Schedules/KDE4/4.4 Release Goals
Appearance
This page reflects the changelog of KDE Software Compilation 4.4.
Plasma Workspace
Basic Functionality and Work-flow
- Storage devices can now automatically be mounted
- Widgets can be published on the network and be accessed remotely
- Desktop configuration is now scriptable using JavaScript
- Browsing through recent notifications
- Work-flow and layout improvements in the device manager widget
- System tray items can now be automatically shown or hidden
- New Plasma Netbook shell (Technology Preview)
- Applets can now be associated to an application (e.g. picture frame with gwenview, etc.) Makes it possible to open the associated application using an icon on the hover bar
- Mouse action plugins allow flexible interaction configuration
- New widget explorer improves the work-flow of adding widgets to the desktop
- Plasma widgets can now be added to the system tray
- Wallpapers can now be set using drag&drop
- Support for dropping remote content to use as wallpapers or create a desktop widget
- KNetworkmanager: new Network Management frontend
- Additionally, a richer Plasma widget as technology preview
User Interface
- Kinetic scrolling
- Taskbar entries, window buttons and other elements of the Plasma interface now have sublte animations
- Animation of popups uses OpenGL for animations
- Improved KMix on-screen display
- Improved layout for the battery widget's popup
- Taskbar previews are now clickable
- Desktop theme configuration has been moved to System Settings -> Style
- Plasma's default Air theme has been further polished and improved
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
Widgets
- NEW Blackboard: a simple paint canvas, it's possible to paint with the mouse or with multitouch events on platforms that supports them
- NEW KDE Observatory: keep track of the development of your favorite KDE projects
- NEW KIMPanel: KDE Input Method Panel for multibyte input
- NEW Knowledge Base: query the knowledgebase of opendesktop.org
- NEW On-screen keyboard
- NEW OpenDesktop.org Activities: activity infomration from opendesktop.org
- NEW Qalculate math expression evaluator, based on libqalculate
- NEW Spellcheck: a quick spell checking area
- NEW Webslice: a plasmoid displaying a part of a web page
- NEW Window list
- Battery: Improved layout, better support for bigger fonts
- Clock/Calendar: Ability to configure Calendar System to display
- Device notifier
- Visual revamp to make it look and feel more Plasma
- Supports non-removable volumes
- Can show/hide devices from the interface
- Popup autohides after 10s of inactivity
- Picture Frame: now supports loading and displaying of remote images
- Microblog: can view replies and direct messages
- Quicklaunch: ascending and descending sort for applications in quicklaunch applet.
- SystemTray
- Now can embed other Plasma widgets
- Supports the finalized version of the StatusNotifier specification
- Old notifications remains accessible for a while, separated by application name, browseable with a tabbar widget
- Tasks
- Clicking on a window preview now activates that window
- Mouse over on a window preview highlights the window if the highlight windows KWin effect is activated
- Control+click on a window group launches the KWin present windows effect if activated
- New taskbar animations
- Weather widget now supports wetter.com
KRunner
- NEW audioplayercontrol: control any MPRIS enabled audio application (amarok is the default)
- NEW plasma-desktop: "desktop console [script file]" triggers the interactive scripting window
- NEW solid: devices and hotplug support using Solid
- NEW mediawiki: generic mediawiki searching with .desktop files for wikipedia, techbase, wikitravel and userbase by default
- NEW windows: switch between and control windows and desktops
- Service runner: a query on a freedesktop application category, like "network" will show all applications of that category
- Bookmarks runner:
- The query "bookmarks" (or its translation) lists all the bookmarks
- Also supports Firefox' bookmarks
- Contacts runner: the query "contacts" shows all contacts
Other
- NEW Pastebin dataengine
- DataEngines can now also be written in JavaScript
- Image wallpaper combobox has been replaced with a nicer view.
- Image wallpaper offers 'Next Wallpaper Image' contextual action in slide-show mode.
KDE Development Platform
- KAuth: Authorization framework, harnesses PolicyKit, currently used in Font installer and System Activity
- Multitouch resize, rotate and move on platforms that support multitouch
- New high-level animation API in Plasma, based on Qt Kinetic
- Nepomuk Semantic Desktop:
- New Virtuoso storage backend, significantly faster and 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
- Printing: 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
- New calendar systems: Indian Civil (Saka), Ethiopian, Coptic, Julian, Proleptic Gregorian
KDE Applications
Basic
- Dolphin File Manager:
- Integrated searching
- Version control integration
- New timeline view, accessible as timeline:/, showing files by modification date
- Gwenview Image Viewer
- Image thumbnails on Folders
- Reworked start page
- New picture importing tool
PIM / Groupware
- KAddressbook now uses Akonadi for storing contacts
- 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 for e.g. signatures
Accessibility
- KDE's text-to-speach subsystem now uses Speech Dispatcher for synthesis
Educational & Games
- New Edu app: Cantor
- New Edu app: Rocs
- New game: Granatier (bomberman game)
- New game: Palapeli (puzzle game)
- KStars: new observation plan manager
- KAlgebra
- Support for lists
- Better MathML presentation support, lambda expressions, jump detections
- New 2d parametric function plotting
Network
- Kopete: Create avatars from a webcam
- KRDC Remote Desktop Client:
- Telepathy Tubes support
- Full screen switching
- KGet Download Manager:
- better support for verification of downloaded files
- Broken downloads can be repaired
- Support for adding mirrors, moving and renaming files while downloading
- New assistant to create metalinks
Utilities
- Okteta Hex Editor:
- NEW Analyzing/Editing with user-defineable data structure templates
- NEW Editing of values in the decoding table now possible
- NEW Split views
- NEW Storing of bookmarks