Schedules/KDE4/4.4 Release Goals

From KDE Community Wiki

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
  • 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), Pure Julian, Pure 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