KDE.news

KDE Commit-Digest for 22nd December 2013

Saturday, 11 January 2014 | Mrybczyn

KStars adds support to online plate solving using astrometry.net web services API, optimizes memory usage
Umbrello adds duplication of diagrams
KWin adds an option in oxygenrc to disable window background
Krita adds thumbnail support for kra and ora files
Numerous bug fixes in KMix.

KDE Ships January Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform

Wednesday, 8 January 2014 | Tnyblom

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. These updates are the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.11 series. Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Platform are frozen and receiving only long term support. Workspace development efforts are focused on Plasma 2; current generation Plasma Workspaces will continue to receive updates until August 2015. KDE Platform is in transition to Frameworks 5. So this release is focused on KDE Applications. The release contains only bugfixes and translation updates, and will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Read More

Frameworks 5 Tech Preview

Tuesday, 7 January 2014 | Jospoortvliet

The KDE Community is proud to announce a Tech Preview of KDE Frameworks 5. Frameworks 5 is the result of almost three years of work to modularize, review and port the set of libraries previously known as KDElibs or KDE Platform 4 into a set of Qt Addons, separate libraries with well-defined dependencies and abilities, ready for Qt 5. This gives the Qt ecosystem a powerful set of drop-in libraries providing additional functionality for a wide variety of tasks and platforms, based on over 15 years of KDE experience in building applications. Today, all the Frameworks are available in Tech Preview mode; a final release is planned for the first half of 2014. Some Tech Preview addons (notably KArchive and Threadweaver) are more mature than others at this time.

What is Frameworks 5?

The KDE libraries are currently the common code base for (almost) all KDE applications. They provide high-level functionality such as toolbars and menus, spell checking and file access. Currently, 'kdelibs' is distributed as a single set of interconnected libraries. Through KDE Frameworks efforts, these libraries have been methodically reworked into a set of independent, cross platform classes that will be readily available to all Qt developers.

The KDE Frameworks—designed as drop-in Qt Addon libraries—will enrich Qt as a development environment with functions that simplify, accelerate and reduce the cost of Qt development. Frameworks eliminate the need to reinvent key functions.

KDE at FOSDEM 2014

Tuesday, 7 January 2014 | Jriddell

KDE will be at FOSDEM in Brussels on 1&2 February this year. We will have a stall both days showing off the latest builds of Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2. Saturday will see our Desktop devroom which is shared with GNOME, LXDE and Unity. There will be a a panel discussion with the governing bodies of the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. (the association that supports KDE), a presentation about KDE Frameworks 5, and a personal account of challenges and triumphs—"Do you have to be brain damaged to care about desktop Linux?. Read More

KDE Commit-Digest for 15th December 2013

Sunday, 5 January 2014 | Mrybczyn

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Marble adds support for cyclestreets.net bicycle routing, showing journey duration for OSRM routing
KHelpcenter adds alphabetical sorting for modules and category reorganization to make it easier to use
Akonadi speeds up appending new items
Plasma improves change wallpaper animation
Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5 effort includes porting and enabling SMB kioslave to Qt5/KF5.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

KDE Commit-Digest for 8th December 2013

Saturday, 4 January 2014 | Mrybczyn

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Artikulate enables initial learner profile support
Marble gets implementation of movie capturing
Calligra gains Apple Keynote document import filter
Choqok gets initial Pump.io implementation
KWin improves icon handling: uses a QIcon in client for the icons instead of Pixmaps and now all sizes are available in one QIcon allowing easy access the best fitting one
Plasma improves crash recovery for plasma-shell
KNotes is converted to Akonadi
Interesting work in progress: server-side search in Akonadi, online banking including sending credit transfers in KMyMoney.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Open Hardware for KDE

Wednesday, 25 December 2013 | Kallecarl

From its beginning, KDE has been a leader in innovation in free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS), but there is a threat to that leadership in one of the fastest growing areas of technology. The advantages of free and open development and use are clear for software; now closed and proprietary strategies have become standard in other kinds of technology. The need for technology freedom has moved from software to other more corporate-controllable areas—notably hardware and the Internet.

As was the case when KDE started, community-developed, freedom-oriented technology is necessary to break the stranglehold of large companies that are more committed to managers and investors than to users. But this won’t be easy and it can’t be left to a few people. The entire KDE Community has a stake in the outcome. For that matter, this should be a concern to anyone who develops free and open software, anyone who uses it, anyone who benefits from it. And that includes just about everyone using technology today.

KDE Commit-Digest for 1st December 2013

Monday, 23 December 2013 | Mrybczyn

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

KDevelop adds advanced features for string formatting completion in Python
Kate's vim mode gains even more options
Amarok can read lyrics from tags
KDE Telepathy supports haze/sipe protocol via a new plugin
Rekonq adds global zoom setting
KDE Frameworks continues in klipper, system tray, KAlgebra and more.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Plasma 2 Technology Preview

Friday, 20 December 2013 | Sebas

KDE's Plasma Team presents a first glimpse at the evolution of the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma 2 Technology Preview demonstrates the current development status. The Plasma 2 user interfaces are built using QML and run on top of a fully hardware accelerated graphics stack using Qt5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma 2 is a converged workspace shell that can run and switch between user interfaces for different formfactors, and makes the workspace adaptable to a given target device. The first formfactor workspace to be demonstrated in this tech preview is Plasma Desktop, showing an incremental evolution to known desktop and laptop paradigms. The user experience aims at keeping existing workflows intact, while providing incremental visual and interactive improvements. Some of those can be observed in this technology preview, many others are still being worked on. Read More

Plasma Media Center 1.2 Released In Time For Christmas

Friday, 20 December 2013 | Sinnykumari

Welcome to PMC 1.2

The KDE community has a Christmas gift for you! We are happy to announce the release of KDE's Plasma Media Center 1.2—your first stop for media and entertainment created by the Elves at KDE. Plasma Media Center is designed to provide an easy and comfortable way to watch your videos, browse your photo collection and listen to your music, all in one place. This release brings many refinements and a host of new features, making consuming media even easier and more fun.

New Features and Improvements

Working with feedback from users since the previous release, the team has implemented many cool new features and a variety of improvements and bug fixes.

PMC Artist Images

Improved Music Mode A lot of effort went into improving the All Music mode so that you will have a good time navigating through your music—search by artist, album or just see it all.

Artist and Album Cover Retrieval From now on, your collection will look better and it will be quicker to locate that album you want to listen to. While PMC already used album covers contained in your music files, this new release enables PMC to go to last.fm and fetch new album covers and artist images!