KDE.news 

At the start of the month the organisation committee for Camp KDE asked for talk proposals for our conference in the Caribbean. We have reviewed the excellent submissions and come to an agreement on selected presentations. Read on for the talks. Read More

The promising nonlinear video editor Kdenlive has made its first non beta for KDE 4, version 0.7 is on us. This closes another gap of the free desktop world: a usable open source video editor. Kdenlive has the potential to become the Amarok or K3b of video editors, offering comfort and elegance so far not available in alternative programs. The feature set looks amazingly complete and far exceeds the KDE 3 version already. Check the release announcement. Read More

The inaugural Desktop Summit, uniting the flagship conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy, will be held in Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain the week of July 3-11, 2009. The conference will be hosted by Cabildo, the local government of Gran Canaria. The GNOME and KDE communities will use this co-located event to intensify momentum and increase collaboration between the projects. It gives a unique opportunity for key figures to collaborate and improve the free and open source desktop for all. Read More

Today, the KDE team invites interested testers and reviewers to give KDE 4.2.0-Beta1 a go. The release announcement lists some significant improvements. The purpose of this release is to get feedback from the community, preferably in the form of bugreports on the new bugs.kde.org bugtracker. Beta1 offers critical features like the Eyes applet (an XEyes clone), but also a more streamlined user experience all over the workspace and applications. With the KDE team being in bug fixing frenzy after the recent hard feature freeze, now is the time to help us smoothing the release for your pleasure starting in January. Read More

Bugsquad will be revisiting PIM bugs next Sunday, concentrating on KMail and KOrganizer. Recently the number of people hanging out and doing bugs in our IRC channel regulary has increased considerably. As there is almost always someone hanging around (and because some people specifically requested it), we decided we could extend our events. So, if you are one of those people who just can not spare time on Sundays, rejoice for Bugweeks. Read More

Linux.com covers Kraft, an administration software package for small and medium businesses (SMB), covering activities such as customer management, document workflow, material management, calculations for positions and templates for most of these. Linux.com concludes "Kraft takes some of the drudgery out of tracking work offers and invoicing. If you are a KDE user, being able to use a single contact manager for issuing your invoices will cut down on your mail merging worries. But Kraft's handling of VAT/GST could be improved." We will have to add to that, that you do not need to be a "KDE user" already to use Kraft. As with all KDE applications, it runs just fine on other Free desktops too. The KDE e.V. uses craft for membership management, and gets first-hand support by Kraft's main developer, our very own Klaas Freitag. Read More

The KOffice Team has announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Beta 3, the third beta version of the upcoming version 2.0. The goal for the third beta is to show progress made since beta 2, as well as to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow the team to release a basically usable 2.0 release, demonstrating our vision for the future of the digital office to a larger audience and attract new contributions both in terms of code and ideas for improvements. Since the last beta release a significant set of improvements and speedups have been integrated for all applications and this release shows the continuous focus on bug fixes until 2.0 is released. More information on the full announcement while the release notes tell you how to get it. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: More improvements in KBruch as part of a Brazilian student projects initiative. Ability to search by "HD Catalog Number" in KStars. Initial Kross support in the Rocs educational tool. Multiple projection support in the Marble Plasmoid. Preliminary support for editors in Klotz (formerly KLDraw). Ability to change the alignment of the window title in the Oxygen window decoration. Animation is added to the "boxswitch" KWin-Composite effect. More new features in Amarok 2.0. A configurable zoom slider is added to the Dolphin status bar. A simple new table-based "annotation display widget" in NEPOMUK. The "reset search bar when changing feeds" feature returns to Akregator. More progress on the KJots rewrite effort (Akonadi integration and Plasmoid). Improved keyboard navigation usability in KPlato. UI effects configuration options added to the "TweakKDE" utility. Various Plasma applets, including "Previewer", "Web Browser", and the new "System Tray" move to kdereview in time for KDE 4.2. Killbots moves to kdereview/games. The rewritten webarchiver tool for Konqueror is imported into KDE SVN. KDETV starts to be ported to KDE 4. KOffice 2.0 Beta 2 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Again it is that time of the year the Spain KDE community gathers in the Akademy-es event. This year the event will be held in A Coruña from 21st to 23rd of November. The talks cover quite a wide range of topics, going from Python KDE development to translation workshops without forgetting more general talks about upcoming KDE 4.2 and KOffice 2. Read More