Aaron Seigo is one of the most public faces of the KDE desktop. Not only is he a long-time developer, but, for the past three years, he has been president of KDE e.V.. Now nearing the end of his time as president, he talked about KDE's recent past and near future, and his role in both.

No one is better qualified to talk about the state of the KDE desktop than Aaron Seigo. A former member of the board of KDE e.V, the German non-profit that oversees the project, Seigo is a lead developer on the desktop. Last weekend, I interviewed him at the Calgary Open Source Systems Festival, COSSFest, in front of an audience, on where KDE is today and where it is heading.

After years of focusing on further improving KDE4 two weeks ago the developers of the free desktop announced the next big step for their project: KDE Frameworks 5.0. But as long-time developer — and Plasma team leader — Aaron Seigo points out the source-incompatible changes shall be held to a minimum.

Aaron Seigo joined the KDE project in 2000 and is sponsored by Trolltech. Based in Calgary, Canada Aaron spends his time thinking about KDE project and its client-side software. Here he describes how porting KDE4 to Windows and MacOS will enable Kontact, the Open Source groupware application, to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Outlook in the enterprise.

With the recent release of version 4.0, the KDE open source project has garnered a lot of international attention. One of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality, Aaron J Seigo is in Australia to speak at this year's Linux.conf.au on his vision for better desktop computing. Computerworld spoke with Seigo, a native of Calgary, Canada, about his view of the world and how a little bit of innovation will permanently change how people interact with software.

On Friday, January 18th, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. gave the keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California about KDE 4, presenting KDE to the world and the world to KDE. Aaron started with an introduction to KDE 4, beginning with the history of the project and expressing how far KDE has come in the last 11 years. Then, Aaron explored what KDE is, and what the community is based on - freedom and openness. Freedom to do work, have fun, and connect with others. Further, Aaron moved on to KDE 4, and discussed the near-future plans and ideas. The vision of KDE 4 is based upon three principles: beauty, accessibility, and functionality. He ventured into the many areas that KDE has improved upon, and pointed to the roadmap for the KDE 4 cycle.

In about 6 weeks the biggest yearly gathering of the KDE community starts in Tampere. To give you all a little taste of Akademy 2010, Guillermo Amaral interviewed Aaron Seigo and asked him about his keynote.

KDE is currently moving in three directions: adding functionality, extending the concept of the social desktop, and the introduction of KDE on to every possible hardware platform. Bruce Byfield learns where KDE is going from lead KDE developer Aaron Seigo.

Aaron J. Seigo presents new graphical effects for KDE 4 desktop Plasma. He shows fade-in and fade-out effects on icons. Aaron also talks about how easy these animations can be implemented by using the Phase/Animator framework. It also makes animations consistent across the desktop and makes them easy to change.