KDE.news 

Akademy, the KDE community summit, is happening in just a few weeks, from the 30 of June to the 6 of July, in Tallinn, Estonia. The Akademy Organizing Team is pleased to welcome this year's Akademy sponsors whose support is critical to the success of the conference.

In the wake of the announcement of the first ever KDE powered tablet, quite a few interesting things are happening in the background. One of them is the formation of a professional Partner Network for devices such as the Vivaldi tablet. Let's look at this Partner Network in more detail.

Claire Lotion

Claire was a vibrant person with strong ideals. She will be remembered for pursuing these ideals, and as a good friend and colleague. She also thought a lot about how KDE as an open source community could find connections to the real business world. Her energy, fresh look at things, positive mindset and intense commitment inspired many people. So did her dancing.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest, Frederik Gladhorn writes about the current state of development in KDE-Accessibility.

As usual, there is also a change list that includes:

• Marble gets the first version of FlightGear position provider
• KPhotoAlbum saves the video length in a database; search for the length is also possible
• KWebkitParts gets an option that allows the user to disable the internal handling of flash and java applets
• KDE-PIM extends the notes class; there are some new properties
• Calligra allows dragging of selected text. It works with drag and drop too.
• Amarok can write album covers to iPods and USB Mass Storage devices; changes in cover art reading and writing
• Solid adds proper support for volumes, storage disks and storage access, which was not working on Windows
• Soprano uses non-Qt local socket communication on Unix systems.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Dolphin view can be synchronized with terminal location
• Konsole has two new profile options for copy & paste mouse behavior
• More search options in Dolphin with Nepomuk
• Google Sync Bookmarks implemented in rekonq
• The order of units is now ensured in the whole Calligra UI
• The star rating may be hidden in KPhotoAlbum.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Agustín Benito Bethencourt (aka "toscalix") recently joined the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. He will be presenting the KDE Community Keynote at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn.

Thank you KDE e.V. and Claudia Rauch for your support.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Konsole gains a Web Shortcuts menu that allows searching selected text using any of the search providers; search scrollback is now possible in Konsole KPart
• New placement policy in KDEWorkspace: allow "under mouse"; work to include screenlocker into ksmserver
• Amarok ships the Free Music Charts by default; Amarok's iPod collection completely rewritten
• Digikam supports keyboard shortcuts in the timeline view
• GlobalShortcuts Plugin added into ActivityManager in KDE-Base
• Work on the rule files in kdemultimedia

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Session focus areas

At Akademy 2012, there will be a lot of focus on KDE Frameworks 5, which will adapt the KDE codebase to the Qt 5 release. For that reason, the committee selected a series of talks relating to the Frameworks project and to Qt 5.