This is week 59 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, we’ve got lots of juicy improvements for our apps! In addition to lots of nice improvements for Plasma and Frameworks, the KDE Applications 19.04.0 release comes out in a little under two months and we’ve been working hard to add awesome new features. Check it out:
New Features
- Implemented KRun support in portals, which allows Flatpak apps to be able to open content in other apps using the typical KDE app chooser window (Denis Karpovskiy, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
- Spectacle now has a new default option to remember the current rectangular region selection box, but only until the program is closed (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Spectacle now lets the user configure what happens when the screenshot shortcut is pressed while Spectacle is already running (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
- Gwenview can now open Krita image files (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- In Gwenview, it’s now possible to browse between images using the back and forward buttons that are present on many mice (Anthony Fieroni, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Konsole now allows tabs to be created by middle-clicking on empty parts of the tab bar, and also has an option to allow tabs to be closed by middle-clicking on them (Shubham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Fixed a case where the current window could appear twice in the Desktop Grid overview (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
- Setting the mouse middle button to open the Application Launcher no longer breaks unrelated parts of the Plasma desktop (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
- Discover no longer crashes when opened using a malformed appstream:// URL (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- The Kickoff Application Launcher no longer unexpectedly and inappropriately responds to window tiling and maximization keyboard shortcuts (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- The Kickoff Application Launcher no longer allows the username and system information text to overlap under certain circumstances (Matthieu Gras, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- Returned the default Breeze window and menu shadow color to being pure black, which makes shadows visible again when using the Breeze Dark color scheme (Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- The “Share to Imgur” feature now actually works in all KDE apps that implement it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
- Dolphin et al. will now show more metadata for AppImage apps when a recent version of the libappimage library is installed (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
- Dolphin no longer crashes on quit when there is more than one Activity and one of them is stopped while Dolphin is still running (David Hallas, KDE Applications 18.12.3)
- Fixed odd display of some box characters in Konsole (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
User Interface Improvements
- Discover no longer shows a misleading message saying “Please check your connectivity” while loading content immediately after being launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- When about to update the system using Discover, long ugly package version strings no longer get cut off when there’s not much horizontal space, such as when using widescreen view and looking at a package description page (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2):
- Made some major improvements to the user interface of the System Settings Emoticons page (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Discover’s Updates page now has improved display for the number of updates in the header on top (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- We now have beautiful new icons for Suspend, Hibernate, and Switch User, among others (Krešimir Čohar, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
- We have a nice new video camera icon, which will soon start showing up in various places (Rafael Brandmaier and Krešimir Čohar , KDE Frameworks 5.56):
- When a Kirigami app has a toolbar button that opens a dropdown menu when clicked, the menu no longer shows a tooltip if hovered over while the menu itself is visible (Aleix Pol Gonzales, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!
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