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Akademy 2008, the annual KDE desktop summit, officially kicked off on Saturday, 9th August in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium, with a schedule packed full of talks, discussions, and development. Read on for the highlights of the first day of the conference. Read More

At Akademy 2008 in Belgium, Qt developers Simon Hausmann and Andreas Aardal Hanssen announced dramatic improvements in the web browser engine in Qt and the canvas that is used by, for example, the Plasma desktop shell. Video support, animations and transitions, optimisations to speed up painting and animations, and new graphical effects open up nearly endless new possibilities for developers to present their user interfaces with. Read on for more details. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on themed buttons and a TabBar (with animations) in Plasma, initial work on a "grouping taskbar", and a "server hotlink" Plasmoid imported. Many KDE games get new sound effects. The start of a graphical user interface for the StepGame project. Basic Git, Bazaar, and Mercurial version control system support in KDevPlatform (the basis of KDevelop4), with Kross scripting interfaces. A new reflection architecture in the Kross Falcon bindings. A new "components and libraries" information dialog in Digikam. Minimal proxy support in the HTTP KIOSlave. D-Bus actions for invoking the Klipper context menu. Xinerama support in KSplash. Native "Open With..." dialogs for the Windows platform. Beginnings of a "bias editor" UI, and a rating widget added to the current track applet in Amarok 2. Added support for saving and removing profiles in the Karbon Calligraphy tool. First working KSpread/ODS export for Kexi reports. An experimental "cylinder" effect for switching desktops in KWin-Composite. Beginning of a KControl module to configure standard action shortcuts. The start of the PowerDevil (power management) KControl module, with D-Bus support. A new game, "Bomber", is imported into KDE SVN. Initial import of Dekoroom, a "new home designer" (with Ogre + Blender support). The NEPOMUK filewatch service moves into kdebase. Initial commits of Kommodity/GIO (Qt/C++ bindings for GIO/GVFS). Results of the "Fusion of Web Services with local services" diploma thesis, making the D-Bus web service proxy widely usable. KOffice 1.9.95 (Alpha 9) is tagged for release. KDE SVN is branched to prepare for the release of KDE 4.1, with KDE 4.1 Release Candidate 1 released. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Several weeks ago MarkMail, a project sponsored and run by Mark Logic, started indexing the KDE mailinglist archives. After about a week of hard work, the KDE archives are now directly searchable from MarkMail. Besides interesting analytics, this brings some powerful search capabilities to the table. Read on for a short interview with Jason Hunter who was responsible for engineering on the project. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for moving of applets in Plasma panels. Various work, such as autocompletion and bookmarks (shared with Konqueror) support in the basic Web Browser Plasmoid. Progress in the "Plasma on new form factors" project. A new "LCD Weather Station" Plasma applet makes an appearance. The Powersave and KWeather utilities are ported to Plasma. More work on the "Cube" KWin-Composite effect, including a configuration dialog and keyboard navigation. Work on the multiple choice mode and internet-based translation in Parley. The new "Message List View" becomes more usable, with work on skinning in KMail. Initial "biased playlist" support, work on the new "mass tagging" feature, and extensions to the Last.fm service in Amarok 2. Experimental work on video capture in Phonon, with a "snapshot" function added to the video widget. KDevPlatform (the basis of KDevelop4) gets early integration with the Kross scripting engine. Further expansion of the D-Bus interface, and more work on the Plasma applet for KTorrent. More work on guide line manipulation, and a new "Paragraph Tool" for better interaction with larger blocks of text in KOffice. More work on the "Presenter View" in KPresenter. The start of a "Table of Contents" implementation in KWord, with the first steps towards a multi-page table shape in KSpread. Initial support for image display, and full support for UTF-8 text in the Kexi web forms component. A NEPOMUK-based file watch service is moved into kdereview. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Some new wallpapers and an Oxygen mouse cursor theme are imported into KDE SVN for the KDE 4.1 release. The KDM login manager gets an Oxygen facelift. Preliminary version of a basic web browser Plasmoid, and a new "ScriptedImage" Plasma applet. Support for storing Amarok 2.0 statistics in NEPOMUK, more work on the new scripting interface, preliminary support for iPod's, and a partially-working "random mode" restored to Amarok 2.0. The "PopupDropper" interface element of Amarok 2.0 is imported into KDE SVN for future development. Expansion of the D-Bus interface and stats collection functionality of KTorrent. Alignment support in KJots. The irritating bell sound is disabled by default in Konsole. Kexi driver for the xBase family of databases is almost complete. KStars receives a INDI Astrophysics driver, and tweaks to its zooming user interface. Work on the "Leitner box" mode in Parley. The start of a "SnaKe" mode in the newly-revitalised KTron. Work on a KIO-based network implementation in the experimental WebKit integration into KDE. An early implementation of storing Decibel contact data in Akonadi. Many KDE applications will now automatically restart after a crash. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on a "Grid" containment for Plasmoids. A Plasma applet to monitor the WiFi signal strength (on Linux systems). Infrastructure in place for a network settings daemon in the NetworkManager Plasmoid. An Akonadi Plasma data engine, intended for initial use by a "Plasmobiff" applet. "Previewer", a new Plasmoid for previewing files using KParts technology. KDevPlatform (the basis of KDevelop4) gets a plugin for basic Git source versioning control. Start of resurrecting C# support in KDevelop. Key bindings added to display various debugging information in KStars. Progress in sound and scripting support in Parley. KTron gets a new maintainer, with work on porting to KDE 4 and moving to SVG graphics. "Find duplicates" tool in Digikam is now regarded as fully functional. Initial efforts at using PolicyKit for the management of system-wide fonts. Work on scrolling interaction in KOrganizer, and further development in the new "Message List View" of KMail. Copying music tracks to an MP3Tunes locker, and experimental auto-fetching of album artwork in Amarok 2.0. Support for authentication algorithm selection for WEP connections in KNetworkManager. Early beginnings of scripting plugin for KTorrent. Initial support for searching for placemarks, and undo/redo support in the "GeoShape" of KOffice. Beginnings of work on the "Presenter View" in KPresenter, with two synchronised canvasses. "Web forms" component of Kexi becomes based on the kde.org template, for consistency and accessibility reasons. Provisional .wav support in TagLib. Initial import of a Perldoc KIOSlave for KDE 4. Import of a KDE 4 port of sysinfo:/ (as seen in openSUSE 11). KDE 4.1 Beta 2 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications. Make sure to take some time to read through the high-level changelog or even the more detailed feature plan on Techbase. Before you try KDE 4.1, please read the KDE4 End User FAQ and make an educated guess whether KDE 4.1 is for you. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: In a long-planned move, the FolderView Plasmoid also becomes a containment (which enables it to fill the desktop space). The FolderView Plasma applet gets standard folder interaction context menu items. First version of CommandWatch Plasmoid, which displays output of a given console command. Support for displaying the running state of plugins and terminating jobs, abstraction of code completion (leading to initial code completion support for Java), and the clearing out of bug reports in KDevelop 4. Integration of the Panaramio online service into Marble. Work on loading themes in Parley. A "drawing history" and support for undo/redo in the sketch widget of Fuzzy Search in Digikam. More features in the "vi input mode" project for Kate. More work on the new MessageListView project of KMail, and a keyring database editor for KPilot. Various developments across Amarok 2, including an early "NepomukCollection". Start of an implementation of the famous "cube switch" effect for KWin-composite. Fully auto-generated Kimono C# bindings. More work on the "Table" tool in KOffice, with other developments including progress in the Kexi reports and web interface components. The "GeoShape" (based on Marble) moves to playground/office. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The Amarok team is proud to present the second Alpha of Amarok 2.0. Development is moving at full speed and a lot of bugs have been fixed since Alpha 1, as well as features polished. Thank you to everyone who has already helped by filing bug reports and sending patches. Please keep them coming! Read the release announcement for a list of bugfixes and changes. Get Alpha 2 today and help make Amarok 2.0 rock. Read More