KDE.news 

KDE's Portugese translation is showing an impressive amount of green in the translation statistics. To find out more about the man who has helped make our winning translation team People Behind KDE interviewed José Nuno Coelho Sanarra Pires, a 'mood chamelion' who has the best name out of any KDE developer we've interviewed so far.

The position of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was today strengthened by the K Desktop Environment (KDE) joining the ODF Alliance. KDE joins other partners such as Oracle, SUN Microsystems, Mandriva, IBM and Junta de Andalucia in promoting the OpenDocument Format as a market leader in document exchange and storage.

Multimedia in KDE has been in the news lately, especially Phonon, the new multimedia framework for KDE 4. Phonon still needs a lot of work, as do the applications which are going to use it. So, in the spirit of the previous KDE PIM meeting, Annahoeve in Achtmaal, The Netherlands, will again be visited by a group of KDE developers. From Friday the 26th to Sunday the 28th of May, more than 15 developers from 4 continents will have a unique chance to talk about and work on Multimedia in KDE.

The amaroK team have announced the official release of amaroK 1.4, and the launch of the Fast Forward series, the cheeky successor to the well-received Airborne series. Fast Forward comes with improved media device support, featuring enhanced iPod support that handles the latest iPod devices, support for IFP/IRiver devices, a new plugin for generic media devices, and the ability to handle as many of these devices as you'd like.

InQub Ltd offers personal remote KDE desktops on Kubuntu using NoMachine's NX technology for bandwidth savings and connection encryption for a small monthly charge. Each account is comes with 1 GB of home directory storage and is customisable by the respective user. This service represents an interesting approach of working with KDE without installation and maintenance issues, especially for GNU/Linux newbies and users travelling a lot. Users can get a week's free trial of the service.

Continuing in a series of interviews with businesses that benefit KDE and benefit from KDE, we investigate AEI (Analytical Engineering, Inc), a Midwestern engineering firm founded in 1994. In an interview originally conducted by Aaron Seigo, AEI's design engineer and author Caleb Tennis discusses AEI's IT needs and KDE's involvement.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: release polishing for amaroK 1.4. New sounds for KTuberling. KDE 4 changes include the proposed kdepimlibs module is created. New SVG icon engine based on QsvgEngine. New capabilities added to Solid. Applications with simple audio needs start to migrate to Phonon.

Linux.com is running a very informative article on Phonon, the new multimedia layer for KDE 4. It explains the rise and fall of Phonon's predecessor aRts and elaborates on the ups and downs of an audio abstraction layer. The article also gives an overview of common use cases and provides some example code. The Phonon website itself provides more code examples and documentation for using the Phonon API and for writing a backend. In addition to the existing NMM backend by Bernhard Fuchshumer, Tim Beaulen is working on a Xine backend for Phonon.

Cristian Tibirna represented KDE at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo Toronto 2006. Here follows his report of this event.

At the request of KDE's representative for North America, George Staikos, and thanks to the sponsoring granted by Plum Comm. Canada, the organizers of the Toronto LWCE, I was able to go to Toronto on April 25th, and to give a three hours tutorial: Why KDE for the desktop and a one hour conference: Take a Hold of the Rapidly Maturing Linux Desktop.

I also wanted to run a KDE stand, but it turned out not to be possible for me (given work-related constraints) to stay through both days as required.

ConsortiumInfo.org is carrying an interesting interview about KOffice called "The Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on KOffice". In this interview, Inge elaborates on ODF support, KOffice vs OOo and KOffice future developments. The OpenDocument format, recently defined as an ISO standard, is the new default format in KOffice 1.5.