KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The beginnings of a network management applet in Plasma, work on containments, and improvements in the "RSS" data engine and "Devices" applet. Initial support for saving changes to documents in Okular. A Kross-based scripting plungin in KLinkStatus. "Tip-of-the-day" and "Qt methods to avoid" checkers for the Krazy code quality reporting system. First steps towards a C++ parser in Umbrello. Work on projection independence in Marble. More maintenance and bux fixing in Kooka. Continued work in KHTML. Expanded support for subtitles and audio channel selection in Phonon (prompted by the requirements of Dragon Player). A rewritten "Todo" view in KOrganizer. Further work towards Amarok 2.0. "HTTP webseeding" in KTorrent. Kross-based scripting in KPlato, with support for "find in multiple documents" in KOffice. Caching support extended to all KDE card games. Improvements in KTurtle, KNetwalk, and Kubrick. Initial imports and work on the "Killbots" and "Astrododge" games. Import of "RSSNOW", an alternate RSS feed reader Plasmoid. The Step physics package moves from playground/edu to kdereview so that it can move to the kdeedu module for KDE 4.1. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Our friends over at OpenUsability have just started a call for students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design or related subjects for the Season of Usability. Season of Usability is a project that offers mentoring students that want to work on usability aspects of various projects, including KDE. Students are offered a stipend worth $US1000. KDE is involved in the Season of Usability with three possible stipends, two for students who want to work on the KDE 4 Human Interface Guidelines, another project aims for improving the toolbox and palette interaction KOffice. Read More

Google's Summer of Code will begin accepting applications soon and KDE will be participating for this fourth year. If you are a student over 18 and want to work on KDE this summer take a look at our ideas page. You are not restricted to what is listed there, other projects are welcome. Take the opportunity to talk to potential mentors over e-mail & IRC to see how feasible your project is, then write a project proposal for your application. You will have a week to apply starting from Monday, March 24. Read More

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop. Read More

A couple of weeks ago Hans Bakker, who had never touched KOffice code before, started hacking on a Krita plugin for the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. Within a week or two he had a working plugin for Krita and it quickly became clear how cool these little devices are and how many possibilities for new user interaction paradigms they afford. Read More

The makers of PolishLinux have made a nice preview of the state of KDE 4.1. "You don't always see this in the official changelogs but the KDE 4 development is progressing in an extraordinary speed." They also have a look at Digikam's KDE 4 port, including its nifty new timeline and Google maps integration. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for alternate direction layouts (vertical, horizontal) in Kickoff. Improvements in the Device Notifier applet, with support for window icons in the Pager Plasmoid in Plasma, with the "Trash" applet moving into kdebase, the "Luna" applet moving to extragear, and the "Contacts" and "Converter" runners moving into kdereview. Support for online play (using the GGZ network) in the KSquares game. A new default theme for the KSame game. More maintenance work in Kooka. Better interaction between Okular and the KDE text-to-speech system. Full support for colour schemes in the interface of Digikam. Lots of old bugs fixed in the mimetype configuration dialog of Konqueror. Continued work and optimisations in KHTML. The start of the ability to extend GUI's with scripting actions using Kross. KRatingPainter becomes a global way to manipulate ratings throughout KDE. A "Konsole" mode and "Web Interface" are added to KTimeTracker. Long-awaited support for inserting signatures at the top of email replies in KMail. The ability to store all attachments in a specified directory, and a status bar are added to Mailody. KOrganizer gets a new "Month" view. More work on the "online reader" syncronization project in Akregaror. Work on general Zeroconf support in KDE, and particularly in KRDC. Continued porting of Kommander to KDE 4. The start of moves to make Phonon the only output engine in Amarok 2. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

kubuntu-de.org has interviewed Tobias König about his work on Akonadi, the personal information storage server. Tobias shares his impressions about the integration into the KDE desktop environment and Akonadi's development and features. He also talks a bit about himself. Available in the original German and Italian. Read More

The organisers of Akademy 2008 are looking for sponsorship. Akademy is the KDE World Summit, this year taking place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium in August. Sponsorship is an opportunity to promote your company or product to the developers, users, deployers and consultants who will attend the conference from around the world. Read More

KDE was present at CeBIT 2008 in Hannover, the world's largest IT fair. The booth was located inside the LinuxPark in Hall 5, where Linux New Media had given KDE, Amarok and other open source projects the opportunity to present their work. Read on for more details. Read More