By all measures it has been quite a year for KDE. Version 3.2 was released in February, 3.3 was released in August. The aKademy conference in August brought developers together to plan for the future. What is very interesting is how KDE applications are getting recognition as best of breed. The development tools are remarkable in their quality. The PIM suite is getting better and better and illustrates the possibilities inherent in the KDE platform. Konqueror continues to improve. There are two actively developed drawing tools. KOffice progresses steadily, with most applications under development. We have a graphical database application in Kexi. The configuration tools such as Kiosk makes KDE viable for the enterprise. Does anything match the quality and variety of the educational tools? KStars, Kig, Kalzium, KTurtle, KHangman (how many languages now?). Probably the top consumer of computer cycles in the world are the solitaire card games, and Patience is second to none.

What is the most important improvement in KDE from last year? What feature has allowed you to do more than before? I'm not asking what improvements you would like to see. No, let's dwell on what has been accomplished. I've selected a hundred or so highlights from the past year. Are there some I missed?

The list has very little order, roughly broken up by month.

• Kdom work started by Rob Buis and Nikolas Zimmermann.
• Andreas Gungl kmail antispam wizard and integration with spamassassin and other spam and anti-virus software.
• Integration of and kaddressbook and knotes into kontact, David Faure
• Max Howell Filelight (now in kdeextragear)
• Marc Mutz KMail crypto rewrite.
• Maks Orlovich large jpeg handling and various graphic optimizations.
• Boudewijn Rempt, Adrian Page, Michael Thaler, Cyrille Berger and Bart Coppens Krita
• Tobias Koenig adds custom fields support.in Kaddressbook
• Ariya Hidayat KSpread undo redo
• Stephan Kulow serious khtml regression tests

Clarence Dang releases Kolourpaint

Arend van Beelen jr. adds Konqueror search bar

Alexander Dymo KDevelop adds property editor, documentation part, Doxygen documentation plugin, DevHelp documentation plugin etc.

KStars Jasem Mutlaq, Fitts Jason Harris opengl support, ui improvements

• Richard Dale Ruby DCOP
• Cornelius Schumacher OpenExchange support kdepim
• Reinhold Kainhofer Kpilot configuration wizard
• Albert Astals Cid KGeography
• Max Howell amaroK - nmm support
• Waldo Bastian Kiosk tool
• amaroK is now becoming a testing platform for future KDE multimedia technologies, Mark Kretschmann
• Zack Rusin implements automagic mailing list handling in Kmail
• Zack Rusin KSpell
• Tobias Koenig eGroupware for kdePim
• Till Gerken Kopete Jabber rework
• KOffice OASIS. David Faure, Laurent Montel, Nicolas Goutte
• 'KDE Integrates Mono'; added -fkimono option to generate C# bindings Richard Dale.
• Arend van Beelen jr.khtml type-ahead find
• Cedric Pasteur and Jaroslaw Staniek kexi
• Jesper Pedersen libkipi, digikam plugins, KimDaBa
• Fred Schattgen kdebluetooth
• Initial drafts and outline for the next generation user guide Lauri Watts. Many people have contributed articles to the userguide.

• Stanislav Karchebny akregator (now in kdepim)
• Ian Reinhart Geiser KjsEmbed work.
• Daniel M. Lambea networked knotes
• khtml Caret Navigation Leo Savernik
• Kopete now supports KIMProxy by implementing KIMIface, the generic IM interface. Will Stephenson
• Scott Wheeler taglib
• KCFGCreator Zack Rusin

• Will Stephenson Kopete KAddressbook integration
• Lubos Lunak kdetrayproxy, kded module that allows using KDE tray apps
• Simone Gotti kppp has the multiple modem profile features
• Anne-Marie Mahfouf kmathtool
• Cornelius Schumacher SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server resources for kdepim
• Kevin Ottens Spring Loading Folders
• Kdevelop -> Qt Designer integration, Alexander Dymo

• Michael Pyne K3B integration used in JuK and amarok
• Renchi Raju Digikam image editor
• Mark Kretschmann amaroK streaming support
• Cornelius Schumacher kdepim journal editor
• khtml Zack Rusin, Dirk Mueller, Germain Garand, Leo Savernik, George Staikos, Arend van Beelen jr., Allan Sandfeld Jensen, Stephan Binner, Lars Knoll, Koos Vriezen, Kazuki Ohta, Maks Orlovich, and no doubt others.
• Jens Dagerbo KDevelop copyto plugin.
• Lubos Lunak KWin: GUI for rules window specific settings
• Jason Kivlighn KRecipes
• Dirk Ziegelmeier Kdetv, deinterlacing, overscan and output filters
• KST Rick Chern, George Staikos, Andrew Walker
• Thorsten Zachmann KPresenter page effects

• Max Howell amaroK Xine engine.
• Zack Rusin KConfigEditor.
• Will Stephenson Kopete Groupwise support
• Ariya Hidayat KSpread new formula engine
• Adrian Page Krita tablet support
• Lucijan Busch Kexi user actions
• Till Adam whacked away at IMAP till it worked.
• Tobias Anton khtml mouse and keyboard events.

• Gary Cramblitt kttsd work
• Ralf Hoelzer and Gilles Caulier DigiKam image plugins
• Oswald Buddenhagen KDM themeing, session switching.
• Ismail Donmez Konversation improvements
• Zack Rusin makes KIO synchronous
• Albert Astals Cid and Enrico Ros vast improvements in KPDF

• Cedric Pasteur Kexi subforms
• Matthias Kretz (and many others) multimedia backend
• David Faure trash kioslave
• Volker Krause KMail KWallet support
• Richard Dale reading in .ui Qt Designer files at runtime with Ruby
• Leo Savernik khtml outline painting algorithm
• Allan Sandfeld Jensen numerous WebCore merges to khtml
• Kevin Ottens media:/ and system :/ ioslaves
• Jakub Stachowski kdnssd
• Anders Lund Kate

• David Faure got GMail working in Konqueror
• Tobias Koenig KitchenSync
• Aaron J. Seigo kicker
• Nikolas Zimmermann svg icon engine
• Allan Sandfeld Jensen khtml bidi
• Creating RubyQt/Korundum RAD environment in Kdevelop Alexander Dymo, Richard Dale

• Andrew Coles password-strength meter to KPasswordDialog
• Scott Wheeler GStreamer 0.8 backend for Juk
• George Staikos Add support for insecure wallets as requested.
• Waldo Bastian: It's file:///foo/bar instead of file:/foo/bar
• Valgrind Nicholas Nethercote, Tom Hughes, Jeremy Fitzhardinge, Robert Walsh
• Sebastian Trueg keeps improving K3b making it the best burner software period.
• Reinhold Kainhofer blogging resource for KOrganizer
• Don Sanders as-you-type spell checking
• Gary Cramblitt SSML markup support in kttsd.

• Renchi Raju remote gallery export
• Germain Gerand for numerous speed-improvements in khtml
• Plastik finally became default and got optimized (Sandro Giessle)
• Cover Album support in JuK by Nathan Toone
• Jason Kivlighn KRecipes
• Kommander becomes a useful scripting tool. Michal Rudolf and Eric Laffoon
• Quanta continues to improve. Andras Mantia, Linus McCabe, Nicolas Deschildre, Paulo Moura Guedes.
• SVG icons thanks to Jonathan Riddell and Nikolas Zimmermann and Frank Karlitschek.
• And how could we not mention the KDE PIM developers. The new feature list is far too long for here, but not the people: David Faure, Bo Thorsen, Cornelius Schumacher, Marc Mutz, Reinhold Kainhofer, Adriaan de Groot, Bram Schoenmakers, Tobias Koenig, Antonio Larrosa Jimenez, Szombathelyi Gyorgy, Allen Winter, Andreas Gungl, Steffen Hansen, David Jarvie, Will Stephenson, Helge Deller, Daniel Molkentin, Heiko Falk, Dag Andersen, Lutz Rogowski, Mart Kelder, Till Adam, Ingo Klocker, Holger Freyther, Don Sanders, Zack Rusin, Martin Kobele, Carsten Burghardt, Volker Krause, Michael Brade, Tuukka Pasanen.

Not to forget Stephan Kulow who managed the hordes of recalcitrant developers towards two major releases. Or Stephan Binner who kept consistency in the codebase. Or Dirk Mueller who kept the whole thing building. Or any who I have missed. If you are impressed with this list, remember that the bugfixing and maintenance effort is equally significant.

Commit Statistics for 2004. (really a bunch of suspect numbers, but a cool way to list everyone)

What is the most important for me? The scripting and development tools. No contest.

Carsten Niehaus opened a new development branch for Kalzium. A molecular calculator is already included. To test it update kdeedu/kalzium/ with "cvs up -rkalziumkde4"