KDE.news 

The family of KDE websites has got a new member, the site for the fine utilities applications from the module kdeutils. Despite being one of the first modules, kdeutils has always been without its own website. No longer. At utils.kde.org you can now find a lot of information about the KDE Utilities. See for yourself the details of the current set of programs below. Read More

The SQO-OSS project aims at developing a software quality assessment platform to Free Software developers. SQO-OSS is a project funded through the European Commission's Framework Programme 6 and consists of a number of European organisations with knowledge relevant to build such a platform, among which KDE e.V.. After more than one and a half years of research, design and development the SQO-OSS developer now have made available a first demo showing some capabilities of the Alitheia system. Alitheia stands for the ultimate and business-like truth. Read on for more details. Read More

Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings and Kross meeting here at the KDAB Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people representing Ruby, Python, C#, Lua and PHP. The projects do not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and review the details of how the implementations worked. Read More

The KOffice team announces the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work. Read More

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page. KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th. Read More

I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week. Aaron Seigo spoke for us all when he said "Uwe had a deep love for and belief in Africa and the role that technology can, and should, play on that continent. He put his back into it and was a great advocate for Free software in his area of the world". Our thoughts go out to his family and friends at this irreplaceable loss, we are all a little less than we were yesterday.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Global keyboard shortcuts for applets, and an Amarok and "python expression" runner in Plasma. A Java test applet and various interaction improvements in Plasma. Simple network and CPU monitors in the system-monitor Plasmoid. Initial import of PeachyDock, a Plasma-based alternative panel. The Oxygen window decoration gets the "on-all-desktops" button. Continued development toward Amarok 2.0. KDevelop gets a new context browser, and various other improvements. Initial work on SVG theming in Parley and Step. Support for OpenGL rendering in Palapeli. Enhancements for KDiamond 4.2. Nonogram switches to its own package format, with the import of a collection of game files in this format. Planned developments start to materialise in KColorEdit. Map-based searches in Digikam. Digikam-related libraries move to kdegraphics for KDE 4.1. Enhanced printing support (selections, zooming) in KSpread. KThumb, a simple command-line utility for managing freedesktop.org thumbnails. Optimisations in Kate, Dolphin, and kjs-frostbyte. Ruby bindings for various KDE facilities (QtWebKit, NEPOMUK, etc). Decibel strips some of its KDE dependencies, and moves to kdesupport. KDiskManager is removed to make way for a replacement. Mailody moves to kdeextragear. KPilot, KMobileTools, and the Kontact Planner summary plugin are disabled for the KDE-PIM 4.1 release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

As a response to recent negativity on the Internet, we've been working with Groklaw to get a story running detailing facts about questions such as "Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake", "I am forced to use the kickoff menu", "The whole KDE4 desktop interface is radically new". among others. Thanks go out to Pamela Jones for giving the KDE community a chance to rectify certain points that have recently been said in public. This way, we hope to make it easier for journalists to put KDE's direction, recent decisions and put simple myths into the right light. Read More

The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade. "The GNOME community is very excited about the co-hosted GUADEC and Akademy" says Behdad Esfahbod, president at the GNOME foundation, "GUADEC has traditionally been a very important chance for our community to meet in person, build great working relationships and make new friends. We're looking forward to having the opportunity to extend those relationships to our KDE colleagues at Akademy/GUADEC." KDE e.V.'s vice-president Adriaan de Groot adds "KDE e.V. is looking forward to a co-located conference, where the GNOME and KDE communities can mingle and cooperate as never before in one location. Gran Canaria is uniquely located at the junction of Europe and Africa, close to the Americas and is a fitting place for a historic 'meet-your-neighbours' conference." Read More

The Amarok team have released the very first alpha version of Amarok 2, their upcoming series based on KDE 4. It features a completely redesigned interface, the PopUp Dropper, and the revolutionary "Biased" playlists. The Complete announcement is available on the Amarok Website. The Amarok team kindly asks you to report any problems you might encounter and submit patches to help make Amarok 2.0 a huge success. Read More