This week in Usability & Productivity, part 20

Here’s some more Usability and Productivity! This week a ton of bugs got stamped out, some of them serious and long-standing. There’s also a lot more goodness that’s in the works, but not quite finished yet, so stay tuned for next week…

New Features

• There’s a new “Share with Telegram” plugin that allows apps like Okular and Spectacle to send files directly to Telegram (Nicolas Fella, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
• Images in Gwenview can now be copied directly to the clipboard (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.08.0)

Bugfixes

• It’s no longer possible to break your system when using Discover in Arch Linux to remove an app with optional dependencies on KDE Plasma (Antonio Rojas, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
• The Countdown Timer widget now conforms to the laws of the universe by counting down one second at a time (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
• It’s now possible to now browse the contents of an archive file that’s inside another archive file (Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
• The Present Windows effect no longer inappropriately shows the global app launcher/menu/dashboard (Scott Harvey, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Activities switcher no longer gets stuck open when its Meta+tab keyboard shortcut is triggered very quickly (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The “Force Fonts DPI” option on the Fonts System Settings page now works again (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
• WINE apps and Virtualbox now display their icons properly when pinned to the Task Manager (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
• Music files and other files with sequential numbers in their metadata are now sorted more naturally in Dolphin (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 18.04.2)
• Gwenview can now accept pasted images from the moment it launches (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.04.2)
• Gwenview’s per-image selection button now updates its icon properly for selected images (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.04.2)
• It’s now possible to use Dolphin’s “Send via Bluetooth” plugin to send multiple types of files at once (Elvis Angelaccio, KDE Frameworks 5.47)

UI Polish & Improvement

• Long app names and filenames in the Application Dashboard now wrap onto a second line when necessary (Scott Harvey, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• Hitting the “increase brightness” key when the brightness is already at its maximum level now shows the brightness display anyway, just like the volume display does (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Kate’s Word count display is now a persistent global preference instead of a non-remembered per-document setting (Wojciech Stachurski, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
• Konsole’s key binding editor received many user interface improvements (Ahmad Samir, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
• Any character can now be used as a keybinding in Konsole (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 18.08.0)

See all the names of people who worked hard to make the computing world a better place? That could be you next week! Getting involved isn’t all that tough, and there’s lots of support available. Give it a try today! It’s easy and fun and important.

None of my patches made it in this week, but I have 31 of them open in various stages of review! The downside to being a front-end developer is that since all of your proposed changes are user-facing, people can be quite opinionated about them! But it’s all good, and part of the review process is to ensure that nobody’s views are totally ignored. It’s important that everyone is listened to and their viewpoint considered, even if it means that in the end that some patches aren’t accepted or take a long time to make it in.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.