KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Various work across Plasma, including improved applet handles with monochrome icons, work on the Weather Plasmoid and the start of an extender-based notification applet. Continued development in PowerDevil, including support for suspend. Long-standing "slow deletion of many files" bug is finally fixed. A System Settings module for choosing the default file manager. Basic implementation of red eye reduction in Gwenview. A generator for G3/G4 fax documents in Okular. Support for filter plugins in Kst. More work on code completion in KDevelop 4. Start of a D-Bus interface in Lokalize. First working implementation of KMenuEdit global shortcuts. Work on supporting different resources in the Akonadi OpenSync plugin. The return of Ark context-menu actions. Liechtenstein, Oman, and San-Marino maps in KGeography. Previews of slide transition effects in KPresenter now happen directly on the affected slide. A KFormula widget is extracted from KOffice and moved into kdelibs for use in other KDE applications. Work on porting Keep, a backup utility, to KDE 4. NEPOMUK query libraries move from kdereview to kdebase/workspace, with the search KIO slave moving into kdereview. A KDE 4 port of KnowIt, a note taking application, is imported into KDE SVN. Eigen 2.0 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The second OpenExpo for this year was held in Winterthur on 24th and 25th September. All was perfectly organized by /ch/open. Read more about KDE's presence at the show. Read More

The KOffice team is proud to announce the first beta of KOffice 2.0. The goal of this release is to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow us to release a 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. Read on for more information or see the announcement and download it from the release notes. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: "Shortcut Scheme" support allows creation of shortcut themes (Emacs, etc.) for use in KDE applications. A "Media Player" runner (with support for Amarok 2), more work on panel hiding, and support for text zoom in the "Web Browser" Plasmoid in Plasma. The "Weather Station" applet moves to kdereview. More refinements in PowerDevil, in preparation for a move to kdebase. Lots more functionality in Attica, the Open Collaboration Services desktop client. Start of session support in KDevPlatform (the basis of KDevelop 4). A "McCabe cyclomatic complexity metric engine" in KDevelop 4. Support for image rating (using KRatingWidget) in the interface of KPhotoAlbum. Progress towards real levels in the KPicross game. More work towards Jabber-based network games in KSirK. A "black screen" presentation feature in Okular. Various work in Akonadi and KDE-PIM. Start of the NetworkManager KControl module (for use in System Settings, etc). Incremental scanner support returns to Amarok 2. New plugin to specify the download order of multi-file torrents in KTorrent. Passwords saved per LDAP login (not host) in KRDC, greatly improving the experience for LDAP administrators. An OpenGL demo to demonstrate various parts of Eigen 2. Some work to make KDE application dialogs fit into 1024x600 pixels. Merge of improvements to KFontInstaller. Import of QuickSand, an alternative front-end for KRunner. A proof-of-concept "decibel-kde" library for representing contacts "based on the representation used by Kopete". WLM protocol imported into Kopete. Asciiquarium screensaver moves from kdereview to kdeartwork. Kugar and koshell are removed from KOffice 2. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The KDE community is pleased to announce UserBase. UserBase is the new end-user wiki for KDE and complements TechBase, the wiki aimed at developers. It will contain tips and tricks, links to where to get more help, as well as an application catalogue giving an overview of the different kinds of programs that KDE offers. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A KPhotoAlbum developer sprint leads to various developments, including a new viewer and support for image "stacks". Initial lyrics support and a new "Albums" applet in Amarok 2.0. Support for export to OpenDocument text and HTML formats for certain file types in Okular. More functionality in the Plasma "Engine Explorer", an application for data engine development. More work on the "grouping taskbar" and "Weather" applet for Plasma, and new features in the wallpaper configuration dialog. A new Plasma wallpaper plugin, "Mandelbrot fractal viewer" based on Eigen. Lots of new settings across KWin-Composite effects. Start of code for a "Plasma loader" in Raptor. Experiments with using Jabber to propose/find network games in KSirK. Support for subprojects with CMake, and a generic "Source Formatter" plugin (with multiple backends) in KDevelop 4. Start of an OpenSync plugin for Akonadi. An Akonadi "server configuration" KControl module, intended for use in KDE System Settings. Support for adding files through command-line arguments in Ark. "Instant search" is implemented in KCharSelect. More work on a new IRC implementation, and improved Kiosk support in Kopete. NEPOMUK query service, and kosdwidget move to kdereview. Import of "LokaRest", an experimental framework to access RESTful web services. A new application, kReMail, is added to playground/pim. Import of "deKorator" KWin window decoration engine to playground/artwork, and a KDE4 port of Kvkbd into playground/utils. KColorEdit 2.0 is released. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The KDE BugSquad is pleased to announce another BugDay! Come and learn the fine art of bug triage. How might one do so? Join us for a KMail BugDay on Sunday, September 14th (7:00 UTC). All you need is KMail version 4.1 or more recent. That is it! We will provide all the training and support. No programming knowledge is needed. Join #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net anytime to find out more details. Also, we have a spiffy mailing list and lots of new documentation on techbase. See you there! Read More

Today was Big Bang Day at CERN as the world's largest science experiment was turned on. Like all good technology enthusiasts the KDE developers have been keeping up with the progress of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. We are pleased to see that like all world class physicists the first ever ATLAS results come from KDE. Their impressive control centre is also making excellent use of KNotes. Just as good, the world has not yet been sucked into a black hole. Read More

It has been a couple of weeks since Akademy 2008 finished. KDE's contributors are now back home, more enthusiastic than ever about our future. If you missed the talks videos are now online. This article covers what happened during the week and outlines some of the results. Read on for more. Read More

During Akademy 2008, we sat down with Fabrizio Montesi who's working on JOLIE integration in KDE (and Plasma in particular). He explained the mechanics of the technology and what it can do for KDE. Read on for the interview. Read More