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 innactivity
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 plasmoids
- 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, used in
- Font installer
- System Activity
Multitouch resize, rotate and move on platforms that support multi-touch
New high-level animation API in Plasma, based on Qt Kinetic
Nepomuk:
- New Virtuoso 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
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:
- Integrated searching
- Version control integration

PIM / Groupware

New: KAddressbook rewritten using 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 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:
- 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
- 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

non-SC Applications

Digikam (stable KDE4 release in December)
Amarok