KDE.news 

After 5 months of hard work the Amarok team is proud to announce the next major release, Amarok 2.1, codenamed "Let There Be Light".

Since the release of 2.0 we have gotten a lot of feedback and have already integrated some of it in 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. This new release includes a new look, many improvements, new features and brings back old favorites. The playlist can now be customized to only show the information you care about, matching the way you use Amarok. The layout of the Context View was changed, while navigation and applet management has been made easier. We added support for Amarok URLs to make it easier to share that crazy rock song you just found on Jamendo. You can now bookmark track positions, allowing you to save a part of a song for later or letting you start your audio book where you left off.

Over the last few years, the KOffice team has reworked the framework into an agile and flexible codebase. Our intention was to increase integration between the components of KOffice, decrease duplication of functionality and ease maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new approaches to UI design and interacting with the user have been implemented to support the new capabilities.

The first openSUSE Community Week took place on the 11-17 May 2009 and as an important part of the distribution, the geeko-loving KDE community were actively involved.

Throughout the week we were busy packaging, triaging bugs and introducing new community members to these skills. The releases of KDE 4.3 Beta 1 and Amarok 2.1 Beta 2 kept the team busy fixing last minute compilation errors and replacing 4.2.3 in the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repository with 4.3 Beta 1 as we move towards openSUSE 11.2. KDE 4.2 continues to be available in the KDE:42 repository so if you haven't switched yet, we expect you want to help make 4.3 excellent!

Another month has passed, and it's time to present the second beta release of the upcoming Amarok 2.1.

Besides the usual amount of bugfixes it also features some useful user interface improvements, for example the Context View has received some artistic love. More attention has been paid to detail and with the useful feedback from usability testing, tweaks have been made. From having the escape key clear the search box to standardizing the behaviour of the collection tree view to follow your KDE settings, the quirks are being ironed out. Check the release notes and grab your copy of Amarok for some testing and help us find and fix the remaining bugs before the release of Amarok 2.1.