Schedules/KDE4/4.4 Release Goals

    From KDE TechBase

    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), 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