KDE.news 

Image management application KPhotoAlbum has launched a splash screen contest. The contest comes with a prize of $100US straight from author Jesper's PayPal account. Some early designs are on the contest page already. The contest runs until September 15th, and after that the KPhotoAlbum community will vote on which one will be used for the next release. Read More

LWN has reported on KDE's Season of KDE projects. Article one introduces the season and looks at projects for KWin, KOffice, user migration and accessibility. Article two covers projects on Poppler, Umbrello, KMail and more. Read More

K3b 1.0 is in sight and with it I would like to introduce a new default theme. Not because I don't like the current ones, but I just want K3b 1.0 to look different so that people will see the difference, not only feel it. If you are interested in creating a theme for K3b see the themes howto which describes the pictures that are needed in a complete K3b theme set. Send your entries to k3b-devel. In other artwork news one of our best community sites kde-look.org passed its fifth birthday. Read More

With a donation of a new Poweredge server from Dell Inc., and a successful hardware fundraiser for disks last month, the long-suffering ktown.kde.org site gets a welcome upgrade, and a new hosting package from the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum. Read on for the details on the new server, Immanuel. Read More

aKademy 2006 has announced the sponsor's list for KDE's World Summit. This is one of the our most impressive list of sponsors to date. Our Gold sponsors are the home of Linus Torvalds OSDL and the KDE based distribution Kubuntu. Housing the conference as our host institution is The School of Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin. Read on for the full list. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: As the Summer Of Code draws to a conclusion, functional code imports and work in the avKode Phonon backend, KDevelop Teamwork and Advanced Session Management projects. Work begins on version 2 of the Kross scripting framework. More work on video file support in KPhotoAlbum. New features and streamlining in Konversation and Konsole. New Oxygen icons and other improvements in KGet. The introduction of wizards to automate many tasks in KMobileTools. Initial porting to KDE 4 of the console-based kdepim tools, with Kopete 0.12 moved into the KDE 3.5 branch. Experiments in fast PDF parsing in Strigi. Read More

Today, KDE releases a first developer snapshot of the upcoming KDE4 release. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE4 will provide, those who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE4 platform and for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE4. This snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable, the interfaces are subject to changes at any time. The changes that have gone into the development version this snapshot is based on have all happened under the hood, little is visible yet. Now it is up to application developers to use the new possibilities. While this snapshot will probably not be what kdelibs will finally look like, it should give a fair idea of what to expect. Read More

Curious about the man responsible for the application behind CTRL-Esc? This postgrad student will make sure his application in KDE4 will 'flash up in a ball of fire and lightning, flames of fire torching random apps on the screen. It will settle down into a mind blowing beautiful interface, with only flickers of flames around the edges.' Want to see a Sneak Preview of KDE4? Or read all about FIFO and LIFO, Saki err Sake, heart attacks and the man responsible for breaking Konversation for five months? People Behind KDE presents John Tapsell. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: kdesu, the KDE application privileges manager, gets long-awaited support for the sudo method. Strigi gets .rpm and .deb package contents indexing capabilities, and can now index UTF-8 encoded text. Guidance gets a new power manager applet. Code import for the Physiks educational Summer Of Code project. Amarok gets support for MTP media devices. Work starts on porting KGoldRunner to KDE 4. Rewrites begin in the KReversi game and Oskar media player. GUI optimisations in KTorrent and KTU (KDE Translation Updater). Experiments using Kexi as a database backend in KPhotoAlbum, and rendering SVG in Unity. Read More

This year in Dublin will host the annual meeting of the KDE community, and it will be a great occasion for developers to meet, code, hold bug-fixing sessions, discussions and much more. During the week of the conference, some KDE-Edu developers will meet to discuss themes including their future strategies of the module for the upcoming KDE 4, current applications, ideas for new ones and collaboration with other education-related projects, like SkoleLinux. A SkoleLinux representive will give a talk during the conference at aKademy. Read More