your story!

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