We’re up to week 77 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! This week’s report encompasses the latter half of the Usability & Productivity sprint. Quite a lot of great work got done, and two features I’m particularly excited about are in progress with patches submitted and under review: image annotation support in Spectacle, and customizable sort ordering for wallpaper slideshows. These are not done yet, but should be soon! Meanwhile, check out what’s already landed:
New Features
- When trying to access a network with a captive portal (e.g. an airport or hotel wifi network that requires you to log in or click a “yes I accept the terms of use bla bla bla” button), an icon in the system tray allows you to access it again in case you miss the page the first time around (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Dolphin’s Information Panel can now optionally auto-play media files; the setting is in the Information Panel’s context menu (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.08.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Flatpak and Snap apps with mismatching app IDs now show up properly in the task manager (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- Job status notifications once again appear for people using Latte Dock (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- Notification pop-ups no longer sometimes become collapsed or fly in from the wrong location when there’s an unpleasant flood of notifications (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- Paused job notifications no longer show an inaccurate “time remaining” indicator (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- Fixed a crash on Wayland when using the default “Smart” window placement strategy (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- The System Settings Look and Feel and Splash Screen pages now consume much less memory (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- Plasma no longer freezes at a black screen when logging out of a Wayland session (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
- Plasma’s KWin window manager no longer gobbles up all available memory when using a non-Breeze window decoration theme on Wayland (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
- It’s now possible for the screen to automatically lock itself while a KWin effect is active (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Apps like Kate and KDevelop that use the KTextEditor framework now continue to spell-check documents for which spell-checking is turned on after they have been reloaded after being changed on disk, and scroll down when dragging something to the bottom of the view at the same speed as they scroll up when dragging it to the top (Ahmad Samir and Axel Kittenberger, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
- When Spectacle is used to save an image with a space in its filename and then quit itself automatically, the link in the notification generated by this action now works (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0)
User Interface Improvements
- The Plasma notification history no longer includes apps that don’t properly configure their notifications, preventing notification spam (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- The Notifications history now displays the configure and clear buttons in the same order on top as they appear within individual notifications (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
- Notifications that appear within one second of another notification that has identical content are now automatically suppressed, preventing notification spam from misbehaving software (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
- The System Settings Colors page now displays color schemes’ titlebar colors too, so for example you can distinguish color schemes that vary only in their titlebar colors (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
- Pages in Info Center now all have the same sized titles (Méven Car, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The Plasma network manager widget no longer futilely tries to keep scanning for wifi networks even when wifi is disabled (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The Audio Volume’s settings window now accurately describes what the feedback options do (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
- The System Settings User Manager page no longer encourages you to enter an incorrect short name (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The Places Panel in Dolphin, file dialogs, and other apps no longer shows a “Root” item by default. Don’t worry, you can still get to / with one click using the Places panel, just click on its corresponding Devices entry, which gets a special icon to make it easy to pick out. Relatedly, the Places Panel now always shows a root device when running from a live ISO image (Méven Car and Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
- The sharing feature’s job dialog is now even more polished, having a better default size and more consistent bottom buttons (Nicolas Fella and me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
- It’s now possible to disable Dolphin’s unreleased “open externally-opened folders in new tabs” feature (Alexander Saoutkin, Dolphin 19.08.0)
- Everything in Dolphin’s main window now has “What’s this?” text (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 19.08.0)
- Okular’s annotation configuration dialogs now look better (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 1.8.0):
Pretty freakin’ sweet, huh?! It was a great development sprint and I’m really happy with how it went. I’ll be writing another more in-depth article about it, so stay tuned.
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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