KDE.news 

KOffice, like most KDE applications, has the unique selling point that the same codebase can be compiled and run on various platforms. The latest KOffice alpha release has attracted extra attention since it ships Windows and Macintosh binaries. This naturally means a much larger audience will be able to try it out and kick the tires. Techworld has an article up where they give a good overview and plenty of screenshots. Have you already tried out a KOffice alpha release? Read More

Akademy 2008 has published the programme of talks. Track themes include research, applications and community. There are keynotes from Frank Karlitschek of the Open Desktop sites, Sebastian Nyström of Nokia, Cliff Schmidt of KDE users Literacy Bridge. Lightning talk sessions include a Plasma Frenzy and an Akonadi Rumble with KDAB's Till Adam. It is a packed programme to start off the week, the rest of which will be filled with BoFs, Tutorials and an Embedded and Mobile Day. Register now. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Amarok 2 gets basic video playing support, and a connection to Librivox public domain audio books. Major porting to KDE 4 continues in K3b. More work on "Fuzzy Search" integration in Digikam. The start of support for sound effects in KGoldRunner, and the addition of a sound feature in KPresenter. Improvements in the msword-odf and kpr-odf import facilities in KOffice. Start of QTestLib integration into KDevelop. The Ruby development bindings support interaction with Akonadi. KMPlayer gets a bookmarks menu and support for displaying Phonon metadata. Kst replaces the concept of tags with "dynamic names". A new, improved version of KColorEdit is imported into KDE SVN. A new module, kdeplasmoids, is created in KDE SVN to consolidate the various different scattered locations of Plasma applets. A new Plasma theme for KDE 4.1 is unveiled in KDE SVN. All of Eigen no longer depends on Qt. KDevelop 4.0.0 Alpha2, Phonon 4.1.0, KOffice 1.9.95 Alpha 8, and KDE 4.0.5 are tagged for release. Phonon moves to kdesupport. guidance-power-manager moves to extragear/utils to be released with KDE 4.1. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

On Sunday 6th July, the Bugsquad will be holding a Kopete bug triage day. The aim: to dramatically reduce the number of Kopete bug reports from the current level of approximately 530. As usual, this bug day will be coordinated in the channel #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net. There will also be a followup bug day two weeks later, on Sunday 20th July, to triage any remaining bugs. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Marble gets "temperature" and "precipitation" maps, and a "stars" plugin. More work on "fuzzy searches" in Digikam. Konqueror gets support for crash session recovery and session management. Runners can now be managed using a KPluginSelector-based dialog, and attention-blinking support in Plasma. Various Plasma applets move around KDE SVN before the KDE 4.1 feature freeze takes effect, with WebKit applet support moving into kdebase. SVG stuff from WebKit starts to be integrated into KHTML. More optimisations in KHTML, with KJS/Frostbyte, a version using bytecode and other enhancements, moving back into kdelibs. Start of an implemention of the JavaScript scripting API for PDF documents in Okular, based on KJS. Continued work on KJots integration into Kontact, and creating/editing links between entries in KJots. More work on theming in Amarok 2. Various improvements in kvpnc. More configuration user interfaces in KNetworkManager. Enhancements in the KTorrent bandwidth scheduler plugin. Support for CUPS printing options in KDE printing dialogs. Mailody moves to kdereview. The "OnlineSync" plugin is merged into Akregator. Initial commit of a new MSWord-to-ODF filter for KWord, and a caligraphy tool for Karbon. KDevMon is ported to KDE 4. Development of the Shaman2 package manager is moved into KDE SVN (playground/sysadmin). The PHP-Qt bindings move from playground/bindings to the kdebindings module. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Another milestone on the road towards KDE 4.1 has been packaged and put online for testing. The release notes highlight some features in Dolphin and Gwenview, as well as additional information on where to get the release, make sure you also check your distributor's websites as well. While there are some bugs left, the release already works quite solidly on most people's machines. Performance problems on NVidia chips remain, but we are confident that those will be solved by the teams over at NVidia in one of the next releases of their graphics driver. In KDE 4.1, there is also some preliminary Mac and Windows support coming up. Several apps can be tried by a wider audience on those proprietary platforms this summer already. On the side of Free operating systems, support for OpenSolaris is coming along nicely, but is not free of bugs yet. Read More

openSUSE 11.0 has been released (screenshots), offering KDE 3.5.9 and an excellent experience of KDE 4.0. There has been a huge collection of changes and additions in this new release. For an overview of the improvements in KDE, see the KDE Sneak Peeks article over at openSUSE News, which features an interview with KDE developer Stephan Binner. He talks about the challenges faced, plans for the future, and what changes you can expect in the upcoming KDE 4.1. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Improved drag-and-drop of applets, and enhanced usability using the "Panel Controller" in Plasma. Grouping of notifications in the "Notify" Plasmoid, and continued progress in the "NetworkManager" applet. Animations in the "Pager" applet. SuperKaramba integration into Plasma is revived. More work on theming in Amarok 2.0, with the "Current Track" and "Wikipedia" applets re-enabled. A return to work on the Raptor menu. Initial steps toward a "satellite layer" plugin for Marble, with initial support for molecular editing in Kalzium. Copy-and-paste of vocabulary entries in Parley. "Singmaster" moves functionality in Kubrick. Support for searching the database by GPS position, and "fuzzy searches" (using a user-drawn sketch) based on the Haar algorithm (from imgSeek) added to Digikam. A "start page" is added to Gwenview. More functionality added to Beagle KIOSlave. A "quick reply" function is added to Mailody. Kontact gets a plugin for KJots. An import dialog added to assist in migrating from the KDE3 to the KDE4 version of KTorrent. Full support for the Windows platform in KTorrent trunk. Optimisations in the next-generation tile system of Krita. Work on loading ODF presentation notes in KPresenter. KNewStuff2 moves to Goya for handling and displaying items. Support for AIFF and RIFF audio file formats in TagLib. Initial import of Nonogram into playground/games. libkscan replaces libksane in kdegraphics. kdelirc moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Phonon moves from kdelibs to kdesupport, "the never-freezing new home of Phonon". Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The KDE Project today announced the eighth alpha release of KOffice 2, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0. Work continues in the same vein as before, with a strong focus on finishing and polishing our new features that will set KOffice. This is a work in progress, showing the changes that have been made over the last month by the KOffice developers. Most features that will be part of the final release are present now, and bug reports are welcome for the more stable components. Read More

This coming Sunday, June 15, BugSquad is hosting a BugDay to go triaging through old Amarok bugs. Come join #kde-bugs anytime to get training and help out! No prior experience is necessary, and you don't need any programming knowledge. Read More