KDE.news 

Readers of the KDE Commit-Digest have probably noticed that Gilles Caulier is again on top with number of commits. On what does he work so furiously? Gilles is the main developer of Digikam which is under transition from KDE 3 to KDE 4 whilst simultaneously adding new features. Read more to know more about the future of advanced digital photo management for KDE and Linux.

The third bugfix release of the KDE 4.0 series is available. KDE 4.0 is mainly targeted at users who live on the bleeding edge. As a dot-oh release it might have its rough edges. The KDE Community releases a service update for this series once a month to make those bleeding edge users' lives easier. The changelog for KDE 4.0.3 is, although not complete, quite impressive. Especially KHTML and with it the Konqueror webbrowser have seen great improvements in both, stability and performance.

This week saw the International Standards Organisation vote on adopting Office Open XML as a standard for office documents. KDE gained a representative late last year through our legal body KDE e.V. realising that the only way to ensure a fair process was to be part of it. Today our delegate voted yes to adopting the format as an international standard. "We have studied the standard hard and many changes have been made to it," said KDE's Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo "and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source we realised the market should decide the best formats to use, not technical bureaucrats".

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for "undo closed windows" in Konqueror. GetHotNewStuff support for Plasma themes. Konsole, Konqueror, and Kate session selection added in Plasma applet form. New Plasmoids: "Generic Folder View", "System Command", KNotify-based "Popups", "Quick Launch", and to display data from Kalzium. Digikam now uses Phonon for video and audio previews, with improved use of Phonon in Dragon Player. Start of NEPOMUK support in Gwenview. A NEPOMUK "Social Query Daemon" for viewing storages across a network, and work on tagging GUI's for NEPOMUK using Dolphin. Work on services and queries, with the removal of the engine system (now using Phonon only) in Amarok 2. Continued development in Konsole. Various functional improvements in KTurtle. Support for synonyms in Parley. Support for custom themes in KNetWalk. A system tray application for Akonadi. Initial implementation of a remote desktops dock widget for KRDC. Work on the "reports" functionality of Kexi. Several long-awaited improvements in KCron. KDiamond moves from kdereview to kdegames. KAgenda moves to playground. Initial import of Palapeli, a jigsaw puzzle game. Read the rest of the Digest here.

PolishLinux is at it again. 7000 svn revisions later PolishLinux has posted their next "visual changelog" article highlighting changes in KDE 4.1. The article highlights new features in numerous pPlasmoids, new Plasmoids, Plasma in general, Dolphin, Amarok, Kget and KWin compositing customization. From the article: "Now I can be almost sure that when a stable edition of KDE 4.1 is published, I will definitely say good [bye] to my old good KDE 3.5."

Sirius' Tom Callway interviews KDE's chief-hugger Aaron Seigo. He talks about KDE 4, communication within the project and what effect the 'new platforms' (Windows and Mac OS) have on KDE development. Seigo also talks about the KDE 4.0 release and how that compares to the 2.0 and 3.0 releases of KDE. About Kontact, he explains, "We are going to see some very interesting developments happening when Kontact is available on all platforms. For instance, finally there will be a groupware solution that looks and behaves exactly the same on all platforms (a support win) that lets you choose your groupware server (a server side win). Kontact represents the client side of the first realistically competitive threat to the Exchange-plus-Outlook hegemony. And that's just one application."

Last weekend a group of developers gathered in Berlin at the KDAB office for an Akonadi sprint. The goal was simple, getting Akonadi in shape for the first public release of Akonadi when KDE 4.1 is released. In the couple of days they met, they made an amazing amount of 270 modifications to the KDE repository, and worked on average from 10am to 3am to make a big step into reaching that goal. Read on for details.

EFYTimes has an interview with Matthias Ettrich, one of KDE's founders. He talks about the history of the project, what he thinks of KDE 4.0 and what he's currently working on in Qt. "The desktop problem has been solved many years ago. Try to compare Windows XP with KDE 3: nobody in their right mind would choose Windows over GNU/Linux based on the desktop experience alone."

In April there will be a Kate Developer Sprint, similar to previous sprints for Decibel, Akonadi, KDevelop and others. This is a great opportunity as developers interested in development of KDE's text editor will discuss what to do to make Kate the best text editor on earth. This also means lots of polishing so that Kate in KDE 4.1 will shine even more! The meeting will take place from 2008-04-11 till 2008-04-13. The location is hosted by basysKom in Darmstadt, Germany. Many thanks goes especially to the KDE e.V. for their financial support. If you are interested in Kate development, join our mailing list. More to come, stay tuned!

On the 12th and 13th of March the 4th OpenExpo took place in Bern. /ch/open oranises the fair every 6 months alternating in Bern and Zurich. A wide variety of talks grouped into three different tracks accompanied the fair. This year more than 30 OpenSource Projects took the opportunity to present themselves and their work to a wide audience. KDE and the Amarok team was among them. The booths attracted many people intersted in the improvements of KDE4 and Amarok2. Most were impressed by the amazing efforts the project took to push KDE into a glorious future.