• If you’re a KDE developer, let us know what’s new
• If you’re a use of KDE software, let us know what’s new
• If you’re using a 4.8 pre-release, get us some screenshots of cool new features

Simple huh? But how can you do it?

Well, we welcome direct edits at our release note drafting Etherpad. You can type in notes or full text and you don’t even need a KDE account – just go to promo.notes.kde.org/58

If you’re a developer, you should make sure that the 4.8 feature plan is up to date for your code.

If you’re really lazy, just leave a comment here with a link to more info

If you can make screenshots, please use the default wallpaper, styles and fonts. If you can store your screenshot online somewhere, just put a link to it in the Etherpad. If not, you can simply send them to me (find my contact details on the About page.

Help spread the word about our 4.8 releases and be a part of KDE.

But perhaps the greatest thing has been the return of the Commit Digest, so I’ll name the Commit Digest team my personal heroes of KDE for 2011. Every week, they let us know what’s going on in this great community of ours. It’s a hell of a lot of work and they deserve a lot of credit.

To be more specific, I glanced back through the Commit Digests and mailing list to see who has been active. I’ve probably missed someone and can only apologise for that, but here are some definite contributors over the past year:

• Alexander van Loon
• Anselmo Melo
• Beat Wolf
• Danny Allen
• Dominik Tritscher
• Frederik Schwarzer
• Gaël Beaudoin
• Mutlu Inek
• Jaka Kranjc
• Marcin Dominiak
• Marco Krohn
• Marta Rybczynska
• Paulo Dias
• Roger Pixley
• Shafqat Bhuiyan
• Test Zy
• Thibaut Gridel
• Tom Vollerthun
• Vladislav Blanton

Thanks to all of you.

Among those, I know Alexander, Danny, Marco, Marta, Roger and Vladislav have been particularly active, also taking care of organising things, writing the Dot summaries and generally making sure it all happens.

I also know that a lot of work goes into every digest and there is always space for more people. So if you want to help, haven’t contributed for a while or can help in other ways please do.

Who are your heroes of KDE?

ALERT is featured (page 14) in the SOFI newsletter, but there is also a lot of news on other software related projects that are ongoing.

If you’re interested in seeing what’s new in software research in Europe, it’s worth a look.

For the first half of this week, I was in Brussels for the first Annual Review of the ALERT project, in which the project partners – including KDE in the shape of yours truly – presented the work done so far to expert reviewers appointed by the European Commission (the project is part funded through the EU Seventh Framework Programme).

The meeting was very informative, as it was the first time I’d seen in one go what everyone has been working on for the past year. ALERT aims to improve bug tracking and collaboration in open source communities and the technical presentations included demos of the technology. At present, a lot of this happens at the command line, but it is already possible to monitor various data resources, including Bugzilla, and get some interesting updates. There are also some good results in indentifying developers and their particular areas of expertise (to suggest to developers for bugs or bugs for developers) and in semi-automated identification of duplicate bugs.

I got back to England last night, had a quick meeting at my university today and then tomorrow I’m off to the KDE e.V. sprint in Berlin. There, we’ll be spending the weekend working on various issues needed to support KDE contributors worldwide, including attracting more people and companies to our Individual and Corporate supporting membership programs.

By the way, if you lack the time to help KDE, but support our objectives (free software – and all the benefits that entails – for everyone) and have the money then why not Join the Game? That’s a serious question by the way – what’s lacking right now that stops you? Leave me a note in the comments.

It has been a little while since I mentioned ALERT here, although I chatted to some of you about the project at the recent Desktop Summit in Berlin. If you’re wondering what we and the other partners have been up to, take a look at the latest ALERT newsletter. This has news about the software for extracting information from structured (e.g Bugzilla) and unstructured (mailing lists, KDE forum) data sources, software for profiling developers, the potential impact on KDE, news of ALERT’s latest award and a look ahead to the testing phase.

Well worth a read – and of course you can always approach Dario and myself with any questions.

Well, at the moment for me, it is no longer having my PhD thesis to work on, having finally handed that in last week. That means I’m now moving into job hunting (like some other people on the Planet – I may post more about that in a bit). It also means I have again a little time for KDE.

MeeGo is dead, long live MeeGo

No, you read that right. Intel are switching to Tizen and this time it is going to work (just like when they switched from Moblin to MeeGo). But for those people and companies who care about a real collaborative effort at a mobile-optimised Linux platform and those who think that there is more to app development than HTML5, MeeGo lives on. With the likes of Plasma Active as a user interface, we could build a compelling case for mobile software freedom.

KDE eases out of puberty

KDE will shortly be 15 years old, just about the age where its hormones will start to settle down. However, it may begin to get interested in girls – or boys, depending on KDE’s gender and preferences – or start experimenting with things it shouldn’t, so there may still be some turbulent times ahead.

Either way, we’ll be asking you to show your love for KDE on its 15th birthday – keep watching the Dot for more details. It’s almost time to celebrate 15 years of desktop freedom.

To finish, a little rant about 1&1

It’s not often that I rant here, so please forgive me but I feel the need to end with this…

• If you want a web host whose control panel does not work in Konqueror
• If you want a web host that buries renewal information in a mystifying maze of submenus
• If you want a web host that sends you renewal invoices without specifying the domain that is up for renewal
• If you want a web host where you cannot cancel a contract without logging into a whole different website, clicking through a confirmation email and harassing their customer service reps*.
• And, most of all, if you want service with a snarl…

…then please sign up with 1&1.

If not, you might prefer another webhost. For example, I’m very satisfied with my main host, ICDSoft.

*Actually, I’m still not sure it’s done. I wish they’d give me the freedom to cancel

However, he needs help to determine the results of 13 remaining tests that need a colour printer, something Gérard does not have access to.

If you have a moment, please check out one (or more!) of the following testcases in Konqueror 4.6.5 or 4.6.4 (it’s important that you are using that latest versions). Then report your results in the thread on the KDE Forum.

You might also want to check the thread first to see which tests still need checking.

9 testcases requiring a color printer:

1. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/at-import-008.htm
2. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-box-000.htm
3. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-break-margins-004.htm
4. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-container-000.htm
5. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-container-008.htm
6. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-container-009.htm
7. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-margin-000.htm
8. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-margin-001.htm
9. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-margin-002.htm

2 testcases where Konqueror hangs or refuses to print, but Gérard needs someone to confirm this behaviour:

1. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/table-footer-group-004.htm
2. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/table-header-group-004.htm

2 testcases UNKNOWN – several characters are not displayed, but this is possibly due to font availability; Gérard needs someone else to confirm and verify this:

1. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/text-transform-bicameral-011.htm
2. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/text-transform-bicameral-012.htm

Gérard has been working on this for 8 months. Please take a few minutes to help him get it finished.

We’re collating information in an etherpad at promo.notes.kde.org/14 – you don’t even need an account to help us.

Developers

If you develop an app, drop by and tell us (even in bullet points) what is new and cool in your app in 4.7. If you have some screenshots, please add links to them in the doc. Afterall, you know what has changed in your app since 4.6. We, the promo team, might not.

Users

Do you follow an app team? Tried the RCs? Know about some cool new stuff that is coming? Well you can help too, just note the features in the pad. you can also look through old copies of the Commit Digest since the 4.6 releases to pick out features from the summaries that have made it into the 4.7 releases.

Plasma Workspaces and KDE Frameworks too

The above also applies of course to the KDE workspaces and the KDE Frameworks, in fact to anything that is part of our general release.

Be a hero, step up and help us tell the world what KDE has been up to in the last six months.

I’m a little underwhelmed with both.

As I explained in my blog post on Diaspora, I like some of its concepts. But I’ve used it very little since joining. Part of that is due to the network effect (not many of my friends have pods) but it is also, I think, due to a general apathy towards social networking. Afterall, I hardly use Facebook now either. If I cannot be bothered to check one website that has most of my friends, I’ll hardly take the time to check three of them.

Google+, from a quick explore, looks kinda nice. They’ve got a similar concept to Diaspora with ‘circles’ rather than aspects. It looks generally a bit nicer and more controllable than Facebook. They do however, by default, sign you up to share information to other sites, but at least they let you know during the sign up and let you disable that. Whether Google will show any more respect for users’ privacy than Facebook remains to be seen.

Google+ - just like Facebook? (Image from xkcd.com under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence)

The key question for me is interoperability. Will Google make Google+ part of the open web, with proper interfacing to other services such as Diaspora? If so then some of the goodies like GMail integration and live chat could make it interesting. If not then it’s just another walled garden and I have no more interest in that than in the closed web portals of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I don’t want a better Facebook, I want an easy way to subscribe to what my friends are doing, whether it be via their blogs, accounts on places like Facebook and LinkedIn or photo sharing sites. I also want to be able to publish my information, but with control over who sees it (so not via something like RSS). I also want it all accessible via open protocols so I can, for example, view something like the Facebook homepage feeds right from a PIM application like Kontact, or in a desktop widget or dedicated app that can sit in the system tray and notify if something interesting happens.

Google has the userbase, the coolness and the money to be the driving force behind the leading open social network. The question is, do they have the motivation? If Google is right and we really do want to use our web browsers for everything in future then perhaps a walled garden of Google+ and GMail and Google Docs and the like will prove compelling. But for me, it’s looking like Google+ will likely just be another, albeit nicer, implementation of Facebook that I can ignore in much the same way.

If you’d like to come, you should also register.

If you have not yet decided, here are a few key points of the Desktop Summit:

• It is set to be the biggest Free Software desktop meeting ever
• You get to learn about the latest (and future) innovations first hand – such as what the rise of mobile computing means for Free Software and the Free Software desktop
• Get involved as some of the largest communities in Free Software strengthen their efforts to collaborate on common goals
• Get the distros’ views on copyright assignment and upstream contributions
• And a whole lot more…

What are you waiting for?