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Monday, 10 August 2009

Reviews of KDE 4.3

Since KDE 4.3 has been released, various reviews have appeared on the web. The DOT had a look at some of them.

Polishlinux once again offers an extensive review with many screenshots showing what is new in KDE 4.3. According to Korneliusz Jarzębski, "Finally the day has come, when the curiosity about the KDE4.3 development branch took the better of me.". The result:

Friday, 7 August 2009

Announcing Camp KDE 2010!

We are pleased to announce Camp KDE 2010!

Camp KDE 2010 will take place at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla, California, USA from January 15th until January 22nd, 2010. The event is free to all participants.

Thursday, 6 August 2009

Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

This year's Gran Canaria Desktop Summit represented the first time the GNOME and KDE communities have co-located their annual conferences in the same location. 852 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together last month to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience at the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

Tuesday, 4 August 2009

KDE 4.3.0 Released: Caizen

KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish. The statistics from the bug tracker speak for themselves: 10,000 bugs have been fixed. In addition, close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. That is not to say that the KDE team did not add a large number of new features: 2000 feature requests were implemented in the past 6 months, meaning that any user's pet feature might well be among the improvements KDE 4.3.0 brings. The changes in KDE 4.3 are largely in three categories: the desktop workspace, the applications, and the development platform.

Plasma, KDE's desktop interface and KWin, KDE's window and compositing manager are now working more closely together. Desktop effects and the Plasma shell now share their themes, and it is also possible to have separate sets of Plasma widgets and wallpapers on each virtual desktop. The new Air theme makes a visual difference. It is much lighter than the Oxygen theme, which is still available through the Desktop Settings dialog.
On the applications front, KDE 3 users will like the new tree view in System Settings, which more closely resembles KDE 3's KControl. Dolphin, KDE's file manager, now show previews of images contained in a directory as an overlay for the directory icon. Hovering over it enables a slideshow of the images in the directory the icon represents.
KDE's development platform has become more stable, more performant, leaner and at the same time more complete. For Plasma applet developers, there is now a geolocation plugin that makes it possible to query the current location. This is used in the OpenDesktop applet to show people near you. The new KDE PolicyKit library provides a mechanism for applications to authorise certain actions based on profiles. A KDE-style API makes it secure and easy to temporarily elevate privileges for an application.

Tuesday, 4 August 2009

New KDE Buzz

While you wait for the KDE 4.3 gates to open, you may be interested in our new buzz.kde.org site, using an experimental "LifeStream" tracking KDE on identi.ca and Twitter, Picasaweb, Flickr and Youtube. Check out buzz.kde.org for the stream for who's saying what about the hottest Free Desktop release this year!

Monday, 3 August 2009

Ongoing Oxygen Icons Usability Survey: KDevelop

Every few weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team are publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you are at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for KDevelop 4 which is a major rewrite of KDevelop for KDE 4. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the KDevelop Icons Survey now.

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

GCDS Slides and Videos Online

The available slides and videos from GCDS are now available for download. Grab the slides to catch up on over 40 of the best talks, and get the videos to over 50 enlightening presentation. Thanks to GeekSoc for hosting and thanks to the team from KDE who manned the cameras.

Thursday, 23 July 2009

Akademy-es 2009

KDE Developers of Spain

During the final days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the fourth edition of Akademy-es was held in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Akademy-es is the sister of Akademy aimed at Spanish speakers. Akademy-es started on Friday 10th with a talk by Cenatic, a governmental foundation with the aim to promote and improve knowledge of free software in public administrations, companies, universities, etc. For that, the foundation is creating and developing different courses both online and at site based on free software. They want to create a specific course for the KDE desktop, so they asked for collaboration from KDE España, the Spanish organisation to support and promote the KDE project in Spain. The president of Cenatic showed his interest in the project and this collaboration will be starting in the coming months.

Later on, Albert Astals Cid and Aleix Pol showed us the KDE-Edu project, giving some demonstrations of different applications like KHangman or KGeography.

Wednesday, 22 July 2009

KDE 4.3 RC3 Released

Even in the hot phase up to KDE 4.3.0, there have been quite a bunch of fixes to KDE's 4.3 branch. The KDE Release Team has decided to err on the safe side and do another release candidate before KDE 4.3.0 comes out. Dirk Müller has rolled tarballs of the current state of KDE 4.3 and put them up for testers, packages for some distributions are already under way. This also means that the release of KDE 4.3.0 has been postponed for one week. The new planned release date is August, 4th 2009.

Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Akademy 2009 Technical Papers Published: Research And Innovation In The KDE Community

Over the last few years KDE has seen increased involvement of students and university researchers. While many universities still feel uneasy about working with Free Software, the open and welcoming attitude in the KDE community has already brought several scientific research projects to life. A prime example is of course the Nepomuk project, officially finished but still very much alive within the Free Software- and scientific communities. Furthermore, many involved contributors make use of scientific research papers while looking for inspiration to solve the more complex problems involved in writing software. The Free Software community also contributes in a practical way to science: the Avogadro project, grown out of the KDE educational application Kalzium develops an advanced molecular editor designed for use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. Last Akademy, an initiative was developed by Celeste Lyn Paul to bring KDE and science even closer.