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The announcement is up on the dot. The first beta of KMyMoney for the KDE 4 Platform has been released! We started in May, due to an innocent email sent by Laurent Montel, which triggered a series of events that led us to this point.

I remember at that point we were stabilizing the code to release 1.0. I had some time off work and my girlfriend was on medical leave, so we decided to start, provided that I would be the only one from the original team to work on the port until 1.0 was ready. Laurent helped a great deal at the time hammering the code to make it build and then run under KDE4. At first, I didn't even have a full KDE4 environment, only a chroot to run the code, and Kate to edit it. I was still running Kubuntu 8.04 and didn't want to switch until 9.04 felt ready.

So, batch after batch of commits, it got gradually into shape. First, it compiled, then it ran, then it didn't crash so often. Along came new help, like Nicolas Lecureuil and Cristian Onet and the rest of the core development team, as the 1.0 release was finally stable and they could dedicate some time to it. More people meant more coordination, and I requested a kde.org mailing list and created a techbase page. Gradually, our work became more KDE-centric, away from our roots on Sourceforge. At the time, we felt it was necessary to keep the work separate, so people wouldn't lose focus on the 1.0 release, but later it became clear that these could be first moves in our migration to the KDE infrastructure. The answer is still unclear on that one!

With the new people coming we were able to reenable features that had been disabled during the initial port. GPG, charts, views, .xml files, the register, were all debugged and reenabled. At the same time, plugins were merged back into the main code, like the reconciliation report and the aqbanking plugin. We felt it was time to start eating our own food, so some of us switched to using it back in October or so. That uncovered more subtle bugs, and even some of them in the underlying Qt and KDE libraries.

The pressure started building up, with more distros discontinuing the KDE3 libraries. Cristian and Michael got KMM running in Windows and OS X, and we didn't have as many bugs and nearly no crashes. So, we decided it was time for a first beta. We went to the documentation and translation team, which was extremely helpful during this whole process, and they recommended for a 1-month string-freeze due to the size of the .po, over 2700 strings. Here we are, after a 4-week string-freeze, with translations in 30 languages and documentation in 3. This is the first time we ship documentation in a language other than English, and it's all thanks to the great work performed by the translators. They also helped us uncover a lot of typos and string erros. After all, many of us are not native English speakers.

Now, version 3.95 is out in the wild, and I'm sure a lot of bugs will be uncovered. It doesn't compile at all in 4.4 beta 2 due to some problem with a GPG constructor. Patches are welcome for that problem, and for any other you might find. In bugs.kde.org, you can file bugs for the kmymoney4 product and we will be happy to take care of the issues as soon as possible.

The schedule for the next releases is still being decided, but we'll probably have 2 or 3 more before going to kdereview, and then, if everything goes ok, to extragear. More on that when the team reaches a decision. Now go, download it, break it and report back to us, please!