KDE.news 

Image by D Sharon Pruitt

October is here in all of its glory! Whether you are seeing the leaves turn or the sun coming back, it is time to celebrate Amarok. We are nearing the year’s end and are ready to sum up our efforts, while we continue to develop and Rok the World!

The KDE Development Platform is an attractive base for developers of Qt applications. At its core, the KDE libraries provide job APIs for asynchronous processing, transparent network access, caching and more. The KDE PIM Development Platform also provides libraries for common transport and storage standards such as POP3, IMAP, vCard, iCal, MIME messages (email) and more. With Akonadi, the KDE 4 Development Platform is a complete framework for creating full-featured PIM applications with modern modular design, extensibility and scalability.

Solid is the part of the KDE Platform that handles interaction with hardware, making it easy for application developers to deal with things like network availability by abstracting underlying libraries within a familiar KDE-style API. As such it is an essential component across all kinds of KDE software. It is getting clear that Solid is becoming a well defined team within KDE and everybody is exited about the idea of attracting more developers interested in hardware support to the desktop, mobile devices, netbooks, media center and beyond. There are now quite a few developers working on Solid so it was a good time to get them all together for a sprint in Madrid, Spain.

Toni, Bastian, Astrid and Harald from the OSGeo
Booth

INTERGEO is the world's largest event for geodesy, geoinformation and land management with a large number of exhibitors and a lot of visitors. This year it took place from October 5th to October 7th in Cologne, Germany. Luckily, the Marble team was invited to present its software at the booth of OSGeo and its German representative FOSSGIS e.V.

Plasma Mobile

Kubuntu 10.10 also features an application-focused KDE interface to the cross-distribution PackageKit package management layer, providing a modern and easy to use native interface for installing and updating your software.

Sunday is the first KWin Bug Day (10th day of the 10th month 2010 - easy to remember!). KWin is a vital part of the KDE Platform and used by all software running in a Plasma Workspace. However, with the latest influx of bug reports it is becoming increasingly difficult for regular contributors like Martin Grässlin and the KWin team to keep up. This is where you can help with squashing those bugs!

Many of you will know that KDE is very active in Spain. After all, KDE Spain recently became the first regional KDE organization to officially affiliate with KDE e.V.

Upcoming Events

Spain is an exciting place for KDE. There are often opportunities to meet people from KDE at events around the country. Sebastian Kügler was recently talking in Madrid and today Rafael Fernández, KDE Spain Vice President, will be presenting at SIMO, the biggest IT event in Madrid. Next month, Antonio Larrosa will be giving a talk at OSWC'10

The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in the city center of Berlin at the Humboldt University, Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events.

KDE has released version 4.5.2 of the desktop and netbook Workspaces, the applications and the software development platform. These releases are the second monthly updates to the 4.5 series and contain nothing but bugfixes, translation updates and performance improvements. This release further stabilizes the newly (in 4.5.0) introduced KSharedDataCache and fixes a number of visual glitches, seen for example in Dolphin. Another area of stabilization focus has been KWin, further improving support for desktop effects. More changes can be found in the changelog (which might, as usual, not be complete).

Wow your audience with KPresenter!

The KPresenter Template Contest was over on September 15. We are really happy with the number and the quality of the entries, and the fact that they came from all over the world. KPresenter 2.3 will be the first version of KPresenter 2 to ship with some cool templates to base your presentations on. Thanks to these templates it's easier than ever to wow your audience, your customers and your colleagues.