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Today on People Behind KDE we introduce you to Ellen Reitmayr, one of KDE and OpenUsability.org's top usability experts. Ellen has done a lot to help the usability of Kontact and other applications but is now focusing on a consistent user experience for the whole KDE desktop. In her interview we get to find out about her "denkbrett" and "liebsters". Read More

Today the KDE team announces a new project to re-synchronize our HTML engine, KHTML, with the WebKit engine. Code named Unity, the project has so far focused on porting the WebKit engine to Qt 4 with minimal changes to the existing code-base. WebKit is a derivative of the KHTML engine developed by Apple Computer Inc. Read More

Red Flag Desktop Linux is the leading distribution in China and surrounding regions. Its goal is to provide the most professional desktop product available. It has more than an 80% desktop share in the Chinese linux market, and over one million copies are shipped each year with KDE as its only desktop environment. Huang JianZhong, a Senior Manager in the Desktop Product R&D Department of Red Flag, speaks below about the history of Red Flag Linux and their relationship with KDE. In 2006, Red Flag Linux has been visible by joining the Open Source Development Labs and their ongoing work with Asianux. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Kamefu (a multi-machine emulator frontend) has been renamed Gamefu. Physiks, a physics educational project, and a project for advanced session management, both a result of the Summer Of Code, are imported into KDE SVN. Work progresses in the "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" and "WorKflow" projects. KDE 4 changes: KPat, a card game application, gets OpenGL bling, while kwin gets experimental compositing support and compiz-like effects. Okular gets support for the TIFF file format. Akonadi advances towards its goals with the import of a command-line and GUI client. Read More

KOffice 1.5 saw the addition of Kross, a framework to allow for scripting plugins in a number of languages. Krita and Kexi come with a number of plugins with more available for download at KDE-Files.org. To find out more about this intriguing technology and how it came about KDE Dot News interviewed the author Sebastian Sauer. Read on to discover how you can use Kross. Read More

About two weeks ago, several KDE developers gathered at FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source conference in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany. Hosted by the Computer Science department of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, the conference also provided rooms for free software projects. One was seized by the KDE project for discussion and hacking. Additionally, representatives of the KDE project gave two talks at the official conference programs, as well as two other talks that directly related to KDE. Read on for the full report. Read More

froglogic GmbH today announced the availability of Squish/KDE. Squish/KDE is a free of charge edition of the Qt GUI testing tool Squish to create and run tests on applications developed for the popular K Desktop Environment. Squish offers a versatile testing framework with a choice of popular test scripting languages (Python, JavaScript and Tcl) extended by test-specific functions, open interfaces, add-ons, integrations into test management systems, a powerful IDE aiding the creation and debugging of tests and a set of command line tools facilitating fully automated test runs. Read More

"Trolltech announced the release of a technology preview of Qt 4.2 – the upcoming new version of its leading framework for high performance cross-platform application development – to its commercial and open source developer community for feedback. The final release of Qt 4.2 is currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2006." 4.2 adds a new canvas, SVG support and improved integration with GTK, CUPS and DBus. Their What's New document includes the full details or just download it directly. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: PDF hyperlink and file editing support in KViewShell. DVI format support in Okular. Continued progress in "WorKflow", "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" and "KDevelop-teamwork" Summer Of Code projects. BsFilter and DSpam tools are now supported in the KMail anti-spam wizard. LastFM stream support becomes more robust and polished, alongside other notable development work in Amarok. Aesthetic modifications made in Kmplot and Kalzium. KDE 4 changes: Work begins on the "Cokoon" widget style, and KSpell2 is renamed "Sonnet" in preparation for some interesting development work. Read More

Today's interview on People Behind KDE brings us one of KDE's oldest contributors. This man translates KDE into Danish to help preserve our freedom. Find out why he turned away from Emacs as we present Erik Kjær Pedersen. Read More