KDE.news 

There is now less than one week to go until KDE developers meet with our users and industry supporters at Trinity College Dublin for our annual KDE World Summit, aKademy 2006. We are pleased to announce a further two sponsors to our long list. Office automation equipment manufacturer Ricoh and mobile phone company Nokia are now both silver supporters. Read on for the keynote speakers and some more useful information.

This year aKademy will continue with tradition created at aKademy 2005 of awarding the people that made an outstanding contribution to KDE in the last year. The award ceremony will be on Sunday, September 24th at 17:50-18:00. Read on for more details.

Packages for the first KDE 4 developers snapshot "Krash" have started appearing. Most exciting is packages for a whole new platform, Mac OS X. More details are on Benjamin Reed's blog. For the traditionalists packages are available from openSUSE and Kubuntu. If you are a KDE application developer, this is the easiest way to start porting your application to KDE 4. Meanwhile work is continuing on KDE on Windows where developers have successfully got all of kdelibs compiling. Finally the KDE Women project has a new tutorial to get you started in KDE4 development.

Tonight in the two-weekly People Behind KDE series we are featuring Allan Sandfeld Jensen. He is a KDE core developer, mostly active for KHTML and KDE multimedia. After reading the interview you will know what his personal "carewolf" looks like, together with all other personal things you have to know about this developer.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work begins on Ruby language support in KDevelop 4. Work continues in the KReversi code rewrite. Kalzium gets functionality to visually show the country an element was discovered in. Automatic regression testing for Kate. Mimetype and metadata support for the XML Paper Specification format. Strigi can now use outside applications to index files outside its core scope, such as PDF files. KJots gets greatly improved find and replace functionality. Many improvements in supporting different archive formats in KArchiver.

Following our interview last month with Phil Thompson on PyQt, we spoke with the maintainer of PyKDE to discover the status of our own Python bindings. Read on for Jim Bublitz talking about how he was suckered into maintaining PyKDE, why you should use it and what his plans for the future are.

KOffice, the KDE office suite, today released version 1.6 beta1. This release incorporates a number of new features, mainly from the Google Summer of Code projects, as well as a great number of bug fixes. It also signals the start of the feature freeze that always preceeds a release of a major new version, thus giving the developers exactly a month to fix outstanding bugs. We urge everybody that is interested in KOffice to install and test this version to make sure that the final 1.6 has a high quality. To see more details, you can look in the announcement or the full changelog.

Trolltech has issued a release candidate of Qt 4.2 under an evaluation licence. This version features CSS-like widget styling capability, a new 2D canvas class called QGraphicsView, text completion, new calendar and font selection widgets, and new desktop integration features. Detailed list of new features on the Qt 4.2 intro page, get it from the download page.

KDE will be present on the LinuxTage Essen in Germany from September 9th to 10th. A number of KDE developers will be present, including some of the famous Amarok hackers. Visit us to see the latest in KDE and tell us what you love and what needs improved.

Under the KDE umbrella, the KOffice project took part in the <a href=""http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html>2006 Summer of Code with four participants. And not only that, but the Dutch Programmeerzomer, sponsored by Finalist, also selected a KOffice project. The summer is over, the season of mists and long hacking nights has arrived and the question that's obviously in everyone's mind is, have these five delivered? -- and, more importantly, will Gabor, Alfredo, Emanuele, Thomas and Fredrik continue hacking on KOffice?