KDE.news 

Since we began seriously working on Amarok 2 more than two years ago, Amarok has come a very long way. Looking back at screenshots of some of the very early incarnations of Amarok 2 can be almost frightening, and it is clear that Amarok 2 has changed much since then. While the Amarok 2.0 release was in no way perfect, it was more importantly a solid foundation to work on, and Amarok 2.1 is already shaping up to be a much more well rounded music manager. Read More

In our tradition of doing monthly service releases, today the KDE community presents the release of 4.2.3, the third update to the KDE 4.2 series and just as cool as ever. This service update brings you bugfixes, performance improvements and updated translations, but no new features in order to minimize the risk of regressions. KDE 4.2.3 is a recommended upgrade for everybody currently running KDE 4.2.2 or earlier. The details of this release can be found in the changelog. Read More

At last year's Akademy the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide community of contributors and users who belief in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. You can find more of this conceptual background on Frank Karlitschek's slides from his keynote at Akademy 2008. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas Frank addressed was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people, to contact them and to collaborate. Read More

Are you a student of design, usability, human factors, or other HCI-related field? Are you interested in working on an open source project? For 10-15 hours a week between June 1 and August 31, you could work with an experienced usability mentor on a fun and interesting design project! An added bonus is the $1000 USD internship stipend at the end of the project. Read More

Earlier today, Qt Software released updates to Qt and Qt Creator. Both releases are available for download from http://qtsoftware.com/downloads -- either stand-alone or as part of a new build of the Qt SDK. Read More

Qt Software and <a href=http://ev.kde.org/"">KDE e.V. are happy to report that they are sponsoring a developer sprint for all North American students accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009 to work on KDE. The event will be completely free for all accepted students, with round-trip flights, lodging, and some meals fully reimbursed; all students that applied for GSoC 2009 are invited to attend, although those not accepted into the program will have to ask <a href=http://ev.kde.org/"">KDE e.V. to be reimbursed for travel and lodging expenses. Read More

Amarok 2.1 Beta 1 is out in the wild! Featuring one of the longest ChangeLogs in Amarok history, this beta release showcases what is possible when building on the strong technical foundations that have been laid with Amarok 2.0. Nearly all parts of Amarok have received attention, and while not a final release, it is already very usable and quite stable. Hop on over to amarok.kde.org to read the full release announcement including the epic sized ChangeLog.

Today, the KOffice team has released the first, and hopefully the only, release candidate for KOffice 2.0, bringing more than three years of work to a temporary conclusion. Compared to Beta 7, this release candidate brings a multitude of bug fixes and not a single new feature, as it should be! Read More

This weekend the A-Team (Akonadi, not Amarok) gathered in KDAB's office in the heart of Berlin to push the Akonadi PIM storage database to the next level.
On Friday afternoon, after everybody arrived, the meeting started with a series of presentations to get everybody on the same page with respect to progress in various parts of Akonadi. Read More

As of today, the latest version of the KDE desktop and software distribution carries the version number 4.2.2. The release, as is usual for our monthly point-releases does not have a lot of exciting new features, but makes your life just a bit easier. Many bug fixes have been backported from the trunk of KDE development. Among those fixes is a large number of improvements in KHTML, some stability work on KRunner, a long list of improvements to KMail, and many others. As they say, the devil is in the detail, so take a cup of tea and read the changelog for yourself. Note that the changelog is often not complete, so be sure to upgrade and check what has been fixed in the set of programs you use. Read More