Schedules/KDE4/4.4 Release Goals
Plasma Workspace
basic functionality
- New Plasma netbook shell
- 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
- Initial desktop configuration is now scriptable
- Taskbar animations
- New widgets explorer
- Mouse action plugins
- 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
- 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
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