KDE.news 

The current edition of Novell Open Audio podcast features an interview with KDE core developer Will Stephenson. He discusses what is coming in KDE 4, Novell's commitment to KDE and the changes he has been working on recently. The first forty minutes of the podcast are a review of some of the projects from Novell Hack Week, with Will's segment starting at 39:50 minutes in. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to mature, with improvements to the Twitter applet (and the creation of a complementary data engine), and the adoption of a common visual style for Plasmoids, and the integration of support for SuperKaramba applets through the creation of the SuperKaramba Plasmoid. More work on the re-implementation of the Magnatune interface within the new music store framework, and integration of the recent Plasma work for Amarok 2. More work on KBlocks, whilst KMines and KLines become the first KDE applications to take advantage of the recently-developed KPixmapCache. More work on colour mixing in Krita. Import of Habitat, a realistic interaction environment, to playground/edu. A return to work on Cokoon, a framework for widget and window decoration creation. RSIBreak, KCall, and the Kickoff menu start to be ported to KDE 4. KDE 4.0 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read More

For the next interview in the People Behind KDE series, we travel to the Netherlands to meet a KDE promoter and meeting organiser, someone who helps the international community to experience KDE events, even if they were not in attendance - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Jos Poortvliet. Read More

A number of KDE related news stories are floating about the interweb today, so here's a quick round-up. Aaron Seigo writes his KDE e.V. Presidential Address on his blog in an effort to force the e.V. to be more transparent about their activities. Over at Ars Technica, I have an article talking about the future of KHTML and WebKit: you'll be happy to know that this seems to no longer be a real problem. Daniel Molkentin has published a new book on coding for Qt 4.x which is now available for ordering at qt4-book.com. Lastly, I've stumbled across a short visual tutorial for those Mac OS X users among us that are looking to help test the KDE/Mac snapshots. Of course you can always go over to TechBase for the build instructions if you have some CPU cycles to spare. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma progress, with new Plasmoids: Browser, Notes, 3D Earth Model, Twitter, Desktop, and Tiger (scripting example), and the development of a mouse cursor data engine. Bug fixing spree in TagLib, K3b, and the Kopete Cryptography plugin. Support for encrypted storage devices in Solid, with better integration of device support in Amarok. Further integration of Plasma in Amarok. Work on making Konsole follow KDE settings more strictly. Much work on revamping Ark for KDE 4. Various functionality improvements in Umbrello. The start of a new version of the Smoke bindings access mechanism, Smoke2. Continued work in kdegames, with the import of KBlocks, a Tetris-like replacement for KSirtet. Rewrite of search-and-replace in Kate. Import of the Kubelka-Munk mixing algorithm, with a restoration of the MetaData framework in Krita. Work to enable networked document collaboration imported in KOffice. GetHotNewStuff experimentally reactivated in okular. A rewrite of the global shortcuts system added to KDE SVN. Pixmap Cache Summer of Code project merged into kdelibs, in time for KDE 4.0. KBoard, renamed Tagua, is removed from KDE SVN to continue in an external code repository. Read More

KDE's new technical documentation library, TechBase, hit an important milestone today when it served up its one millionth page. In step with the KDE 4.0 development cycle, TechBase is rapidly maturing into a central hub for high-level technical information related to KDE and the Free software desktop. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Much work in Amarok, with the implementation of a CoverFlow-esque OpenGL album art visualisation, codenamed "CoverBling", and Service Framework and Plasmification efforts. Sample OpenGL-based applets added to Plasma,, with Plasmoids to watch for changes to files, for browsing files, and to monitor network interfaces. General progress in the 2d projection and KML in Marble, OpenPrinting, and KOrganizer Theming Summer of Code projects. KWallet support in KRDC. KMines essentially rewritten with a QGraphicsView base, with support for multiple background SVG themes in KGoldRunner. More manipulation and view work in Kreative3d. Implementation of Kubelka-Munk paint mixing research in Krita. Internet integration in Kaider, with a WebQuery view and example script to use Google Translate. okular becomes usable as a print preview component. KTrace, a "strace" interface for KDE 4 added to playground/sysadmin. Beginnings of support for ComunIP, a Brazilian IM protocol in Kopete. More progress in the porting of Digikam and KTorrent to KDE 4. The start of a rewrite of the Oxygen widget style. KBFX, an alternate K menu, moves to kdereview. Read More

After a short break, we return to the next interview in the People Behind KDE series, travelling back to Germany to talk to a developer who wants to make things as simple as possible - for both users and developers. The recent winner of an aKademy Award for Best Non-Application for his work on Phonon - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Matthias Kretz. Read More

The Amarok team needs your help. Amarok are looking for a new, shiny and fresh jingle to play at first start of Amarok 2.0 and are holding a contest to find one. Magnatune and ccMixter have generously offered their help to get this going. The Amarok project will award the winner with fame, glory and a load of cool prizes, including $100 US dollars in cash and cool Amarok swag. The 2 runners up take away some swag as well. Read on for the rules of the contest. Read More