KDE.news 

KDevelop 3.4 has been released, bringing many new features to KDE's Integrated Development Environment. The first major release in over a year closes more than 500 bugs. There is an impressive list of additional features including improved Qt 4 support, new debugging abilities, more attractive default user interface layout and improvements for C++, Ruby and PHP support. Packages are available for Kubuntu and openSUSE with unofficial builds for several others on the download page. Update: The developers have put together a slideshow to showcase the new features.

The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.6, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Significant features include additional support for Compiz as a window manager with Kicker, session management for browser tabs in Akregator, templating for KMail messages, faster frame rates with video chat in Kopete and new summary menus for Kontact making it easier to work with your appointments and to-dos.

Thanks to the efforts of the KDevelop team and the bug squad, the number of bugs in KDevelop has been reduced by more than half -- as of the current count, 186 bugs! To find out more, please check out the KDE Bug Tracking System.

Have you ever had your taskbar filled with 10 applications all doing something that involved waiting for a task to finish?
Document Printing Progress, a K3b CD burning dialogue, Audio Encoding via KAudioCreator, File Transfers in Konqueror, Kopete, KTorrent, checking email in KMail... The new Jobs support in KDE 4 will unify the display of progress for these tasks, making it easy to see and manage what is happening on your system. Read on for details.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KHangman becomes the latest application to migrate to SVG-based scalable interface rendering. KOpenBabel is merged and the beginnings of a 3d navigation system in Kalzium. Work expands in the Umbrello/KPlato Student Mentoring program. Support for the ComicBook Archive and other improvements in okular. Work on Picture, Video and Krita "Flake" shapes in KOffice. Improvements in both the KDE 3.5 and 4.0 versions of Konsole. Language detection in Sonnet continues to mature. Import of concept code demos in Decibel. "Simple-search" user interface work, and support for indexing binary data fields in Strigi. "liveui" moves back into kdelibs. dbmodeler, a database schema modelling application (part of the Season of KDE), is renamed "grama".

Rosegarden, a powerful KDE based professional music composition and editing
environment, has been named SourceForge project of the month for December.
With a notation editor, event editor, intuitive MIDI Studio concept, vast
mixing and plugin capabilities, Rosegarden provides the audio professional
with the tools they need for a complete Digital Audio Workstation. In the
article, the programmers discuss how the project started, the intended
audience, and the defining moment for Rosegarden as a widely used and
important application. Congratulations to the Rosegarden team!

The next issue of the weekly Amarok newsletter is out. This issue covers the fine tuning of the scoring algorithm, new fadeout options, configurable playlist color, as well as new handy tool for editing filters. Traditionally, with tips included.

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we meet a developer who has unfinished business with midges, someone who prefers bullets to stars - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Daniel Molkentin.

NEPOMUK is the social semantic desktop project which is planned to be integrated into KDE 4. The work is being done by Mandriva programmers Sebastian Trüg (of K3b's fame) and Stephane Lauriere. As the move to kdelibs is planned, there will be a couple of presentations in Paris to clarify the aims of the project and its technical aspects. The first one will be held at the "Solution Linux" meeting on the 31st January. The second will be happening directly at the Mandriva Offices on the 1st and 2nd February. Sebastian's announcement on the Mandriva mailing list has more details.

Just because KDE has been designed to be portable across Linux, FreeBSD and other UNIX/X11 environments for an age now, doesn't mean we aren't up for the occasional challenge. With version 4, Trolltech released Qt for the Mac, Windows and now even embedded environments under the GPL.
Since Qt is the base upon which KDE is developed, KDE is now free to offer native support for these platforms. Today I am focusing on the KDE/Mac developments for KDE 4. Read on for the details.