Today KDE announces the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4, "Caikaku", bringing an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users. Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented. The KDE community would like to thank everybody who has helped to make this release possible.

Read the Official KDE SC 4.4.0 Announcement and the Visual Guide To KDE Software Compilation 4.4 for more details on the improvements in 4.4.

The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers. Keep reading to gain some insight into the people and processes behind the retooling.

KDE will be at FOSDEM this weekend, the largest gathering of free software contributors there is. We will have a KDE devroom on the Saturday with a packed programme of talks covering KDevelop, PIM, Designer and more. On the Sunday we have been working with our friends at Gnome on a cross desktop schedule of talks. This will include semantic desktop, zeroconf, package installing and accessibility. There will also be a KDE stall showing off the almost-final release of KDE Software Compilation 4.4. See you there!

Akademy is the annual conference of the KDE community and open to all who share an interest in the KDE community and its goals. This conference brings together artists, designers, programmers, translators, users, writers and other contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and helps define the vision for the next year. In its 7th year, we invite all contributors and users to participate in Akademy in Tampere, Finland from July 3 to 10 2010.

With the number of fixes still going into the 4.4 branch after RC2 last week, the release managers have decided to pop another release candidate in between. Last night, Dirk tagged KDE Software Compilation 4.4 RC3, and we're releasing it today already. Overall the release is shaping up nicely, with many bugs still being squashed even in this late phase. Thanks everybody for participating in making KDE SC 4.4 a solid release.

KDAB have published an interview with Akonadi-hacker Stephen Kelly, who also recently won a Qt contribution award. In the interview, Stephen explains how his contributions to the Model/View infrastructure in Qt make dealing with complex models, such as those used in Akonadi to display emails and other personal data, easier. In the interview, Steve also hints at the future of note-taking in KDE.

Looking to help the KDE community and living in Southern California? Then this is a great opportunity for you! The Southern California Linux Expo will be in town February 20-21, 2010, at the Westin Hotel near LAX. All you need to help out is to be willing and able to be there and be a user of KDE's applications, such as the Plasma Workspaces, Amarok and Koffice.

KDE's release team is working hard these days as you see. Today, we're bringing to you the final update for KDE SC 4.3, 4.3.5. Final because there are currently no more releases planned for the 4.3 branch. The KDE team will instead fully concentrate on SC 4.4, with its first incarnation coming to users across the world on February 9th.

Last week, the KDE Community had their yearly Americas event, this year in sunny San Diego. Despite California not living up to its sunny reputation, the attendees certainly had a good time. The first three days featured talks about a variety of topics (day 1, day 2 and day 3), there were CMake and Qt development courses and of course several small meetings and work to be done. However there was more than sitting in the conference room at UCSD. We had a great time at Banana Bungalows on the beach, went out for a variety of food, had a few dragons and babies visit us and risked our lives getting to and from the university. Read on for some general impressions on the event, and for some motivation to attend Camp KDE 2011 next January, at a location still to be determined.

The last release candidate of KDE SC 4.4 is out. Following up the first release candidate, another number of bugs has been searched and destroyed. This releases fixes some problems found during the earlier testing phase, and acts as a last line of defense before KDE SC 4.4.0 will be released on February, 9th 2010. Please give this release another spin, report last-minute showstoppers to us using KDE's Bugzilla.