The line graph shows the rate of resolved bugs climbing at a rather steady pace. As for the commit level, the following image (thanks Simon St James!) shows all commits (green), code commits (red) and Plasma-related commits (yellow). Over the last year, Plasma-related commits have really taken off, as you can see.
So what have we been up to exactly? Besides bug fixes by the ton, we've been filling in missing features to the taskbar, like multiple rows of windows (all nicely animated!) and "show only windows on this desktop", to name a couple. Desktop icon loading has improved substantially, as has performance of many of the Plasma components.
Script support for DataEngines and Runners was recently added, and the Plasmoids continue to grow in number. The continued development has helped solidify the Plasma library even further as we discover common patterns in Plasmoids. It really didn't occur to me, for instance, how many Plasmoids would need to keep themselves in a perfect square shape. =)
In between all this great work, we also had the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California. Thanks to Google's amazing help in organization and financial sponsorship, the event was truly an impressive thing. The presentations were streamed lived around the world and now appear on Google Video. I've seen photos of the keynote on walls in German taverns, so I know the streaming was indeed working. ;)
It was terrific to see both industry people there, hard core developers (including kernel developers) and general community members. Highlights for me were experiencing Patrick Volkderding's first karaoke performance, the KDE-branded wine (thanks Celeste!), the truly astounding Konqi and Katie mascots, and listening to the KDE people who came to express just how much closer they felt to the project as a whole.
It was pretty hectic for me personally, with meetings lasting well into the night. That was exactly why we did this, of course: to gain exposure, get our message out, connect the community and do something worthy of a release such as this.
It will be a hard event to top, but then we don't get a 4.0 every year. However, it seems we'll be doing a KDE Americas event at the beginning of every year as a counterpoint to the Akademy events in Europe in the middle of the year.