The last three years have been no fun in the history of KPhotoAlbum. We have
been struggling with porting KPhotoAlbum to Qt4/KDE4.

During that period we for sure have lost many users that got bored from the
lack of releases, and also many contributors that got fat up by
listening to me saying no, no, no and no again to new features.

Recognizing the enormous work the port would be, I had the strong belief
that the best path to getting through it would be to
concentrate on the port alone, and not get lost in a million new features
at the same time. I'll let history judge if that was a good or a bad
approach.

Anyway, now we are through, and a KDE 4 release have been a few month ago,
and new development has started!

To that end, I've spent the last week on adding a new section to the
website trying to help people get started with contributing. Among
other things a number of junior tasks have been identified.

So if you are interested in joining KPhotoAlbum development, why not drop
by #kphotoalbum at irc.kde.org this weekend, and get started with your
contribution.

Tomorrow it starts! The (at least for four of us) long awaited KPhotoAlbum development sprint!

Tuomas Suutari, Jan Kundrát, Henner Zeller, and I will all by together at my place in Hjørring, Denmark the coming week to bring the development of KPhotoAlbum forward.

Stay tuned!

Today KPhotoAlbum entered message freeze, and is now ready to be
translated. The release will happen Dec 31th 2006.

To bring a bit of attention to the great work the translators do, I've
started a small prize drawing contest which those who have made a complete
translation of KPA participating. The prize is $100.

See http://www.kphotoalbum.org/news.htm#item0043 for details.

The KPhotoAlbum splash screen contest ended today, and a winner has been found, namely Jaroslav Holan's submission. Congratulation and thanks for all the nice splash screen submitted.

Just one more day (till tonight midnight), and the KPhotoAlbum splash screen contest is over. I am truely impressed with the amount and quality of submissions. Have a look at http://www.kphotoalbum.org/splashscreen.htm

I promissed the KPhotoAlbum community that I for once (ahem) would not be a cruel dictator, but instead allow them to vote on which one we would use. And am I glad I did that, there is at least 5-6 which I simply can't choose among, because they are so good

Any suggestions on how to run such a vote is more than welcome.

The splash screen contest started yesterday just got more exciting. You now have the chance of winning $100. see contest info

Today Christoph Moseler managed to push me over the edge. Several times people have complained that the KPhotoAlbum splash screen was a combination of ugly, ugly and non relating to KPhotoAlbum. So far I've managed to tell people to go and take a hike, but today I gave up

Therefore, I started a contest to make a new splash screen for KPhotoAlbum. I hope lots of talented artist will participate.

KPhotoAlbum development is going really well in the evenings these days. Currently I'm working on the video support in KPhotoAlbum. Actually, tonight I finished the HTML generation, check out a web page with videos and images generated from KPhotoAlbum

In just 15 days I'm going home to my lovely girlfriend permanently (greetings encoded to my coworkers who've I've spent a year with now, and my girlfriend who I haven't), man am I looking forward to that!

Finally, if some of you out there want to become my star, then hurry send some Danish Candy to Holiday Inn, Beautiful Downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut (and address the envelope: "Dope for your Danish addict")

It didn't take long from me setting up my RSS reader til KPhotoAlbum's news section could be read using such a guy,

Now point your RSS reader at http://www.kphotoalbum.org/news.rss

In my cubicle at work, there is this dude (Hi Steve) who almost everyday
complains that I never blog anything, so let me start doing that
occationally from now on - I'm sure Steve will remind me

KPhotoAlbum development for the next release is really comming along real
nice now, there seem to be three major topics covered in the next release:

• SQL backend. Tuomos is making good progress on his Google Summer of Code
  project on adding an SQL backend to KPhotoAlbum.
• Video support. Darn have I been asked for this like a million times, so
  now it finally seem to be in KPA. So KPA will be able to categories videos
  like images, and it is capable of playing them back.
• Improved support for annotating images. One of the cool thing about KPA
  is its capabilities to annotate lots of images fast. The annotation dialog
  is getting lots of minor but important improvements. Stuff like sub
  categories now being shown in list boxes, items not
  matching the typed text disapears etc.
  

  So everyone, please keep me on my toes of reporting progress here.

  Cheers
  Jesper.