KDE.news

Amarok 2.2 "Sunjammer" released

Thursday, 1 October 2009 | Nightrose

Amarok 2.2

The Amarok team is excited to announce the release of Amarok 2.2. In three and a half months, Amarok has made a huge leap forward, gaining many new features and a lot of old features from 1.4 have returned.

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.

First KDialogue Is Now Open

Monday, 28 September 2009 | Einar

Today, the KDE Community Forums, in collaboration with "People Behind KDE", have launched a new initiative to give the community an opportunity to get to know each other a bit closer: KDialogue. Read More

What I Did On My Summer Holiday

Saturday, 26 September 2009 | Nightrose

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.

NLUUG Autumn Conference - The Open Web

Thursday, 24 September 2009 | Jospoortvliet

On October 29 the dutch NLUUG will organise a conference about 'The Open Web'. In 18 talks and one keynote we hope to give you the best from a wide range of topics. Things you can expect are cool stuff you can do with HTML5, integrating geoinformation in applications with Geoclue, comet, the social desktop (integrating information from web services and all contacts into applications and your desktop) and much more. Read More

Community Members Invited To Qt Developer Days 2009

Saturday, 19 September 2009 | Leinir

The last few years has seen the company formerly known as Trolltech open their arms to one of the largest parts of their supporting community, KDE, in a new way: By offering a few members of the KDE community free admittance to the Qt Developer Days conference. This year is no different, and they have invited a number of people to attend this year's conferences. Yes, that's plural: There are two conferences. One from the 12th to 14th of October in Munich, Germany and one from the 2nd to the 4th of November in San Francisco, USA. Read More

KOffice To Be Used In Next Generation Smart Phone

Thursday, 17 September 2009 | Nightrose

Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

"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".

KOffice 2.1 Beta 2 Released

Wednesday, 16 September 2009 | Ingwa

The KOffice team today announced the second beta of the upcoming 2.1 release. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to only fix the remaining bugs, and that is obvious from this release. The first beta of 2.1 was released without any fanfares, but it marked the transition into the bugfixing stage. We now think it's time to let the users start to participate in the process. You can see the progress in the full changelog. Read More

Third Plasma Summit Lifts KDE Desktop To Higher Grounds

Tuesday, 8 September 2009 | Sebas

The Plasma Team

Last week, the third Plasma developers meeting was held in the Swiss Alps. 15 developers from 3 continents came to Randa, Canton Wallis to work on Plasma's code, design new ideas and concepts and to strengthen their bonds as a sub-community within KDE. Topics of this third Plasma sprint, which is named after a plasma fusion reactor, included but were not limited to Plasma on mobile devices, network-enabled Plasma widgets and a richer user interface thanks to a new animation framework. Furthermore deeper integration of web services in the Plasma shell, semantic awareness of Plasma components, secure privilege elevation and polishing of the existing functionality, among many other things, were on the agenda. The results of Tokamak III are, with all due modesty, nothing short of mind-blowing and display the health and swift pace of development of the whole KDE community. Plasma lead developer Aaron Seigo wraps up "It's been one of the longest KDE sprints ever, and after a week, we're all quite exhausted. Looking back at the results, however, the we have shown impressive progress all over the KDE desktop shell. We're reaching out to new use cases, new developers, new devices. Meanwhile the social aspects within the Plasma team continue to impress me. The Plasma team has grown into a small community, a group of friends that have set out to revolutionize the desktop. With the previous KDE releases, we mainly focused on providing and improving existing technology, now we're pushing the boundaries of the Free Desktop. Looking at the results that have materialized over the past week, this is the Plasma promise coming true. And we've only just begun..."

Remote Controlling KDE

Dutch Plasma hacker Rob Scheepmaker presented the results of his work on sharing and controlling Plasma applets and KDE applications over the network. He presented how the user can easily share locally installed widgets over the network. As an example, he showed how to share the "Now Playing" Plasmoid with other machines and users on the local network. The "Now Playing" Plasmoid can now be used to control the media player running on another computer, all using KDE's Plasma technology. Under the hood, a number of technologies for communicating, orchestrating and announcing local services is used. For announcing the availability of an applet on the network, the Zeroconf protocol is used. The orchestration and transferring of applets, data and control commands happens using the JOLIE and QtJolie technology. The remote widget support is another long-planned feature for Plasma which will become available in the 4.4 release, as Scheepmakers worked hard to ready the API and polish the user interfaces to meet KDE's standards for inclusion in a main module. "The remote control of a media player on another computer is only the tip of the iceberg of what we make available across the network. Prepare for some completely new and truly innovative collaboration and interaction features coming up using this unique new technology", Scheepmaker lets us know.

Amarok 2.2 Beta 1 "Crystal Clear" Released

Friday, 4 September 2009 | Nightrose

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.

KDE Community Forums Awarded phpBBHacks.com Featured phpBB For August 2009

Friday, 4 September 2009 | Justin Kirby

Over the last year the KDE Community Forums have served as a premier platform for the KDE community to communicate with each other. With over 13,000 registered users generating more than 15,000 topics of discussion the site is growing by the minute. A little over a month ago, the forums introduced a new look while moving over to the phpBB forum software. These improvements have clearly caught the attention of many people as KDE's Community Forums were selected as the phpBBHacks.com Featured phpBB for the month of August 2009. Read More