KMyMoney 1.0

The KMyMoney development team is pleased to announce a major step forward for what has been described as "the BEST personal finance manager for FREE users". KMyMoney 1.0 has been released. With over 3 years of development, this new stable release has many new features and a refreshed user interface.

The PySide team is pleased to announce the first public release of PySide: Python for Qt. PySide is a project providing an LGPL'd set of Python bindings for the Qt framework.

Looks like summer finally caught up with digiKam developers! This week the digest will be very short: ongoing work on refactoring color profiles code; libkdcraw updated to libraw-0.8.0-beta5 (support for RAW files bigger than 2GB); new features in Flickr export. A total of 10 bugs were closed (including several crashes) while 8 new ones were reported. Read the rest of the
digiKam digest here!

As usual, Mikolaj Machowski has compiled a commit digest of the work going on in Digikam on his blog. This excellent work deserves a more public spot, so from now you will find them linked on the dot. Those interested in the progress and new developments in the world of digital photography, be sure to click through to the digest!

Since KDE 4.3 has been released, various reviews have appeared on the web. KDE Dot News had a look at some of them. Read on for an overview!

We are pleased to announce Camp KDE 2010!

Camp KDE 2010 will take place at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla, California, USA from January 15th until January 22nd, 2010. The event is free to all participants.

This year's Gran Canaria Desktop Summit represented the first time the GNOME and KDE communities have co-located their annual conferences in the same location. 852 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together last month to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience at the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

"The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was a milestone not only for the KDE and GNOME communities, but also for the free desktop in general." said Cornelius Schumacher, president of KDE e.V., "New collaboration efforts were started and existing ones revitalized. We already have seen results for example in the area of the semantic desktop, and on improving the specification processes on freedesktop.org. I'm sure we'll see more results in the near future."

The summit accomplished its goal of increasing co-operation between GNOME and KDE to improve the Free Desktop experience. Throughout the conference there were many examples of successful collaboration including shared technologies, community co-operation and growth of the local free software community

"I was really excited to see all of the energy at the conference - 800 free desktop supporters in the same building!" said Vincent Untz, Director and Chairman of the GNOME Board. "I heard conversations about search technologies, recruiting developers and marketing. Both our communities benefited and I look forward to seeing the benefits passed on to GNOME users."

KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish. The statistics from the bug tracker speak for themselves: 10,000 bugs have been fixed. In addition, close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. That is not to say that the KDE team did not add a large number of new features: 2000 feature requests were implemented in the past 6 months, meaning that any user's pet feature might well be among the improvements KDE 4.3.0 brings.

While you wait for the KDE 4.3 gates to open, you may be interested in our new buzz.kde.org site, using an experimental "LifeStream" tracking KDE on identi.ca and Twitter, Picasaweb, Flickr and Youtube. Check out buzz.kde.org for the stream for who's saying what about the hottest Free Desktop release this year!

Every few weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team are publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you are at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for KDevelop 4 which is a major rewrite of KDevelop for KDE 4. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the KDevelop Icons Survey now.