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With KDE 4 due out in the fourth quarter of 2007, the KDE developers had their work cut out for themselves when they met in Glasgow, Scotland, for their annual worldwide meeting, aKademy 2007.
Besides a lot of brainstorming and coding, KDE e.V., the official organization behind the popular Linux desktop environment, had to deal with a change of leadership. Longtime President Eva Brucherseifer left office and was replaced as president by Aaron Seigo, a well-known KDE developer from Canada.
Seigo, in his blog, has been very pleased with how the meeting has gone. “Its been an amazing week, however. The things that struck me the most was the growing visibility of teams within KDE. I think we have successfully traversed the conversion from a project to a full meta-project; while in previous years we were obviously a meta project made up of many smaller efforts, this year it is very apparent where there are teams and who they are.”
The weeklong gathering kicked off on June 30th, with a keynote by Trolltech and KDE developer Lars Knoll. Knoll explained how Trolltech is using “extreme programming” techniques to further the advancement of Qt, the cross-platform development framework and C++ library that lies behind KDE.
Knoll also described how all of this is leading to new features for Qts next release, Version 4.4. This version should have improved multimedia, multithreading and IPC (interprocess communication) support. In addition, Trolltech is working with Apple on integrating WebKit as a Qt module. This would enable KDE developers to more easily create applications that would work in concert with such popular Mac OX applications as the Safari Web browser, the Dashboard and Mail.