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Friday, 16 October 2009

Linux Journal Reviews Kdenlive

Over at Linux Journal, Dave Phillips takes a look at the video editor Kdenlive. This KDE 4 application allows users to download video from camcorders or capture screen recordings, edit audio and video tracks, and more. Phillips concludes: "There's a lot to like about Kdenlive, and I like it a lot. Its feature set is full enough to satisfy basic desktop video production needs, and its workflow is uncomplicated and easy to learn. However, it must be considered that I've reviewed a personal build from SVN sources." Read the full article.

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

Nokia Sponsors KOffice Development for Mobile Devices

At the Maemo Conference in Amsterdam Suresh Chande announced that Nokia has contracted KO GmbH to write a mobile office viewer using the KOffice libraries. The presentation by Suresh was given with the Nokia N900 smartphone, using the new Office Viewer.

Monday, 12 October 2009

Free N900

At the Maemo Summit Conference in Amsterdam, Nokia gave out over 300 N900 phones running Maemo 5. The N900 is the successor to the N810, over a hundred of which were handed out at Akademy a year ago. Read on for some opinions about the N900 and the results of 3 days of hacking.

Monday, 12 October 2009

KDE Community Forums Celebrate Their First Birthday

Exactly one year ago, on October 12th, the KDE Community Forums were founded. It was about time to give users a place for discussion and support beside the mailing lists, which were mainly used by developers and other contributors. A lot of time has passed since then, and the forums have grown into a healthy community, contributing to the KDE landscape as a whole. Here people can ask KDE-related questions, help other users, find useful information, or just discuss whatever comes to mind.

The KDE Community Forums started as a two-person endeavor, but members from various backgrounds in the KDE community soon joined: as of today, the staff includes four administrators, five global moderators and a plethora of forum moderators. At the same time, the forums have acted as a foundation for new initiatives, the most famous one being the KDE Brainstorm. In Brainstorm forum members can suggest improvements to KDE, as well as vote on and discuss other users' ideas. Other, similar activities have included the Klassroom (week-long tutorial sessions) and the recently launched KDialogue. The forums evolved to accomodate the needs of their users, getting a brand new look and more features.

A timeline showing major events in the history of the KDE Community Forums

Right from the start there were already some application-specific forums, for example for KMyMoney. Later a special forum for Eigen was also added on request. A big milestone was the merge with the largest existing KDE application forum at that point, the Amarok forum. Other applications (such as KOffice and Krita) also found their home in the forums. These are all moderated by their respective developers, with support from the forum team.

As of today, the forums have 18397 registered members and no less than 71001 posts in 15246 topics.
What will the future bring for the KDE Community Forums? There is still room for expansion, and the team welcomes any constructive feedback. You can leave a message in the Feedback & Questions forum or talk to us directly on IRC in #kde-forum on Freenode.

So, happy birthday to the forums. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

Sunday, 11 October 2009

Maemo Conference 2009 in Amsterdam

KDE people @ Maemo

Last weekend Amsterdam was visited by hackers from various Free Software communities and companies from around the world. Brought together by the Maemo Summit in the WesterGasFabriek, they gave and attended talks about topics like the Maemo applications, user interface components, the underlying infrastructure and of course the future of Maemo. Read on for a short impression of this conference. Since the decision to move to Qt for the UI in the next release of Maemo, Harmattan, the KDE community has gotten more involved with Maemo. Due to the use of many frameworks initially developed within the Gnome community, Maemo presents an interesting mix of technologies which has the potential to infuse new ideas in the Free Desktop. The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this year already made clear how both communities can work together and how the whole can be more than the parts.

Dave Neary talking about documentation in the main hall

Cocktails from Skype!

There are people here from various KDE projects like Amarok and KOffice but also KDE related companies like KDAB and BasysKom. They mingle with the Maemo community, and the location is perfect for that. In the community area, but also in the main ("N900") hall you can find besides the usual tables and chairs beanbags, plenty of power outlets, wifi and plenty of food and drinks. The Westergasfabriek is certainly a very interesting location, especially the main hall - the photos below certainly don't do justice to the industrial environment. We're being taken care off very well, that's for sure.

Friday, 9 October 2009

The Social Desktop Winners

Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

Thursday, 8 October 2009

KOffice 2.1 Beta 3 Released

"Gentlebot" made with Krita

The KOffice team is happy to announce the third beta of the upcoming KOffice 2.1. This extra beta has been added to ensure the highest quality for the final 2.1 release. The KOffice team has worked overtime and can show a longer list of fixed bugs than ever. See the full changelog for the impressive details. You can grab the source or install packages available for your distribution.

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

Alex Spehr Interviewed About KDE and BugSquad

Linux Pro Magazine has interviewed Alex Spehr about her work on BugSquad and promoting KDE. The interview reveals what she's doing to help North America catch up with KDE promotion and what the most scary thing is about working with free software.

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

Akademy 2010 Dates Announced

Last week Adriaan de Groot, Claudia Rauch and Kenny Duffus visited Tampere, Finland representing KDE. This gave a chance to meet face to face with members of the local team and talk about next summer's Akademy 2010 conference.

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

KDE 4.3.2 Available

The KDE community today proudly announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2. As with any minor release, there are no new features but a strong concentration on further polishing the 4.3 series, which has been widely received as a release suitable for end users of all sorts.