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Trolltech has announced the availability of the second Qt 4 Technical Preview. Key highlights include support for AT-SPI, bringing accessibility to the Unix and Linux desktop for people with disabilities. Read the online documentation or jump to the download page.

A new issue of the series "Application of the Month" has been released. It covers an application from the KDE Edutainment Project called Kig together with a (bit outdated) interview with its maintainer Dominique Devriese. Kig is an interactive program which you can use to study geometric figures and their relationships. If you want to help us creating this monthly series or you want to translate it to your own language please contact us. Enjoy App of the Month in Dutch, English and German.

A new KDE website has been launched! KDE.org.uk promotes the K Desktop Environment and showcases activities of KDE developers and contributors around the United Kingdom. If you want to help with creating more content on KDE.org.uk or get involved in KDE events in the UK, please contact the KDE.org.uk team.

In the third installment of the Stealth Desktop series about Slackware Linux, Eduardo Sánchez builds upon the previous steps of Part I and Part II. Continuing where those parts left off, he introduces the subjects of user, font and printer management in Slackware showing how KDE can help on these tasks.

Celebrating one month of KDE 3.3 out in the wild, userinstinct put together a usability review with user testing. "Based on feedback from our test group, the default settings for a number of KDE parameters differ from what is usually expected and desired by users. Providing better defaults would reduce the time users spend looking for configuration settings and would provide a better "out-of-the-box" experience."

For those of you not in the know, Ruby is a relatively new general purpose scripting language that is surprisingly expressive, allowing developers to prototype and develop powerful applications in a short time. Now with QtRuby and Korundrum, that power and expressivity has increased: You can sketch out pretty interfaces with Qt Designer and automatically create Ruby code with the rbuic tool. Or do amazing things with DCOP without needing preprocessors, makefiles etc -- just type in your Ruby script and be in control of your desktop. In fact, you can find a fairly complete description of all the features supported by QtRuby and Korundrum over at the Ruby bindings section of the KDE Developer's Corner.

If you missed out on the writing competition at aKademy, now is your chance to make up for it. The KDE Quality and Documentation teams have got together to offer some great O'Reilly prizes for writing documentation. All you have to do to enter is write a page for the new KDE User Guide within two weeks and we'll send you a prize! Read on for the full details.

The KOffice team is happy to bring you the third bugfix package that builds upon the previous 1.3.x versions, with many fixes, mainly in the core libraries and in some filters. But there is also a fully new and complete translation for KOffice: Welsh. See the release notes and the complete list of changes.

It seems like whenever KDE developers get together for a meeting or conference, great things happen. For instance, in the past we've seen developments such as the creation of DCOP (one of the building blocks of KDE), or thousands of fixes in only one short week. The recent KDE conference in Germany was no exception. One of the most notable outcomes of the conference was an impromptu project to port Mozilla to KDE.

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest (experimental layout): KPDF adds zoom, search, thumbnails and is optimized. Kontact now supports Kolab version 2. Krita adds startup templates. khtml improves the outline painting algorithm. Kopete merges Novell GroupWise Messenger support into HEAD. Plastik style optimized.