AKADEMIC

The first two days of the KDE developer conference [1], aKademy 2007, focused on KDE 4. Many central components for the new major release, which is expected in the fall, have been rewritten from scratch. Thanks to KDE’s Plasma Framework [2], which aims to integrate elements of the SuperKaramba widget manager with the standard KDE desktop, the KDE 4 desktop will have access to familiar SuperKaramba components.

KDE is also introducing various multimedia enhancements: the Arts sound server, which has often been criticized as unreliable and hard to integrate with application development, is now a thing of the past. Its successor is the new Phonon [3] audio/ video framework, which leaves audio playback to various back-ends, such as Xine or the Helix engine, and the Gstreamer framework. In addition to its ability to mix multiple audio tracks, Phonon also makes it easier to develop video playback applications.