News and announcements
KDE Ships First Beta of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.10
Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2012-11-22
November 21, 2012. Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed
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 new and old functionality.
Highlights of 4.10 include, but are not limited to:
* 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 our user's user experience when they get the
update. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because
developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We're counting on
you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release.
Please consider joining 4.10 thoroughly and report any bugs you find to
bugs.kde.org.
KDE SC 4.9.3 available
Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2012-11-07
KDE ships November Updates to Applications, Workspaces and Development Platform
Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development
Platform.
These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to
the 4.9 series. 4.9.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on
top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended updates for
everyone running 4.9.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains
bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for
everyone.
The list of 86 recorded bugfixes include improvements in the Kate editor and
Kontact email and groupware client, resulting from recent coding sprints the
respective teams had. KDE's development platform has received a number of
updates which affect multiple applications.
The changes are listed on KDE's issue tracker. For a detailed list of changes
that went into 4.9.3, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.9.3 also
ships a more complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported
languages.
To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.9.3 Info Page. If
you would like to find out more about the KDE Workspaces and Applications 4.9,
please refer to the 4.9 release notes and its earlier versions.
Plasma Active 3 Improves Performance, Brings New Apps
Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2012-10-15
KDE has released the 3rd stable version of Plasma Active, KDE's device-
independent user experience. The Plasma Active user interface is touch-
friendly and works well across a range of devices. Its Activities function
gives users a natural way to organize and access their applications, files and
information. Plasma Active Three noticeably improves the user experience with
its enhanced and expanded set of apps, improved performance and a new virtual
keyboard.
New Apps
Files is a new default application in Plasma Active. It is a file manager,
but, unlike most others, it isn't based on folders; rather users can search
for documents by file type, creation time and semantic information such as
Tags. Files does not use the file system directly; it organizes documents with
Nepomuk, Plasma Active's underlying semantic engine.
Okular Active is Plasma Active's new Ebook Reader. Okular Active is built on
the technology which also drives the desktop version of the popular Document
Viewer, and is optimized for reading documents on a touch device. Okular
Active supports a wide range of file formats, such as PDF, EPub, Open
Document, and many others.
Through Plasma Active's Add Ons, thousands of ebooks are available for free,
with paid applications and content coming soon.
Champions: Kontact and Calligra
With Calligra Active and Kontact Touch, Plasma Active delivers scalable and
proven applications for office and groupware tasks, with a focus on
interoperability. Kontact Touch supports many groupware solutions, and brings
calendaring, email, contact management among other features. Calligra Active
has excellent support for most common office file formats such as OpenDocument
and Microsoft's .doc, .docx, .xls and .xlsx.
The KDE developers have put a lot of effort into improving the performance of
the user experience, its applications and underlying libraries. These
improvements bring a noticeably snappier and more visually coherent user
interface, and make using Plasma Active a more enjoyable experience compared
to previous versions.
Plasma Active runs on Mer
Mer is the leading openly developed Linux-based OS for mobile devices. It is
based on work from the MeeGo Project. With the size of the Core OS reduced to
the bare essentials, Mer delivers performance. It is also a fully open
development project, and thus supports fundamental Plasma Active design
principles—
Improved Text Input
Thanks to a new virtual keyboard based on Maliit, the input method used on
devices such as Nokia's N9, Plasma Active Three improves ease of text input.
The new virtual keyboard is faster and more convenient to use and offers great
flexibility for system integrators.
Roadmap: More Apps, Qt5 and File Synchronization
In future releases, users can expect support for a wider range of devices,
easier synchronization of data across devices, an improved user experience
through the use of Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, and more applications for popular
uses.
The KDE team is currently working to bring a Plasma Active-based tablet to the
market to demonstrate its capabilities fully and offer users a fresh and more
open alternative to existing mobile operating systems.
About Plasma Active
Plasma Active is openly developed Free software. Its reference implementation
builds on the Mer operating system and runs on a number of devices, including
popular x86-based tablet computers and ARM-based hardware such as the Archos
G9 series. Plasma Active can be used as a base for creating custom user
experiences, and for a variety of purposes on existing and emerging touch-
enabled devices. Participation in Plasma Active is welcomed, either through
individual contributions or by joining the Make * Play * Live partner network
as an official support or distribution partner.
KDE Ships October Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform (KDE SC 4.9.2)
Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2012-10-03
Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development
Platform.
These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to
the 4.9 series. 4.9.2 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on
top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended updates for
everyone running 4.9.1 or earlier versions. As the release only contains
bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for
everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages,
with more to come.
Significant bugfixes include improvements to the Kontact Suite, bugfixes in
Dolphin, Plasma and many more corrections and performance improvements all
over the place. KDE's development platform has received a number of updates
which affect multiple applications.
The changes are listed on Bugzilla. For a detailed list of changes that went
into 4.9.2, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.9.2 also ships a
more complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported languages.
To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.9.2 Info Page. If
you would like to find out more about the KDE Workspaces and Applications 4.9,
please refer to the 4.9 release notes and its earlier versions.
KDE Ships September Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform (KDE SC 4.9.1)
Written for KDE SC by yurikoles on 2012-09-05
KDE Ships September Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform
September 4, 2012. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces,
Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a
series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.1 updates bring
many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8
series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.9.0 or earlier
versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it
will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already
translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
Significant bugfixes include improvements to the Kontact Suite, bugfixes in
Dolphin and many more corrections and performance improvements all over the
place. The changes are listed on Bugzilla, though this list might not contain
all improvements since 4.9.0. For a complete list of changes that went into
4.9.1, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.9.1 also ships a more
complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported languages. To
download source code or packages to install go to the 4.9.1 Info Page. If you
would like to find out more about the KDE Workspaces and Applications 4.9,
please refer to the 4.9 release notes and its earlier versions.
