4.1 is out and i, too, am going to akademy.

KDE 4.1 was released last week and there has been a lot of positive coverage in the press and the blogosphere about it. (Side note .. The promo team is busy collecting a list of these articles and putting them together for publication on kde.org.)

With the release of 4.1, KDE executed on our collective commitment to release in July. More importantly, that release fulfilled the milestone we set out for ourselves: a day-to-day usable desktop shell, more polish on the applications, lots of bugs fixed, more platform coverage and more application porting underway.

Make no mistake about it: 4.0 was absolutely required for the development team to successfuly unfold KDE4 over the coming years; but with 4.1 it is indeed time to look forward, not back.

So .. looking forward:

The hiatus is over: I'm back. Well, I was never really gone, I was just unvisible ("un-" being more pink than "in-", and pink being the new black).

The KDE community has brought a number of important modifications to our community infrastructure to the table. Many of these are in "alpha", if you will, right now and will be making their way out into production over the next several months.

The variety of initiatives is impressive, ranging from a draft of a Code of Conduct that will hopefully get a general viewing during Akademy to comment moderation on the Dot, and lots of other things, big and small, in between.

This momentum has restored my personal faith in this community of contributors. I feel, once again, that we are able to take care of each other and not just sit idly by while Rome and its inhabitants burn. While it saddened me to step back, perhaps it was necessary to help get focus on issues that were being neglected by us all. It also gave me some space to catch my own breath.

To those who have put time, thought and energy into working on these topics: thank you!

Now let's get back to what we're all here for in the first place ...

Akademy 2008 is upon us. At the end of this week a few hundred of us start gathering together in Belgium for what is shaping up to be one of the best Akademy events ever, which is saying a lot given the past installments.

KDE e.V. has sponsored more travel than ever (nearly twice as much as two years ago and over 20% more than last year) and the program looks fantastic. The Embedded & Mobile Day is going to be great (Plasma is already being used in product development in this category, so this topic is even more relevant to me now); the workshop led by Nokia engineers should be fun (playing with N810s! yay!); the Usability Day will be very fruitful (I'll be doing a presentation in that track; I hope to see work on the HIG reivigorated). And I can't wait to see what the BoFs will end up being like this year.

I also know of a couple of release announcements that will happen at Akademy, but I don't want to spoil the surprise for others so I'll (painfully) sit on these things until next week. Pay attention though, because some cool stuff is going to emerge!

As usual, the KDE e.V. AGM will be a roaring blast, or at least as roaring a blast as 7 hours of meeting mandated by and presided over by German law can be. ;) (Honestly, they are actually pretty good. =) Apparently I have to deliver the assembly opening, which I have yet to write. I promise to keep it short and sweet.

At the Plasma Frenzy at the end of Saturday, the Plasma team will be presenting a series of 5 minute lightening talks on various aspects and features of Plasma. We will cover such things as extenders, new applets (the UIServer and Notify ones, for example), scripting, API strategies, Plasma-on-screensaver and more.

I'll also be staking out a Plasma Tokamak area for the hack week where I'll be (mostly) planting myself to discuss and work on all things Plasma. If you are looking for me, (even if it isn't about Plasma =) that's where you will be able to find me .

And just in time for Akademy 2008 ...

... KDE 4.2 development has begun. I think we are all proud of our achievements with 4.1, but we're not standing around patting each other on the back with drinks in our hands.

There is so much left to do and so much yet to explore in terms of what is possible with our new frameworks and applications. The goal has become to fully realize the potential imbued in the KDE4 foundations and pillars.

Thanks to the work to date and most notably the 4.1 release, we've gotten to the point where the code is really fun to work with and the results very enjoyable to use. We're back to the job of adding features, refining existing bits and fixing problems. In other words, we're doing evolutionary development and releases again.

With 4.2 having opened up for feature work in July, the Plasma team started off with not just a bang, but a Big Bang: two of our Summer of Code projects have already been merged into trunk with more on the way, and a number of features that had been lurking about in playground have also been folded in. There have also been numerous bug fixes and polishings done in July to both trunk (4.2) and the 4.1 branch.

To give you an idea of our current progress on 4.2, here is the current change log of notable improvements since 4.1 was branched off for release:

libplasma
---------
* Features
   * Symbol Versioning: limit loading of plugins to those that match the libplasma version
   * New: ToolTipManager for Plasma style tooltips
   * Applet
       * sizeHintChanged() signal. A containment (such as a panel) can adjust its size based on changed sizehints of an applet
       * NEW: Plasma::Extender and Plasma::ExtenderItem, allowing visual, relocatable extensions to Applet
       * NEW: PopupApplet, which switches between an icon with a popup in a Horizontal/Vertical containment (such as a panel) and the widget directly on the canvas in a Planer containment (such as a desktop)
   * Corona
       * addOffscreenWidget/removeOffscreenWidget: manage canvas items that should not appear in a primary view (e.g. Extenders)
   * Package system:
       * PackageStructure supports arbitrary URIs (in addition to auto-discovery for package) structure description files.
   * Plasma::Theme
       * Support compressed SVGs (*.svgz)
   * Widgets
       * NEW: Plasma::Slider based on QSlider
       * NEW: Plasma::TabWidget
       * NEW: Plasma::Frame used to visually group widgets
       * Plasma::PushButton is svg-themed
   * Panel SVG
       * setting the margins via in-SVG hints
       * paintPanel API additions to make it more like QPainter and Plasma::Svg

* Significant Fixes
   * WebContent painting update synchronization (fixes, among other things, scrolling)
   * Prevent crash when Containment that AppletBrowser is associated with is deleted
   * Applet handles work with all icon sizes (user system settings)
   * Fix View so that when a new activity is added, don't move more than necessary;
     fixes dragging lock

Developer Documentation
-----------------------
* Design documentation
   * NEW: tooltips
   * NEW: wallpaper
   * NEW: widgets

* Tutorials

Desktop Theme
-------------
* NEW: widgets/button for theming pushbuttons
* NEW: widgets/frame for theming Plasma::Frame used also in other widgets

Plasma Desktop Shell
--------------------
* Features
   * Panel
       * resizes itself when an applet changes its sizehint according to its maximum and minimum sizes

* Significant Fixes
   * Reposition toolbox when zooming out/in to avoid panel overlap
   * MS Windows compile fixes

Plugins/Addons
--------------
* Features
   * Plasmoids
       * NEW: Calendar
       * NEW: Character selector
       * Now Playing media player controls
       * Notes
           * Custom colors
       * Digital clock
       * Custom colors
   * Folder view
           * Filtering improvements: mimetype and exclusion based.

   * DataEngines
       * nowplaying Plasma::Service for controlling media players
       * nowplaying supports MPRIS

* Significant Fixes
   * Various clocks ported to AppletClock for calendar and timezone consistency
   * Kickoff menu size restoration
   * MS Windows compile fixes
   * Taskbar shows thumbnails of windows on hover (4.1 regression)

KRunner
-------
* Features
   * Plasma Screensaver: Plasma widget overlay for screensavers

* Significant Fixes
   * Screensaver activation fixed to compensate for system clock changes

Note that this is not our feature plan (we have one of those, too, of course =). Rather, this is what we've already done and will be part of the KDE 4.2 release in January 2009.

We still have a nearly 6 months of development ahead of us with a large number of features, fixes and streamlining activities in the pipeline. More goodies will follow, and if you wish you can follow the change log as it evolves here.

If Plasma is any indicator of the overall level of activity in the rest of KDE, 4.2 is going to be an insane release, especially since we'll be joined by apps like Amarok2 by that point.

To put it all into perspective: KDE3 had 6 years of development on it after 3.0, KDE4 has so far had 6 months. Think about it. =)

Wade Olson's inspirational KDE themed Picasa albums, from which many of the above graphics were borrowed.