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Amarok 2.2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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".

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.

The Plasma Team

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.

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.

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.