KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: NEPOMUK integration, and a new "browser" interface added to Akonadi. Refactoring work in Kate and KPilot. Experiments with a new Kate-alike session list in Konsole. Expose-like window management effects in KWin. Support for styling the background of forms in KHTML. A Strigi-based metadata indexer for KIO. Signature support in Mailody. Improved support for metadata internal storage and display, and a new Flake shape for video in KOffice. Large code update in Umbrello, part of the Student Mentoring program. New tileset selector for kdegames, to be shared between KMahjongg and KShisen. Support for the FictionBook format in okular. Import of an initial version of the Oxygen sound theme for KDE 4. Import of user documentation for Kompare. kaction-cleanup-branch merged back into the main kdelibs. Security fixes in KPDF and KSirc. Read More

In this week's edition of the Road to KDE 4, we'll take a look at the up and coming KWord 2.0 as part of the KOffice project. KWord 1.6.1 is already a powerful KDE-integrated word processor, but with KDE 4 technologies, KWord 2.0 promises to be among the most powerful free word processors available. Read on for more details. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Sonnet, the natural language checker, continues to develop and can now discriminate between more than 70 different languages. More work on the "konsole-split-view" branch to add split/merge functionality to the KDE 4 console. Support for filesystem labels in the "mountconfig" Guidance configuration module. Large developments in the "mailtransport" KDE-PIM work to enable code sharing between users of the common "emailing" action. Support for background text colours in Konversation. Further work in the "Papillon" MSN Messenger connection library, with support for Xtraz status and notifications in Kopete. Gradient editing tool introduced across KOffice. Better support for PDF presentation files in Okular. Improved AI in the recently-imported game KSquares. "Sublime", the new user interface library for KDevelop 4 is imported into KDE SVN. The initial code for KRunner, the KDE 4 replacement for the "Run Command" dialog, is imported into KDE SVN. The RSS Konqueror sidebar plugin is removed from KDE SVN, along with dcoprss and librss, which will both be replaced by libsyndication in KDE 4. Read More

FOSDEM is yet another one of those catchy acronyms that stands for nothing less than "Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting". KDE will again be hosting a room dedicated to talks and chat about the free desktop. These annual meetings are organised by volunteers, free of charge and generally recognised as one of the most productive gatherings available on the European stage. This year it will be held on the weekend of 24/25th February 2007 on the ULB Campus Solbosh in Brussels, Belgium. Read More

Qt community site Qt Centre is celebrating its first anniversary with a programming contest. The contest is open until the end of May and the winning entries will be the best Qt 4 or Qtopia application or component, each selected from one of several categories. Great prizes to be won include a MacBook and two Qtopia Greenphones. The contest is sponsored by Basyskom, froglogic, ICS, KDAB and Trolltech. Read More

The KDE community is getting ready to set a major milestone for the free desktop with the upcoming release of KDE 4. This will mark a new level of user experience, technical excellence in the framework and opportunities for free software on the desktop. The KDE contributors conference, which is part of aKademy, the world summit of the KDE community, will be the place to present the newest developments, long-term strategies or interesting input from the surrounding communities, projects and societies. Be part of it, present your thoughts, ideas and work at aKademy 2007 in Glasgow, Scotland. Read More

In a brand new series of People Behind KDE we meet a coder from the KDE heartland, Germany who enables us to communicate with the global developer community through Konversation. Someone who is not satisfied with a static terminal window, tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Eike Hein. Read More

Since KDE 4 development is in full swing with plans for a KDE 4.0 release sometime later this year, I thought I'd put together a weekly piece entitled The Road to KDE 4. The idea is to have a short overview of one or two of the features that show progress in KDE 4. For my first issue, the goal is to show off some of the great SVG work that has taken place so far. Read on for the details... Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The KDE Commit-Digest 2006 retrospective. blinKen and KNetWalk become the latest applications to move to scalable graphics. KSquares further develops, with an AI player implemented. More maps and a more sophisticated divisions and capitals implementation in KGeography. Support for password-protected RAR archives in the kio_rar interface. Work to support drag-and-drop of transfers in KGet. Import of "koregressions" test suite for KOffice. Longstanding KWeather and KHTML bugs fixed. Major refactoring in the "sonnet" natural language checker. Version 1.0 of Eigen, the library for vector and matrix math, is released. Read More