[Kmymoney-devel] Version 3.96 - Announcement draft

[Alvaro Soliverez]

Here is the final draft. Unless anyone objects by tomorrow morning, I
will submit this to the marketing team.

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KMyMoney releases second beta for KDE4 and maintenance version for KDE3
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The KMyMoney Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of
version 3.96 of KMyMoney. This is the second beta release for the KDE4
platform, after only 1 and a half of months of hard work, stabilizing
and fixing bugs found during the first beta release.
This version is still considered beta and not recommended for general
use. As with the previous version, the intention is to get feedback
from the community and find those issues that are not immediately
apparent.

Some of the improvements included in this release are:
- Compatibility with KDE SC 4.4, after an unfortunate bug in our
previous release that made it impossible to compile in that setup
- Better integration with the Qt4 version of AqBanking, and an
arrangement with AqBanking to have the Qt4 version more easily
available
- Integration with KDE Calendar libraries, for a better local holiday support
- Improved handling of GPG-related errors
- The main view now has three different modes: the traditional left
navigation bar, a tree, and tabbed windows
- Charts have been improved and several features which were missing in
the previous release have been added back, and some that were not
present in the KDE3 version
- Over 30 bugs have been fixed for this release alone and only 8 bugs
remain open at this point. We thank the community for the reports and
we expect to see more reports (and hopefully more fixes) after this
release
- Several custom widgets have been ported to be fully Qt4-native. This
means not only an aesthetic improvement, but also a cleaner and more
maintainable code, which has already helped us solve some bugs along
the way. Plans are already being laid out to extend this effort to all
the remaining widgets in subsequent releases
- Better build management, thanks to the feedback provided by the
packagers of many distributions and platforms
- Documentation is now available in Italian and a Valencian Catalan
translation is available for the user interface

For this and coming releases, at least until hitting a stable version,
we have adopted a quick release cycle, comprised of 4 weeks devoted to
the big changes and fixes, and 2 weeks to stabilizing and translating.
We believe this will help us find bugs more quickly and improve the
feedback, while still having enough time to work on bugs and new
features. This means you can expect a new release 6 weeks from now,
unless a blocking issue gets in the way.

For those still using the KDE3 platform version, the team has also
released version 1.0.3. This maintenance release contains some fixes
and improvements we found during the development of the KDE4 version
and backported to it.