Schedules/KDE4/4.4 Release Goals

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
• ISO Currency Code support

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