Since its beginning in 1996, KDE has developed as an organization creating a wide range of software. From the start, KDE relied on Qt, the toolkit that helps to power KDE’s software. KDE and Qt have always worked together closely. This partnership has grown even closer since Qt development moved to the Qt Project. The quality of current and future KDE applications depends on innovation and improvements within Qt. A few days ago, the Qt Project achieved a major milestone—the release of Qt 5.0. The release included significant contributions from KDE Community members. Congratulations to everyone who made a contribution!

Qt Developer Days 2012 are the premier Qt events of the year. The 2012 Conference for Europe started today in Berlin co-hosted by KDE e.V.; there will be news and more information from the Conference over the next few days. Meanwhile, preparations are well underway for Qt Developer Days – North America in Silicon Valley, which will take place December 5 – 7.

Following the recent announcement that Digia will be acquiring the complete Qt business from Nokia, Digia has set out its plans in a letter to the KDE Community.

Digia Director of R&D, Tuukka Turunen, sets out their aims of securing the future of Qt as the best cross-platform development framework and seeking greater cooperation with KDE and other partners in the Qt ecosystem.

The full text of the letter is reproduced below.

Dear KDE Community,

Today Nokia announced the start of the open governance model for Qt, known as the Qt Project. The Qt Project allows both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt. KDE supports this move and is excited about the possibilities it brings. We have been waiting for opportunities to take a more active role in Qt's future for a long time and open governance will make this easier.

Knut's got talent

Over the last few weeks a phenomenon has been sweeping the cultural headlines of Norway. Qt Community Manager and friend of KDE Knut Yrvin has been amazing the judges of Norske Talenter (Norway's Got Talent) with his robotic moves (YouTube video).

Tonight is the final and Knut has made it to the last few contestants. The streets of Oslo will be silent as everyone will be eagerly watching the Norwegian Ant and Dec introduce the acts. Will Knut triumph or will the judges buzz him out? KDE will be backing him all the way.

Update: unfortunately he failed to make first place, the Norwegian Simon Cowell must have just as poor judgement as the original. Knut will always be a winner with KDE and we look forward to a repeat performance at Akademy. Coverage on YouTube.

Last week, Munich saw the 2009 Edition of the Qt Developer Days. Qt Developer Days is a Qt-focused software conference which is held yearly in Europe and the U.S. The American edition will be held at the start of November in San Francisco. 700 attendants and more than 70 Trolls made this edition the biggest Developer Days to date. Qt Development Frameworks had invited a group of KDE developers to the conference, more well-known heads from the KDE world were sent by their respective employers. The days brought training sessions around Qt and many interesting presentations ranging from higher level topics such as the future roadmap for Qt to topics related to Qt programming with techniques and technologies such as the Model/View Framework, QGraphicsView, WebKit, multithreading and many more. Read on for a more detailed report of what has been revealed and talked about during the three-day conference in Munich's Hilton Park hotel.

Today, we at Qt Software have opened our repositories to the public. Any developer can now help guide and shape the future development of Qt by contributions of code, translations, examples and other material to Qt and Qt-related projects. We have also published our roadmap and released Qt Jambi under the LGPL. Read on for details.

Earlier today, Qt Software released updates to Qt and Qt Creator. Both releases are available for download from http://qtsoftware.com/downloads -- either stand-alone or as part of a new build of the Qt SDK.

Qt 4.5.1 includes bugfixes and optimizations made since the release of Qt 4.5.0.

Qt Creator 1.1 incorporates a good deal of user feedback gathered since the 1.0 release, and provides a broad collection of improvements and additions.

Today, the Qt Marketing Team has launched a new website to engage the community in a different way: QtOverload.com. This site is dedicated to unusual Qt development and will mirror the diversity of the ecosystem surrounding Qt.

Qt Software directly asks for submissions by their readers and hopes for a broad spectrum of contributions ranging from mockups to actual applications that make use of Qt technology.

If you have anything you would like to contribute yourself, please, send an email to submissions [at] qtoverload [dot] com.

Qt Software has made Qt 4.5 and the Qt Creator 1.0 IDE available for download. For the first time, Qt SDK is available, a convenient bundle of the two. Qt Software will be opening up their development process by making it easier for people to contribute patches and add-ons in the forthcoming weeks. Both Qt and Creator now come with the an LGPL licensing option along with the current GPL and commercial licenses.

Qt 4.5 brings many new features such as a new pluggable graphics system, ODF support and an updated WebKit component which features HTML 5, Netscape-Plugin (e.g. Flash) support and the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine. Find out more in the Qt release blog, the Qt Creator release blog and feel free to join the new #qt-labs IRC channel on Freenode.