It is that time of the year again. Akademy 2009 is about to begin in only a few days. Held in the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium close to the beautiful beaches of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, this event is shaping up to be a special conference.

Today, three days before the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit starts, the KDE team released KDE 4.3.0 RC1. RC1 is an early candidate for what will become KDE 4.3.0 at the end of this month.
Artwork has now also been merged, and KDE 4.3 will have a new Plasma look, sported by the new, light "Air" Plasma theme. Oxygen, the default in earlier versions of KDE 4 is still available as an option through the "Desktop Settings" dialog. Please give this version some good testing so we can iron out last bugs and make 4.3.0 a smooth release. Note that KDE 4.3.0 RC1 is not suitable for end users.

During this weekend (and after almost 24 hours of work), the KDE Community Forums have undergone a complete overhaul, resulting in a much improved look and additional features. The first and most user-visible change is the new forum theme. It is heavily inspired by "Air", the default Plasma theme in the soon to be released KDE 4.3.

Also, the board is now powered by the phpBB forum software and has gained a number of extra features, including but not limited to:

• Improved KDE Brainstorm section, with a new user interface;
• A "friends connection" system that enables people to mark other users as
  friends and easily interact with them;
• Improved user reputation system;
• Topic tagging;

The changes are quite numerous and deep, so some bugs may have slipped through our tests. The whole KDE Community is encouraged to visit the forums and report issues.

As a final note, thanks go to the people who made this possible: the KDE Community Forums administrators (Ben Cooksley, Ingo Malchow, Sayak Banerjee), the phpBB developers Chris Smith, Ashley Pinner and Nils Adermann for their continued assistance and support and to the entire phpBB team.

Today, exactly one month since the release of KOffice 2.0.0, the KOffice team releases the first bugfix release in the 2.0 series. This release contains no new features but lots of bugfixes for almost all of the components in KOffice 2.0. We are planning at least two more bugfix releases of 2.0 before starting the 2.1 series in October this year.

On behalf of the KDevelop team I am happy to announce the Beta 4 release of KDevelop 4. This release includes some major new features, such as working sets (only available when building with KDE 4.3), integration of the quickopen functionality into the toolbar and a new perspective switcher (see the upper right corner of the mainwindow).

Time for another Kubuntu Tutorials Day. Learn about KDE and Kubuntu development in a helpful atmosphere next Monday from 19:00UTC in the #kubuntu-devel IRC freenode channel. We have a lineup of exciting speakers on a range of topics. Read on for the timetable

The first ODF Plugfest was held on the 15th and 16th of June 2009 in the Royal Library in the Netherlands. The meeting was initiated by the Dutch government and the OpenDoc Society. Jos van den Oever, brand new employee of KO GmbH and Sven Langkamp, proud developer, went on behalf of the KOffice team. With over forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organizations, open source projects and research institutions, the meeting was an incredible success.

Read on for an impression of the event.

As we get ready for the 4.3 release, it's time to have another BugDay! We are going back to basics this time, and doing Konqueror.

All you need to join is yourself and a recent copy of KDE (trunk is best, but you can also use a Neon nightly or a snapshot from a distribution). You do not need to know how to program! We will teach you all you need to know. This is a fun and easy way to get involved with the KDE community! Working with BugSquad is a great way to discover KDE, especially if you would like to help contribute, but aren't sure where to begin.

We'll be doing various things:

Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality.

The Open Collaboration Services API has gotten many new features in the past few months and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3, but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.

Last weekend — it seems like yesterday and like a year ago at the same time — the KOffice team came to Berlin for the first post 2.0 sprint. Graciously hosted by KDAB and smoothly organized by Alexandra Leisse, this sprint was one of the most productive sprints ever for KOffice. Not only because there were many developers attending, among them three out of four of our KOffice Summer of Code students, but also because everyone was filled to the brim with joy and relief about having release 2.0 and eager to forge forwards to 2.1.