KDE.news 

Community Keynote
Agustín Benito Bethencourt

Some people kicked off the conference on Friday night at the pre-registration party sponsored by Intel or even arrived earlier in the week to explore Tallinn and sample Estonia's beers. During the first day of Akademy, there were sessions on release management, Plasma Active, and the future of KDE and Qt technologies.

The KDE Community is looking for a host for Akademy 2013.

Akademy is the annual gathering of the KDE Community, one of the largest in the world of Free and Open Source Software. At Akademy, KDE people gather to exchange ideas for development, plan for the future, and discuss other important issues. It is an extraordinary occasion for creativity, enthusiasm, commitment, close working relationships and innovation.

Today KDE released the first Release Candidate for the 4.9 versions of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is still on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.9 include:

The KDE e.V. report for the first quarter of 2012 has been published. It gives an overview of the activities KDE e.V. supported during that time, including various sprints, conferences and projects. It also has a feature article by Stuart Jarvis about the ALERT Project, an initiative to improve bug resolution processes in Open Source development teams.

Tuukka Turunen - Digia Director of R&D

Tuukka: At Digia, we see and understand the potential of Qt as the best cross-platform development framework. We applaud its history and foundation from the Trolltech days where dedicated Trolls and Qt fans created a framework that hobbyists, developers and large corporations today use to drive the most innovative software available. It was the strength of the Qt community and its unmatched technology that in 2011 interested Digia in taking Qt forward by being its exclusive commercial licensor.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Android native look&feel plugin added to android-qt
• New assistant for new classes from templates in KDevelop
• Fancy bookmarking in rekonq
• Experimental rgbaf32 colorspace in the lcms color engine, all missing chart marker types implemented in Calligra
• Rewrite the Topic tab in the Channel Options dialog in Konversation
• GSoC work in KStars and Calligra
• Season of KDE work in Marble.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Akademy is more than inspiring talks. It's also a place to plan, collaborate and get a lot of work done in BoFs and workshops.

This year, we have two special workshops that you won't want to miss. These events alone make Akademy 2012 well worth attending. To attend please register for free.

Today KDE released the second beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.9 will include the following and more:

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Okular saves annotations locally
• Delayed search in Calligra allows the users to type the whole word; adding image lists possible; brush rotation is absolute to canvas rotation
• Amarok is now capable of transcoding music when copying it to USB Mass Storage devices
• Exponential notation supported in Kst
• Play Previous and Play Next and other updates in miniplayer
• Further preparations for drag-and-drop support in the Places Panel in Dolphin
• Refactoring work in Kdenlive
• GSoC work in Cantor.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

The KDE Testing Team will continue its efforts with 4.9 Beta 2. The testing intensive started with KDE 4.9 Beta 1 last week; 83 bug reports were opened or confirmed, 29 of which are already closed, the bugs having been fixed. Some bugs were even corrected without anyone opening a bug report. Newcomers joined the team and are doing a great job. A big thank you!