News and announcements

KDE Ships First Beta of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.11

Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2013-06-14

June 13, 2013. Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of Workspaces,
Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature
freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further
polishing.

The 4.11 releases include the following highlights and more:

    Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces—Qt Quick is continuing to make its way into
the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE"s extensions on top of Qt Quick,
allow deeper integration and more powerful apps and Plasma components. One of
the central Plasma widgets, the task manager, was completely rewritten in
Plasma Quick. It got quite a few bug fixes on its way to the new QML version.
The Battery widget was overhauled. It now shows information about all the
batteries (e.g. mouse, keyboard) in a system. And the battery icons can now
show a finer-grained load-status.

    Faster Nepomuk indexing—The Nepomuk semantic engine received massive
performance optimizations (e.g., reading data is 6 or more times faster).
Indexing happens in two stages: the first stage retrieves general information
(such as file type and name) immediately; additional information like MP3
tags, author information and similar is extracted in a second, somehow slower
stage. Metadata display is now much faster. In addition, the Nepomuk backup
and restore system was improved. The system also got new indexers for
documents like odt or docx.

    Kontact improvements—Kontact got a faster indexer for its PIM data with
improvements to Nepomuk, and a new theme editor for email headers. The way it
handles email images now allows it to resize pictures on the fly. The whole
KDE PIM suite got a lot of bug fixes, such as the way it deals with Google
Calender resources. The PIM Import Wizard allows users to import settings and
data for Trojita (the Qt IMAP email client) and all other importers were
improved as well.

    KWin and Path to Wayland—Intial experimental support for Wayland was added
to KWin. KWin also got many OpenGL improvements including support being added
for creating an OpenGL 3.1 core context and robustness from using the new
functionality provided by the GL_ARB_robustness extension. Numerous KWin
optimizations are aimed at reducing CPU and memory overhead in the OpenGL
backend. Some desktop effects have been re-written in JavaScript to ease
maintenance.

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KDE Ships May Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform

Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2013-05-10

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development
Platform. These updates continue the series of monthly stabilization updates
to the 4.10 series. 4.10.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates
on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended updates for everyone running
the 4.10 release series. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation
updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyonee.

The over 75 recorded bugfixes include improvements to the Personal Information
Management suite Kontact, the Window Manager KWin, and others. The changes are
listed on KDE's issue tracker. For a detailed list of changes that went into
4.10.3, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs.

To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.10.3 Info Page. If
you want to find out more about the 4.10 versions of KDE Workspaces,
Applications and Development Platform, please refer to the 4.10 release notes.

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KDE Ships April Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform (4.10.2)

Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2013-04-03

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development
Platform. These updates are the second in a series of monthly stabilization
updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.2 updates bring many bugfixes and translation
updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended updates for everyone
running the 4.10 release series. As this release only contains bugfixes and
translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

The over 100 recorded bugfixes include improvements to the Personal Information
Management suite Kontact, the Window Manager KWin, and others. KDE's
Development Platform has received a number of updates that affect multiple
applications. The changes are listed on KDE's issue tracker. For a detailed
list of changes that went into 4.10.2, you can browse the Subversion and Git
logs.

To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.10.2 Info Page. If
you want to find out more about the 4.10 versions of KDE Workspaces,
Applications and Development Platform, please refer to the 4.10 release notes.

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KDE Ships Third Release Candidate of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.10

Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2013-01-19

Yesterday KDE released the third release candidate for its renewed Workspaces,
Applications, and Development Platform.

Highlights of 4.10 include:

* *Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces* -- Qt Quick is continuing to make its way
into the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE's extensions on top of QtQuick
allow deeper integration with the system and more powerful apps and Plasma
components. Plasma Containments can now be written in QtQuick. Various
Plasma widgets have been rewritten in QtQuick, notably the system tray,
pager, notifications, lock & logout, weather and weather station, comic
strip and calculator plasmoids.

* *New Screen Locker* -- A new screen locking mechanism based on QtQuick
brings more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop.

* *Animated Wallpapers* -- Thanks to a new QtQuick-based wallpaper engine,
animated wallpapers are now much easier to create.

* *Improved Zooming in Okular* -- A technique called tiled rendering, which
internally splits up the document in parts and only renders visible parts
allows Okular to zoom in much more while reducing memory consumption. Okular
Active, the touch-friendly version of the powerful document reader is now
part of KDE SC.

* *Faster indexing* -- A new indexer allows the Nepomuk semantic engine
faster indexing of files. The new Tags kioslave allows users to browse their
files by tags in any KDE-powered application.

* *Color Correction* -- Gwenview, KDE's smart image viewer and Plasma's
window manager now support color correction and can be adjusted to the color
profile of different monitors, allowing for more natural representation of
photos and graphics.

* *Notifications* -- Plasma's notifications are now rendered using QtQuick,
notifications themselves, especially concerning power management have been
cleaned up.

* *New Print Manager* -- Setup of printers and monitoring jobs was improved
thanks to a new implementation of the Print Manager.

* *Kate*, KDE's Advanced Text Editor received multiple improvements
regarding
user feedback. It is now extensible using Python plugins.

* *KTouch* -- KDE's touch-typing learning utility has been rewritten and
features a cleaner, more elegant user interface.

* *libkdegames improvements* -- Many parts of libkdegames have been
rewritten,
porting instructions for 3rd party developers are available.

* *KSudoku* now allows printing puzzles.

* *KJumpingCube* has seen a large number of improvements making the game
more enjoyable.

More improvements can be found in the 4.10 Feature Plan. As with any large
number of changes, we need to give 4.10 a good testing in order to maintain
and improve the quality and user experience when users install the update.

Testing

KDE is running an extra detailed testing program throughout the 4.10 beta
and RC releases. To participate, get the latest KDE 4.10. Instructions for
installing the latest test release can be found here.

Some areas of KDE deserve extra testing attention this time around. We have
checklists for testing in general, and recommendations for special attention
on the wiki.

Get Involved

The KDE testing program is a way for everyone to contribute to the
ongoing quality of KDE software. You can make a difference by carefully
testing the programs that are part of the KDE 4.10 beta and assist
developers by identifying legitimate bugs. This means higher quality
software, more features and happier users and developers.

The Testing Program is structured so that any KDE user can give back to KDE,
regardless of their skill level. If you want to be part of this quality
improvement program, please contact the Team on the IRC channel #kde-quality
on freenode.net. The Team Leaders want to know ahead of time who is involved
in order to coordinate all of the testing activities. They are also
committed to having this project be fun and rewarding. After checking in,
you can install the RC through your distribution package manager. The KDE
Community wiki has instructions. This page will be updated as RC packages
for other distributions become available. With the RC installed, you can
proceed with testing. Please contact the Team on IRC #kde-quality if you
need help getting started.

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