KDE.news 

For the past year and a half, I've been a co-sponsor of the KDE Quanta+ project helping Eric, Andras and the entire Quanta+ team deliver one of the best web development applications in the world -- Free or otherwise. It has been my pleasure and an honor to be part of bringing Quanta+ to you.

Almost unnoticed, our favorite Desktop Environment has turned eight. This posting by a young and daring student called Matthias Ettrich started it all. Since then, KDE has come a long way. It did not only evolve technically, but also has one of the greatest communities, where people are not only terribly productive but friends. Thanks to all contributors and happy birthday KDE!

This week's KDE CVS-Digest (experimental layout): Pixie Plus returns with new maintainer. Krita now shears and rotates images. KPresenter adds master page support. amaroK now supports NMM. Plus coverage of the GStreamer presentation from the aKademy conference.

The Quality Team and Docs Team are pleased to announce the results of the recent Docs Competition. The judges were impressed with a wide range of "very high quality" submissions, all of which can be found here. In time they will all be included in the new User Guide, and each entrant will receive full credit. Read on to find out who won!

A range of new Konqi the Dragon graphics and the first Konqi video has been put together by newcomer to the KDE Artists mailing list Bastian Salmela (Basse). Unlike previous versions, this new Konqi wireframe model is made in the Free Software application Blender. You can find Konqi and the Magical Rope of Curiosity video (our killer feature at LinuxWorld London) as well as still graphics and their sources on the KDE Clipart page and Basse's KDE page. Basse is working on more videos and improving the Konqi model so expect more soon.

During October a lot of conferences and events in Germany will take place where KDE will be present. The KDE Project is still in urgent need for some volunteers to staff our booth at Systems Fairs (18.-22.10.2004) in Munich, Berlinux (22-23.10.2004) in Berlin and LinuxWorldExpo (26.-28.10.) in Frankfurt. If you would like to help and present KDE please send an email to the KDE promo mailinglist.

What is a portable usability laboratory? And could KDE development make use of one? Pete Gordon, an engineer behind such a one, shares his thoughts in this interview on exactly that topic.

Last week saw the first LinuxWorld Conference & Expo franchise in London. Representing the KDE project were Jonathan Riddell (Umbrello), Jeff Snyder (Kompare), Richard Smith (Kopete), George Wright (KLatin), Martijn Dekkers, Ben Lamb and David Pashley (on the Debian stand).

A new snapshot of the cspi-dbus bridge has been released. Together with the Qt 4 D-BUS bindings, it is now possible to write KDE assistive technologies that transparently interact with Qt/KDE applications as well as GTK/GNOME applications.

KDE 3.3.1 has been released. This latest and greatest from KDE mercilessly exterminates bugs in Konqueror, KHTML, the KDE Edutainment module, the KDE JuK box and more. Better yet, Plastik is now ridiculously fast and has become a strong contender for the default style in KDE 3.4. Also, the Quanta Web Development tool has been enhanced and now has the VPL (Visual Page Layout aka WYSIWYG) mode enabled. For the gory details, read the KDE 3.3.1 changelog.