KDE.news 

Bringing things together...

This is particularly a question for the many developers of KDE applications that are not part of KDE's six monthly Software Compilation releases. These developers must either provide binaries for a range of distributions themselves or hope that distribution volunteers will do the packaging for them.

Only three months after the last feature release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.2. As usual, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins.

Next weekend (5-6 February 2011) is FOSDEM, one of the largest gatherings of Free Software developers in the world. KDE will be in Brussels with a stall and as part of the crossdesktop devroom. KDE talks will cover: education, an introduction to Qt and Qt Quick, Phonon, KDE on Windows and mentoring. In the crossdesktop devroom, there will be other talks on topics such as application distribution and games development, which will be interesting to KDE developers too. In the main track, there is a talk on Qt WebKit. That's not to mention the many other tracks of talks or the legendary Beer Event. See you there.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

          <ul><li>New features in <a href="http://edu.kde.org/marble/">Marble</a>, including support for imperial units when generating driving instructions, new earthquake and OpenDesktop community online service plugins, a map creation wizard</li>

            <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2010-12-26/">Read the rest of the Digest here</a>.

The latest Amarok Insider features the writing of seven Google Code-In students, writing nine different articles. They range from an interview with developer Bart Cerneels to "How To install a new script in Amarok". Besides the mentors, students were able to get assistance and encouragement in their tasks and research from Amarok developers and users in the #amarok IRC channel on Freenode, which is what makes these articles of such high quality.

Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro has done an interview for People Behind KDE. He discusses his work on KDE Platform 4.5 and how he organises (or not) his busy week, "At the end of the week I don't know what I did on Monday". He reveals where his inspiration for artwork comes from, how to become an artist and the secret to design success, "First and most important is imagination".

KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma workspaces, KDE Applications and KDE Platform. These releases, versioned 4.6, provide many new features in each of KDE's three product lines.Some highlights include:

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

          <ul><li>The intense work throughout <a href="http://pim.kde.org/">KDE-PIM</a> and <a href="http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/">Akonadi</a> continues</li>

            <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2010-12-19/">Read the rest of the Digest here</a>.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

          <ul><li>Bug fixing efforts throughout the KDE development platform and applications after the release of KDE SC 4.6 Beta 2</li>

            <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2010-12-12/">Read the rest of the Digest here</a>.

After a longer than usual and especially intense development period, the Amarok team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 2.4, codename "Slipstream".

This release brings significant performance, usability and stability improvements. Many bugs have been fixed, especially in the context pane, and the collection scanner has been rewritten from scratch. Notable features that have been added to this release include: