XFig is not young. It's not beautiful either. It is still in use though.
Even on Windows, there are people setting up cygwin only to get xfig.
And that is because it has one killer feature.
Export to Postscript/LaTeX in a way that lets latex replace the text in the drawing.
That way the font and text size etc are consistent with the rest of the latex document.
And you can add LaTeX text relatively easy and comfortable to your drawing too.
Usability wise XFig is a killer...
Even though it is possible to work fast with it thanks to keyboard shortcuts and quite advanced functions below the gui.
I wish there was something like this available in a modern graphics application like Krita.
Looks like I will have to learn getting along with XFig...

Avgoustino Kadis works on a summer of code project for Parley and has ambitious plans:

Hi! I'm a fresher in Computing at Imperial College London and I've the
luck to participate in GSoC this year with doing something for Parley.
I'm going to make it easier & faster for someone to create a
vocabulary file for Parley by providing automatic translation and
retrieval of unknown words from a text. At the same time I'll get
involved in open source development for the first time and if I like
it I'll keep on helping on making Parley even more useful, easy and
fun! And then!! I'll get deeper and deeper into KDE development,
become the leader of all the development team and force all KDE
desktops have me as background and no way to change it!! Just kidding!
Have a nice day

David Capel will work on Parley during the Summer of Code.
I'll let him speak for himself:

Hello, I'm David Capel, an 18-year-old from Minnesota in the USA. I'm
going to be a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Madison this
fall and will likely major in computer science of some sort. For my
summer of code project I'm rewriting Parley's practice interface so
that it uses SVG themes and will be easy to extend in the future, and
I will likely create a few new practice modes along the way (if anyone
has ideas or requests, feel free to email me). Finally, I'm looking
forward to joining the KDE community.

This morning Patrick complained that he had no picture of himself while he was at the cebit.
So here comes remedy. I stumbled across some other random KDE related pictures also...

Edu meeting last year:
While waiting for pizza...


... we made the Step team eat snails.

KDE at CeBit:

And as soon as the visitors started to leave...

At the interop-ability party of Novell-Microsoft (does the spelling hint at missing parts of specifications?)

KDevelop meeting last weekend (and last week for the KDevelop guys)

And now for you, dear reader... which world famous painting is Jeremy standing in front of?

Seems like I've been bad. At least bad enough to get kicked from planetkde.org.
No clue why actually.
edit: I'm back, thanks to Chris Lee for running the planet in the first place

Today (for some yesterday I guess) the KDevelop meeting started.
After arriving a little late, I came just in time to grab something to eat after listening to the end of Aleix's talk about KDE 4 in general.
So far we are still at the "formal" part, discussing general direction of KDevelop in KDE 4.

A week ago I discovered a feature so obvious in that plasma thingy, that I just need to share it.
You can put your favorite vocabulary trainer into your favorite panel. You knew it, I bet. Do it
Proof:

I even poked at it a little so it only takes up a quarter of the panel instead of half of it.
Now I already spent more time on this (I just wanted to see how hard it would be to create a plasmoid... but throwing it away seemed like a waste as well...).
So if you've been looking for something fun and small like improving Parloids, let me know!
Opening files (yes, this includes Parley, KWordQuiz, Kanagram and KHangman ones) should work now.

What is missing (in the config of the applet mostly) is a selection of which languages to display in which order.
Also at CeBit I got the suggestion to let the solution show after a certain timeout automatically (right now it is revealed when the mouse is over the Parloid) to enable even more relaxed passive learning.
Also a first summer of code patch for Parley arrived a bit early today

The time to paint easter eggs has not come yet. It will though, in about half an hour. Also I don't really know why I'll do it. Maybe to reflect on my art skills once more and be happy that other people user their ability to create great artwork for KDE and Parley.
Instead I yesterday started something that had been rotating in the back of my head for about a year now. Since I started working on KVocTrain/Parley one problem has been how to deal with synonyms (to a lesser degree antonyms and false friends, which will be done with in the same instant).

Ok, so SaroEngels was first... but who has the better view? Opposite of KDE CeBit booth...

Plasmoids have been creeping into different parts of KDE... The E-Team lately spotted two of them. So maybe check out KDE-Edu to get a real hot calculator made by apol. The gui is in need of some love, but it's already very powerful since it uses KAlgebra behind the scenes (yay, scientific calculations on your desktop).

The other one I quickly hacked together, using artwork that leeo did for the icon originally.
Being reminded by aseigo to seperate engine and applet, I had a glimpse at how engines are created, decided it's easy enough, so the engine is there too now. It can easily be extended to give tons of data, so I'm open to crazy ideas, if you want it to spit out more data, just tell me. Font config works, but some layouting might do good. And feel free to come up with an improved design and especially layout. As I have little time lately and rather want to get Parley in trunk into a working state again, I won't update the plasmoid much. Junior jobbing anyone? Great place to start, I already have a couple of ideas... drop by in #kde-edu on freenode.