KDE.news 

Today, the Qt Marketing Team has launched a new website to engage the community in a different way: QtOverload.com. This site is dedicated to unusual Qt development and will mirror the diversity of the ecosystem surrounding Qt.

One year ago, on April 6th, BugSquad had the first BugDay. Since then, an astounding 93 people have participated in one. For many, it was their first active involvement in the KDE community. Join us as we celebrate in style!

Bruce Byfield looks closer at KDE's development process and compares it to our friendly competition at GNOME. Byfield looks at the potential of both platforms in the long run, and asks the question: "... which developmental approach is likely to be most successful in the next few years?" In the article, Bruce provides some good insight into the big picture that lies behind the move to KDE 4 technologies and how they are unfolding their potential: "Reviews about KDE are not always positive, but they are about large issues and shifts in the desktop paradigm. Reading them, you cannot help but come away with the impression that KDE developers are headed in a definite direction, even if you disagree with some or all of the details."

Full Circle Magazine has a new issue out (4MB PDF) with a couple of KDE themed interviews. Lydia Pintscher, Amarok community manager and Kubuntu Council member, is interviewed about how she got into Linux, her role in the community, the fate of KDE women and even how she fell in love. Elite Kubuntu packaging ninja, Steve Stalcup talks about how he got into packaging, where to get help and what makes him amazed.

The student application period for Google Summer of Code begins at 19:00 UTC today, and closes at 19:00 UTC on April 3rd. Students should be sure to seek feedback from their mentors as early as possible, to ensure that their application is in top shape for the grading period.

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for July to December 2008. This document includes reports of the board and the Marketing and System Administration working groups, details of the KDE e.V. activities of the last two quarters of 2008, financial information, and future plans. All long-term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V.

KDE is about the community, rather than the product. It is not all about the code: there are many other ways in which people can be part of KDE, and a very simple way is to connect with other people.

This summer KDE will once again be participating in Google Summer of Code! This will give KDE another opportunity to achieve the massive forward momentum and influx of new developers that has been the hallmark of each Summer of Code.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Experimentation with recording presentations in Okular. Mobipocket format support added to Okular, Strigi, and the thumbnailer. Ability to configure gestures in the "Hotkeys" KControl module. Start of a metadata editor and other general work in Plasmate. Support for multiple collections, and HTML emails in the LionMail Plasma widget. A "maintenance" tab, with reorganised status displays and operations added to the folder properties dialog in KMail. Initial check-in of Qt QObject - GTK GObject bridge. Support for C# events added to the C# bindings. A simple plugin using WebKit for Kommander 4. Rudimentary printing support implemented in Kompare. Charts tables added to Postgres backend in Kamala. More development work in KMJ and the rewrite of Kolf. Zooming, and seeking during video playback now working in KPhotoAlbum. Support for changing brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation in LinTV. More work on effects in KWin-Composite. Support for letting the user change KDE mimetype icons. Save report support in the DrKonqi dialog. Improved tab behaviour, and a prototype "Konsole" KPart-based plugin (to provide SSH/Telnet support) in KRDC. SnaKe is renamed KSnake. Initial import of Kopier and Tellico to KDE SVN.

Photographers in the Free world rejoice! On behalf of the Digikam developer team, Gilles Caullier has announced the first KDE 4 release of Digikam, the photo management application.

Digikam is a full-fledged tool that covers the whole digital photography workflow, from downloading the pictures off of your camera (and in the new version even capturing photos from inside digikam) to sorting, editing, rating and tagging (including geolocation and editing of raw photos in the new version) and of course also publishing your photos. Digikam now also allows for importing images from Social Media such as Facebook and SmugMug. Export plugins makes it easy to publish your photos to sites such as Picasa, FlickR, 23hq, Facebook and SmugMug. For the more traditional paper version of photos, there is the scan option that lets you import and manage all your old photos from Digikam as well. Light Table allows you to compare pictures side by side and the powerful Image Editor lets you touch up your photos, correct colors, white balance and contrast and remove red eyes. It also offers more advanced features such as ICC profile-based color management and lens vignetting correction.