Schedules/KDE4/4.4 Release Goals

Plasma Workspace

basic functionality

• Storage devices can now automatically be mounted

Widgets can be published on the network and be accessed remotely

• Networkmanager frontend (knetworkmanager)
  • Experimental network-manager plasma widget
• Applets can now be associated to an application (e.g. picture frame -> gwenview, etc.)
• Desktop theme configuration has been moved to System Settings -> Style
• Workspace actions moved to System Settings -> Desktop
• desktop configuration is now scriptable

• Improved layout for the battery widget's popup
• OpenGL accelerated popup animation
• Support for Plasma widgets in the system tray
• System tray items can now be automatically shown or hidden
• Workflow and layout improvements in the device manager widget
• Improved KMix OSD

• Taskbar previews are not clickable
• Setting the wallpaper using drag&drop
• Support for dropping remote content

Window & Compositing Manager

• New: Window maximizing and tiling by snapping to the screen-edges ("Aero Snap")
• Native window tabs: Arbitrary windows can be grouped in tabs
• Window Management Plugin for KRunner
• Subtle animations in the window decoration, and other options to customize the window behavior
• Alt+Tab window switching improvements
• Improvements in present windows, flip switch, logout effect

Other widgets and addons

• Bookmark runner now also supports Firefox' bookmarks

KDE Development Platform

• KAuth: Authorization framework, harnesses PolicyKit, used in
  • Font installer
  • System Activity
• Multitouch resize, rotate and move on platforms that support multi-touch
• New high-level animation API, based on Qt Kinetic
• Nepomuk:
  • New Virtuoso backend, much faster, more scalable
  • Nepomuk: KIO slave for querying Nepomuk resources
  • Nepomuk is now able to search on non-mounted media
• libksane (scanner library): basic scanner support for Windows
• improved exiv2 support in libkexiv2
• Add Odd/Even page selection and server-side page selection when using CUPS
• KDE integration of QtWebKit (cookies, proxies, etc. but not KPart)
• Thumbnail previews for Comicbook format
• Add new calendar systems: Indian Civil (Saka), Pure Julian, Pure Gregorian.

KDE Applications

Basic

• Dolphin: integrated searching

PIM / Groupware

• New: KAddressbook rewrite for Akonadi
• KMail:
  • Archiving of emails
  • Improved recipient picker
  • searching by tag
  • Clickable HTML statusbar
  • Collapsible recipient fields
  • Error messages are now passive, less disturbant to workflow
  • Templating improvements

Educational & Games

• KStars: Observation plan manager
• KAlgebra
  • support for lists
  • better MathML presentation support, lambda expressions, jump detections
  • new 2d parametric function plotting
• New Edu app: Cantor
• New Edu app: Rocs
• New game: Granatier
• New game: Palapeli

Network

• Kopete: Create avatars from a webcam
• KRDC:
  • Telepathy Tubes support,
  • full screen switching
• KGet:
  • better support for verification of downloaded files
  • Broken downloads can be repaired
  • Support for adding mirrors, moving and renaming files while downloading
  • Assistant to create metalinks

Utilities

• Okteta Hex Editor:
  • Improved selecting mechanism
  • Base64 encoding
  • Split views
  • Storing of bookmarks

non-SC Applications

• Digikam (stable KDE4 release in December)
• Amarok