The Amarok team just released Amarok 2.3.0. It comes with many bugfixes and improvements such as a new funky toolbar and a rewritten file browser featuring much better integration with the rest of Amarok. Read the release notes and enjoy rediscovering your music!

Oh and a new Amarok Insider is out with some tips and tricks including how to search your music collection easily.

It's Sunday now in Deventer and, except for Lukas Tvrdy, all Krita hackers have gone home -- or, in the case of your author, stayed home. Time for tea and writing a recap of the whole sprint and hackfest!

Part of the repositioning of the KDE brands was choosing an appropriate 'KDE Software Label' for developers working on applications outside the main KDE Software Compilation. Technology developed by KDE is used far and wide, as can be witnessed on kde-apps.org and other sites. Some of these applications are developed by people closely entrenched in the KDE community, others by developers who just happened to like KDE technology and don't feel part of the KDE community in any big way. To allow authors to express their connection to the KDE community, the KDE community has chosen three appropriate labels.

We are also presenting the first draft of a guide for distributors of KDE software on how to integrate their communications with our brands.

The KDE España association is organizing Akademy-es 2010 in collaboration with Itsas (the Free Software group of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU) and the Department of Culture of the Basque Goverment. This event gathers contributors to and users of KDE software and will be held in the Engineering Technical School of Bilbao from the 7th to the 9th of May.

Berlin, probably one of the most frequented KDE hacking locations in the world, saw another hack sprint from 13th to 21st of February. This time four of the KDevelop and five of the Kate developers shared a week of very productive programming. Additionally team members from Okteta and KDE on Windows joined the meeting.

Welcome to another interview with a KDE contributor. Last time we interviewed Marco Martin from KDE Plasma team, this time we talked with Tobias König from KDEPIM about Akonadi and the TV series Lost ;)

The original interview in Italian is available in Giovanni Venturi's KDE blog.

A little over a month ago, the KDE community had its yearly Americas event in San Diego. In the final article we promised you all the videos of the talks and now the KDE promo channel on Youtube features a series of Camp KDE talks. Check it out!

KDE has released an update to the 4.4 series of our Software Compilation. Among other improvements, this update includes a fix for KMail hanging when sending emails that just missed the deadline for 4.4.0 and a number of fixes in many gearheads' favorite terminal emulator, Konsole.

As usual, this maintenance release also brings updated translations, but no new features. KDE recommends this update to everyone running 4.4.0 or earlier. Updated packages for many distros are becoming available as we speak.

Today a new Free Software business was launched with the goal of strengthening the Kolab groupware solution ecosystem. The former Kolab Konsortium now has a new charter and thus a new name: Kolab Systems AG. Offering services, packaging and quality assurance based on a partnership model, Kolab Systems builds its business on the proven Kolab groupware solution. This leads to a continued focus on supporting and deploying KDE personal information management (PIM) applications and server infrastructure on a variety of platforms.

A while ago, Giovanni Venturi interviewed Marco Martin for an Italian KDE blog (so if you read Italian, please see there for the authentic version). For our Italian-challenged readers, we are pleased to present an English translation below.

Marco "Notmart" Martin is of course well known as one of the primary developers of the new Plasma Netbook workspace and for his habit of teasing us via his blog with news of new features for the X+1 release of our Software Compilation just before version X is released...