KDE.news 

Google has published the list of 60 student proposals that have been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012 for KDE. It means that 60 students will be able to work full-time on changing the world this summer! A big thank you to Google for making this possible.

The first LaKademy is taking place in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil from April 27th to May 1st, 2012. People were invited from Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia. 12 known KDE contributors have confirmed their presence, along with 6 newcomers. Current KDE contributors recommended newcomers based on their abilities and their potential to become long-time KDE contributors.

Mathias Klang  photo by Ola Waagen

Dr. Klang will deliver one of the keynote talks at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn, Estonia. My interview with another keynoter, Dr. Will Schroeder, was published recently on the Dot.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Dolphin now uses KMessageWidget for error and information messages, and has faster file sorting
• Initial Fuse backend implementation for Solid
• It is now possible to save images from HTML mails in KMail
• OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) is supported as routing backend in Marble
• Lokalize adds basic support for QT Linguist .ts files
• Improved sorting by meridian transit time / observation time for an observation session in KStars; improved DSS image retrieval feature.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

(Matthias) Kalle Dalheimer is the President and Founder of KDAB, and also one of the founding members of the KDE project and KDE e.V. He hasn't personally been very active in KDE lately, but some of the old-timers will remember that he served as President and Treasurer of KDE e.V. for a few years. He also wrote the first C++ class ever used in kdelibs (KConfig) even though it's doubtful that any of the code is still left in today's codebase.

KDE China User meeting

On March 30th, a grand meeting called KDE China User was held in Beijing. This meeting provided KDE users, community members and technophiles with a nice "face-to-face" opportunity to discuss KDE's latest and cutting edge technology trends. Read on to find out what transpired at the meeting and what the future might hold for KDE in China.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• In KDevelop, C++11 gets noexcept keyword support; external scripts can be run from Project context menu; performance improved in compiler error-detection regexps
• Amarok gets a diagnostics dialog for easy bug reporting
• Konversation supports SSL Client Certificate authentication using PEM files
• Nepomuk metadata can be shown inside views
• Amarok can distinguish between mp4, m4a, m4v types in Amarok::FileType
• New functions in Kate document JavaScript API
• Previously hidden option allows for specifying whether an upscaling of images should be done.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

Take the tour to discover some of the apps of Calligra.

Will Schroeder

I asked him to share his background and insights from his experiences with Free and Open Source Software. People attending Akademy 2012 are fortunate to have Will Schroeder helping to expand horizons.

Simon, KDE's speech recognition software, has recently migrated from Sourceforge to KDE's Git infrastructure. Developed to allow people with physical disabilities to control their computers entirely by voice, Simon has found its way into voice-controlled media centers in homes for the elderly and most recently in assistive care-giving robots.