KDE.news

KDE PIM 2014 Spring Sprint

Friday, 2 May 2014 | Markg85

We continue the tradition of having the PIM sprint in a place that starts with a "B". The last 3 PIM sprints were in Berlin (twice) and Brno. The Spring edition of this year took place in Barcelona, continuing the tradition. Add to this the name of the company hosting us which conveniently starts with a "B" as well (BlueSystems). Read More

Akademy 2014 Call for Papers

Wednesday, 30 April 2014 | Sealne

Akademy is the KDE Community conference. It is where we meet, discuss plans for the future, get inspired, learn and get work done. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE, this is your chance to present your work and ideas at the Conference from September 6-12 in Brno, Czech Republic. The main days for talks are Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th of September. The rest of the week will be BoFs, unconference sessions and workshops. Read More

KDE Ships second April Updates to Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces

Wednesday, 30 April 2014 | Unormal

Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.9. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

KDE Telepathy Sprint

Tuesday, 29 April 2014 | David Edmundson

In April 2014, we had a sprint for KDE Telepathy, KDE's foremost instant messaging client. The sprint consisted of both past and new contributors from around the world.

Group chats

For the sprint we decided to concentrate our hacking efforts into a few key areas that are currently weak inside KDE Telepathy. We chose group chats as it was one of the most repeated feature requests coming especially from enterprise circles. It was something we supported at a basic level but, since none of us used it on a daily basis, it did not receive the attention it deserved.

Firstly, we forced ourselves to use a conference room for the duration of the sprint for all our chatting purposes and made a list of every potential improvement we could find. Afterwards we picked things off the list one by one and made significant improvements to the group chatting experience.

Freedesktop Summit 2014 Report

Monday, 21 April 2014 | Dfaure

The team in action

From March 31 to April 4, Free Software desktop hackers from many of the largest desktop projects (including GNOME, KDE, Unity and LXDE-Qt) met to collaborate on specifications and tools to improve application interoperability between the desktops. Clarified standards are expected not only to improve the experience of running applications designed for one desktop inside of another, but also to provide a clearer picture of what is required from third party application developers approaching the Free Software desktop for the first time.

This was the second time the annual event occurred. Both times, it was sponsored and hosted by SUSE at their offices in Nuremberg.

KDE Releases Applications and Development Platform 4.13

Wednesday, 16 April 2014 | Jospoortvliet

April 16 2014 - The KDE Community proudly announces the latest major updates to KDE Applications delivering new features and fixes. Major improvements are made to KDE's Semantic Search technology, benefiting many applications. With Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Development Platform frozen and receiving only long term support, those teams are focusing on the transition to Frameworks 5. This release is translated into 53 languages; more languages are expected to be added in subsequent monthly minor bugfix releases.

KDE Applications 4.13 Benefit From The New Semantic Search, Introduce New Features

The KDE Community is proud to announce the latest major updates to the KDE Applications delivering new features and fixes. Kontact (the personal information manager) has been the subject of intense activity, benefiting from the improvements to KDE's Semantic Search technology and bringing new features. Document viewer Okular and advanced text editor Kate have gotten interface-related and feature improvements. In the education and game areas, we introduce the new foreign speech trainer Artikulate; Marble (the desktop globe) gets support for Sun, Moon, planets, bicycle routing and nautical miles. Palapeli (the jigsaw puzzle application) has leaped to unprecedented new dimensions and capabilities. read the announcement.

KDE Development Platform 4.13 Introduces Improved Semantic Search

The KDE Development Platform libraries are frozen and receive only bugfixes and minor improvements. The upgrade in the version number for the Development Platform is only for packaging convenience. All bug fixes and minor features developed since the release of Applications and Development Platform 4.11 have been included. The only major change in this release is the introduction of an improved Semantic Search, which brings better performance and reliability to searching on the Linux Desktop.

Development of the next generation KDE Development Platform—called KDE Frameworks 5—is in beta stage. Read this article to find out what is coming and see here for the latest announcements.

KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd March 2014

Sunday, 6 April 2014 | Mrybczyn

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Parley adds support for sound in multiple modes, allows the use of image instead of word for flashcard training
Okular adds Magnifier and play/pause in the presentation mode
KDE-PIM adds KAccounts support to Google resources
Krita uses the google-breakpad crashhandler for Krita on Windows.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

KDE Commit-Digest for 23rd February 2014

Saturday, 5 April 2014 | Mrybczyn

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

KDevelop Clang support adds refactoring / renaming of variables and functions
Kate adds jump to next/previous change function and a plugin that allows you to launch the replicode executable with specified settings
KDE-PIM implements webdav sharelink, adds optional KAccounts support to the facebook resource
Krita has a config option to pick colors with opacity
Plasma MediaCenter implements a media cache populated by one or more media sources
NetworkManager supports an airplane mode
Porting to Frameworks5 continues in rekonq, ksecrets, YaKuake.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Interview with Aaron Seigo About Bodega Appstore

Friday, 4 April 2014 | Jospoortvliet

Welcome to the Bodega store!

The openSUSE News site features an interview with Aaron Seigo about Bodega, a content store technology developed under the KDE umbrella. We replicate the KDE-relevant parts of the article here.

What is Bodega?

First off, let’s find out what Bodega is all about. Aaron explains:

KDE Releases Alpha Version of Next-gen Plasma Workspace

Wednesday, 2 April 2014 | Sebas

Plasma Next: familiar yet polished

KDE today releases the first Alpha version of the next-generation Plasma workspace. This kicks off the public testing phase for the next iteration of the popular Free software workspace, code-named "Plasma Next" (referring to the 'next' Plasma release-see below "A note on versioning and naming"). Plasma Next is built using QML and runs on top of a fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack using Qt 5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma Next provides a core desktop experience that will be easy and familiar for current users of KDE workspaces or alternative Free Software or proprietary offerings. Plasma Next is planned to be released as 2014.6 on the 17th of June.

The converged workspace

Modern day computing device abilities are starting to blend with each other. Tablets can be used with a keyboard, phones can stream their screen contents to a television, laptops have gotten flip and touch screens. To deal with this, Plasma Next has been designed as a converged workspace shell. It will be able to switch on demand between workspaces optimized for these different form factors, like a tablet user interface turning into a traditional desktop workspace when paired with a keyboard and a mouse. Plasma will be easily extensible as new form factors emerge.

Smoother Kickoff menu

The mechanism to adapt to different form factors is fully implemented and functional, but, as there is only one workspace available right now, it is not useful at this point. In the months to come, the Plasma team plans to make available additional workspaces, such as the tablet-oriented Plasma Active user experience, and the media-consumption-targeted Plasma Mediacenter.

A note on versioning and naming: The code name "Plasma Next" always points to the upcoming release of Plasma, KDE's end user workspace. The current Alpha will become 2014.6, to be released in June of this year. If the team opts for a 6 month release cycle (still to be determined), Plasma Next will refer to the 2014.12 release once 2014.6 is out.