KDE.news 

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: Work on WebKit integration, the ability to access Plasma data engines in Plasmoids rendered through WebKit, and a HDDtemp daemon data engine are added to Plasma, plus work on Plasmoid packaging and KRunner. Items can now be dragged from the Kickoff menu to the desktop or the panel. More work on syncing Akregator with online reader services. A GUI for declinations in Parley. Support for DGML tags in Marble. Genuine progress in the KTankBattle game. General improvements and the removal of the Helix engine in Amarok 2. A visual redesign of the KGet "Web Interface", with added translation capabilities. Continued work on KPresenter slide transitions, and KCron. Work on importing and exporting shortcut configurations in KControl. The "three stars per character" password mode returns to KDE 4 (from the KDE 3 series). Various speed optimisations across KDE applications. Ligature moves to "unmaintained" status. KDE 4.0.2 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The KDE community has released another update to its cutting edge KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.2 has, along with the bugfixes some new features in Plasma. The panel can now be configured to sit somewhere else than at the bottom and UI options for changing its size have been added. Do not let yourself be distracted by those new things, there are also plenty of bugfixes, performance improvements and translation updates in there, among which support for two new languages: Persian and Icelandic. KDE 4.0.2 is thus available in 49 whopping languages, and more are soon to come. More highlights include rendering improvements in KHTML and lots of bugfixes in Okular and Kopete. The KDE community hopes you enjoy this release which should be hitting your favourite packaging system soon. See the changelog for more updates and info page for download options. Read More

As the new leaves of spring bud in the Low Countries, the organisation of Akademy is also growing. This will bear fruit in August as the worldwide KDE community gathers in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium at the De Nayer Institute to celebrate and consider the post-KDE 4.0 world. Now that the KDE 4 technology platform is in place, this year's Akademy will focus on bringing the pillars of KDE to applications, research efforts around KDE, and work on non-traditional platforms for the desktop. Your work on KDE is interesting to us, so please submit a talk. See the complete Call for Presentations for more details. The important date is the deadline for submissions to the main conference tracks: May 1st. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: More work on runners, bindings into WebKit, and the beginnings of better composite manager support in Plasma, with support for multiple feed sources in the RSS Plasmoid. The addition of a "BBall", "Show Desktop", "KMLDonkey", and "IM Presence" (using Decibel) Plasma applets. An alternative alt+tab window switcher (similar to Compiz Fusion's "Cover Switch" effect). SuperKaramba gets support for Qt 4.4 "widgets-on-canvas". A long-overdue "major" rewrite of KCron is undertaken. Undo support in the KShortcutsEditor dialog. New plugins in Digikam and Krita. Various improvements in KTorrent and Amarok 2.0. Interface work and MusicBrainz integration in KsCD (student project). Lots of work on page transition effects in KPresenter. The start of work on integrating online reader support into Akregator. Kubrick, a Rubik's Cube game, is imported into playground/games. KDiamond moves from playground/games to kdereview, Kollision from kdereview to kdegames for KDE 4.1. kdebase (trunk, KDE 4.1) now requires Qt 4.4. Akonalendar (a small app to demonstrate Akonadi KCal models), and the Quasar graphics library are imported into KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced. KDE leads the popularity list in the category Desktop Environment with a rocking 52% percent of the votes leaving competing contenders in its dust. Among the users on Linuxquestions.org, KDE is being praised for its high level of integration, for the number of applications and of course for Konqui being the cute mascot it is. But also KDE applications have been very popular among the voters on Linuxquestions.org. Read on for more details. Read More

The combined KDE/Amarok booth and developer room at the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brusssels was a great experience (as usual!). Many people showed up from the KDE and Amarok communities, and we had a hard time fitting all our cool hardware and people in the booth. Luckily, the talks drew quite a crowd, and the booth became less busy as the day progressed. Read on for an overview of FOSDEM 2008 from the KDE perspective. Read More

Kommander, the graphical scripting tool, has been radically improved for KDE 3.5.9. While our next goal is a KDE 4 executor, then a full update we wanted to offer some new functionality for KDE 3 users. Best of all, shortly you will be able to run what was built in KDE 3 unaltered and native in KDE 4. In 3.5.9 the focus was on the executor, but new features are in the editor. That includes popup menus, KPart creation, a DatePicker widget, widget creation on the fly, embedded widgets, standard dialogs, and a lot more. There is a new plugin architecture and new plugins for database, KParts, HTTP connections and even a KHTML widget. Read on for more. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Configuration and layout work in Plasma. A whole load of Plasma backports from trunk to the KDE 4.0 branch (for KDE 4.0.2). Plasma applets begin to be ported to use WebKit from Qt 4.4. Color blindness simulation for KMag. Work on support for button form fields, and support for encrypted ODF documents in Okular. More developments in the porting and maintanence of Kooka. Remote KABC resource and an Akonadi to KCal bridge in Akonadi. UPnp integration in Kopete. A rewritten upload plugin for KDevPlatform (used in Quanta and KDevelop). Continued work on a new projection framework in Marble. Undo/Redo work using a "piece table" in Okteta. Optimisations in Kalzium, Amarok, and KGet. A KControl module for configuring imaplib resources in Mailody, and a module for managing emoticon themes in KDE. Start of work on Puck, a tool to convert the Plasma XML user interface format into C++ code. Experiments with a KDE 4 version of Kommander. A branch of KDEPrint to experiment with refactoring and porting to Qt 4.4 (for KDE 4.1). Decibel and the Plasma "Luna" and "Trash" applets move to kdereview. KSystemLog moves into kdeadmin. Import of Smoke and Ruby Plasma bindings. KDE 3.5.9 and KOffice 1.9.95.3 (KOffice 2 Alpha 6) are tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The KDE PIM crew met again at Osnabrück for three days of hacking, discussing and community building. The big topics were Akonadi and KDE 4.1. The team settled on the plan to release KDE PIM with KDE 4.1 based on the traditional backends and include the first platform release of Akonadi as the future base for PIM applications in and around KDE. The meeting was kindly hosted by Intevation and supported by the KDE e.V. and KDAB. Read on for a report or see the notes on the website. Read More