KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

          <ul><li>Exponential zoom in/out feature in "Solar System Viewer" of <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kstars/">KStars</a></li>

            <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2014-04-13/">Read the rest of the Digest here</a>.

It's the time of the year again when the Randa Meetings plan starts to get quite concrete. After a break last year, the 5th edition of the Randa Meetings will happen in the middle of the Swiss Alps in August 2014. So once again more then 50 KDE contributors will meet in Randa to hack, discuss, decide and work for a full week.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Plasma screen locker gains password checking
• Krita adds Background Color feature to KisImage
• Plasma MediaCenter fetches and stores genre metadata in media library
• Ktorrent implements a magnet manager; sees multiple optimizations
• Pykde5 adds Sonnet support.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.13 series. This release contains only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

KDE is pleased to announce that Plasma Next Beta 1 has been released. Plasma Next is the codename for the new version of our beautiful desktop workspace built on KDE Frameworks 5. It features the same familiar layout you will be used to but with a simplified and more slick look from the new KDE Visual Design Group. For the first time our desktop ships with its own font, the Oxygen Font. Internally much has been rewritten in QML to make it smoother to render and easier to develop. The source has been split into over 20 sources making it easier for distributions to package. We need as many testers as possible to iron out the many bugs we know still exist. Many distributions have started making packages so you can easily test it, listed on the unstable packages wiki page. The easiest way to try it out is to download the Neon5 ISO and boot from it on a USB drive, Neon5 has the latest daily builds of Plasma code. Please test it out and let the Plasma team know what to work on.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• KWallet adds support for pam-kwallet in kwalletd
• KWin introduces a X-KWin-Internal in kwineffect services
• Krita shows rulers in pixel units by default (user can change this)
• Smb4k implements permanent (re)mounting of shares
• Choqok adds preview of images from Twitter.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• KDE Frameworks changes default font settings to Oxygen font
• KDevelop improves Custom Buildsystem Plugin, and it is now possible to define macros and add include directories/files through GUI and the GUI is always accessible by clicking on Project->Open Configuration
• Kwin introduces a new Effect Loading mechanism
• Trojita distinguishes between IMAP errors and network failures
• In KDEPIM, work starts on mailmerge support
• Skrooge can reorder the suboperations in the split operation
• Plasma MediaCenter adds a Baloo plugin
• Baloo reduces memory usage of the Akonadi indexer.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Baloo reduces I/O usage during initial indexing; introduces a new database wrapper which adds features such as combining a writable + read only db and many convenience functions
• Plasma Framework makes the desktop scripting activity-aware
• KDE-PIM makes some of the IMAP dialogs asynchronous which improves error handling
• Umbrello adds synchronous message support to collaboration diagrams
• Skrooge filters date better in operation page

Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Plasma Desktop can highlight currently open applets
• Plasma framework adds an optional EGL/X11 backend for WindowThumbnail QQuickItem
• KDE-PIM can create calendar events from e-mail
• Kate substantially improves highlighting of reStructuredText (rest.xml)
• Skrooge adds "quarter" and "semester" period in graph and "Incomes & Expenditures" dashboard widget.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

From May 16th to 18th, Málaga is hosting Akademy-es 2014 in Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieria de Telecomunicación of Universidad de Málaga. This event is organized by KDE España, Linux Málaga and Bitvalley, and represents the return of a KDE event to Málaga 9 years after it hosted Akademy 2005.