KDE.news 

The KDE development team is working hard on the KDE 4 platform. KDE 4 will include many exciting new technologies which will greatly enhance the functionality of KDE. One of these new technologies is Decibel. We would like to give you an idea of what Decibel is all about.

The long-awaited Amarok 1.4.5 has finally been released. Major changes include an integrated Shoutcast stream directory, the new Magnatune music store re-download manager, support for track labeling, and improved sound quality when using the equalizer with xine engine. Many of the new features are explained in the latest issue of the Amarok Weekly Newsletter.

Like the previously featured articles on new KDE 4 technologies for Job Processes or SVG Widgets, today we feature the shiny new multimedia technology Phonon. Phonon is designed to take some of the complications out of writing multimedia applications in KDE 4, and ensure that these applications will work on a multitude of platforms and sound architectures. Unfortunately, writing about a sound technology produces very few snazzy screenshots, so instead this week has a few more technical details. Read on for the details.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work begins on Amarok 2.0. KBlackBox becomes the latest games application to take the step into the scalable graphics arena. KTTT, a tic-tac-toe game, is ported to KDE 4. Further progress made on the knewstuff2 framework. Software RAID monitoring, along with other improvements in KSysGuard. Mailody gets support for printing HTML emails. Improved support for custom emoticons in Kopete. The sublime-integration user interface branch is merged back into the main KDevelop source tree. Step, an educational physics simulation package, is imported into KDE SVN. KitchenSync is removed from KDE SVN, in anticipation of an OpenSync-based implementation.

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel to France to meet a developer who likes polishing, someone who loves to create images only to filter them out -- tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Cyrille Berger.

The Season of Usability, run by the OpenUsability project has kicked off with two KDE applications in the focus: BasKet Note Pads and the KDE 4 universal document viewer Okular. Usability, as one of the important focus points of the upcoming fourth major version of KDE, is also an active part of the KDE project. The Season of Usability manifests KDE's close involvement with OpenUsability.

Since not all of the development for KDE 4 is in base technologies, this week features two of applications from the KDE-Edu team: Kalzium, a feature-filled chemistry reference tool, and KmPlot, a powerful equation graphing and visualization program. Read on for the details.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KGoldRunner begins the transition to a scalable graphics interface. Okular gains support for DjVu metadata, and investigates the use of threaded text extraction in order to prevent interface freezes. Continued improvement in the font KControl configuration module. More 3D and contemporary effects in the kwin_composite branch. Multiple, discriminatory language spellchecking develops in Sonnet. Improved support for BMP and ZIP files in Strigi. Import of user documentation for Mailody. Optimisations in the Dolphin filemanager. An important stage in the replacement of KDesktop elements with KRunner is completed. KTorrent makes exploratory moves towards a KDE 4 port. KSirc, an IRC client, is removed from KDE SVN.

On Friday 14 January 2007, members of the KDE PIM developer group came together for the fifth year in a row in Osnabrück, Germany to review the state of the project. Important topics including Akonadi, KDE PIM maintenance and enterprise usage. A record number of attendees were welcomed into the Intevation office and made at home by Bernhard Reiter, Jan-Oliver Wagner and the rest of the team.

In partnership with the Qt based VoIP free software OpenWengo and Mandriva, KDE-France is organising week of events in Paris from January 29th to February 2 about KDE 4. KDE will be present at the SolutionsLinux trade show, the annual French professional meeting for Open Source software. We will have a booth and give two presentations during the show. Two open KDE 4 hacking events will sandwich Solutions Linux, one before at OpenWengo and the Nepomuk workshop, previously mentioned on KDE Dot News, organised after.