KDE.news 

Late but worthy -- that's how one can call this issue of Amarok Weekly News. It talks about new or updated Amarok features, and continues to provide tips and links to interesting scripts. As a bonus, kind of a New Year gift, we provide you an experimental RSS feed, for your pleasure. Enjoy! Read More

Users of BasKet Note Pads, an advanced notepad application for the KDE desktop, are called to participate in a usability survey. The survey is carried out by the recently launched BasKet Usability Project, a sponsored student project in the "Season of Usability" of OpenUsability.org. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A new game, KSquares, is imported into KDE SVN, with KLines starting on the (now familiar) path towards scalable graphics and general improvement. Usability and other improvements in Okular. Support for multiple "identies", alongside a festive basket of other enhancements in Mailody. Search support and plugin handling improvements in KGet. In Amarok, the "yauap" engine (a redeveloped GStreamer interface, using D-Bus interaction) progresses, with support for audio CD's. Improved OpenFormula specification compliance in KSpread. A much-enhanced implementation of "run-around text" comes to KWord. A work-in-progress python parser for KDevelop is imported into KDE SVN. Work begins on the Oxygen-themed widget style and window decoration for KDE 4. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A new interface element, the 'viewbar', makes its debut; continued work on Flake and Kross-based scripting within KOffice. Continued refinements in KSysGuard. Much work to improve support for VPN connections in KNetworkManager, with KNetworkManager being moved from playground/ to extragear/. Kaffeine begins porting to GStreamer 0.10. KGeography extends its global coverage with a handful of new country maps. KWin4 and Kolf begin their transition towards improved and scalable (SVG) graphics. Commits start to flow in the Student Mentoring program. Support for bullet-aliased passwords across KDE. Read More

Australian computer news site Computerworld asks if KDE 4 will be the ultimate business desktop. Speaking to developer Hamish Rodda they look at the changes being made to the KDE libraries including the Akonadi storage manager for PIM data. He also explains why KDE 4 will be important for ISVs to support. Read More

Scribus is known as the most mature open source WYSIWYG page layout application. This interview with members of the Scribus core team focuses on upcoming releases 1.3.4 and 1.3.5, standards in pre-press, success stories and many other important issues. This article was originally published in Russian for linuxgraphics.ru. Read More

Yahoo! user interface blog hosts an interview video with Lars Knoll and George Staikos on KHTML and WebKit. The video features the history of Konqueror (first 10 minutes) as well as the current development situation (next 10 minutes), an outlook about the possible future and of course a short demo presenting Qt4-WebKit accessing the Yahoo! page and rendering it nicely (last 10 minutes). You need Flash to view the page - if you don't have Flash, read a short summary of the interview. Read More

In a move to promote the KDE desktop in the Enterprise, the UK's Open Source experts, Sirius Corporation, have become a Supporting Member of the KDE project. Sirius' commitment to KDE is our second supporting membership and follows Canonical's recent patronage of the project. Sirius and KDE are joint participants in SQO-OSS, an EU-funded project that assesses the quality of Open Source code. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The beginnings of Sega Genesis/Megadrive support in Gamefu. kdegames improvements continue with porting and gameplay work in KBackGammon. OpenDocument master page support in Okular. 'Idle time' detection comes to the 'powermanager' module of the Guidance system utilies. MIDI format support in KTabEdit. The new histogram graphing functionality of Strigi continues to be refined. Following Akonadi, NEPOMUK starts to utilise the power of Strigi. WHATWG audio objects supported in KHTML through Phonon. Appointment printing work in KOrganizer. Kross scripting infiltrates KWord. Read More

KPhotoAlbum has entered string freeze for its new release, and author Jesper Pedersen is offering a prize draw for those who complete the translation. Individuals and teams with 100% of the strings translated will be entered into the draw for $100 to take place on hogmanay alongside the new release. The prize money is taken from the donations made to the KPhotoAlbum PayPal account and the aim is to show some appreciation for our hard working but often forgotten translators. Read More