Here’s week 81 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! And boy is there some delicious stuff today. In addition to new features and bugfixes, we’ve got a modernized look and feel for our settings windows to show off:

Doesn’t it look really good!? This design is months in the making, and it took quite a bit of work to pull it off. I’d like to thank Marco Martin, Filip Fila, and the rest of the KDE VDG team for making it happen. This is the first of several user interface changes we’re hoping to land in the Plasma 5.17 timeframe, and I hope you’ll like them!

In the meantime, look at all the other cool stuff that got done this week:

New Features

• Image slideshow wallpapers now permit you to set the sort order, rather than always being random (David Redondo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Night Color feature now has a “Manual” mode that allows you to turn it on or off at will (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The feature that syncs user settings to the SDDM login screen now syncs the screen DPI and NumLock key status as well (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Opening the System Settings Fonts page no longer unexpectedly alters the font anti-aliasing settings (Antonio Rojas, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• When using the Application Dashboard, opening apps with a touch on the touchscreen now works reliably again (Luca Carlon, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• KRunner is now faster to return results, and entries no longer jump around once you’ve got something selected (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• KIO’s FTP connection feature is now more tolerant of broken FTP server implementations (Enes Selim, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• List items in QML-based software that displays inline actions on hover now have better spacing for the items, and take into account whether or not the view’s scrollbar is visible (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  
• Media apps using a sandboxing technology like FireJail can now be controlled through Plasma’s Media Player widget as expected (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.61)

User Interface Improvements

• The Networks widget’s Airplane Mode setting now persists across reboots, powers off Bluetooth as well, and no longer appears at all on systems without any wireless hardware (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Code that controls widget positioning on the Desktop has been completely rewritten, which should improve remembering widget locations, and also now widget resize handles and icons increase in size when interacted with via touch (Marco Martin, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
• Discover’s sidebar is now full of pretty icons! (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The System Settings Fonts page now informs you that apps may need to be restarted before changes are applied with an inline message rather than an annoying dialog box (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The new Unsplash Wallpapers Picture of the Day plugin now lets you select which category you want — or all of them! (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Audio Volume widget now uses the more user-friendly term “Recording devices” rather than “capture devices” (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The spinning busy indicator visible in Discover now spins more slowly (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  
• Improvements to Okular’s Stamp annotation tool: the configuration dialog is now more obvious about the fact that it supports user-specified images, and it shows a preview of your custom image; non-square stamps aren’t resized to be square; and finally it now warns you that it’s an experimental feature which may not work properly in all cases (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 1.9.0):
  

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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Somehow we’ve gone through 80 weeks of progress reports for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! Does that seem like a lot to you? Because it seems like a lot to me. Speaking of a lot, features are now pouring in for KDE’s Plasma 5.17 release, as well as Applications 19.08. Even more is lined up for Applications 19.12 too, which promises to be quite a release. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got for you:

New Features

• It’s now possible to see a network’s QR code for easy sharing with others (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• It’s now possible to sync user settings for fonts, cursors, color schemes, etc. to the SDDM login screen, ensuring a unified look and feel from boot to shutdown (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• KRunner’s unit conversion abilities now include binary sizes like Megabytes and Gibibytes (Jonathan Rubenstein, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• Okular now has an “Open Containing Folder” feature, so for example you can easily find the on-disk location of PDFs downloaded from the internet (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.8.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• It’s once again easily possible to close the Look And Feel preview window on systems using Qt 5.13 (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Fixed a recent regression that prevented documents located on remote servers from being opened using KIO’s command-line tools when the URL for the document contained a port number (Gleb Popov, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Plasma no longer attempts to auto-mount already-mounted devices under certain circumstances (Méven Car, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Comboboxes in QML-based software now close their open pop-ups when clicking on the combobox itself (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• Spinboxes in QML-based software now display text that’s anti-aliased correctly and looks good with a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• When dragging a rubber-band-selection in Dolphin, the selection box now goes away as expected after right-clicking (Jackson Reed McNeill, Dolphin 19.08.0)
• Okular’s page borders now look good in High DPI mode (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The spinning busy indicator animation now has arrows that point in the same direction as the rotation (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  
• Kate’s “switch input mode” keyboard shortcut is now bound to Ctrl+Alt+V by default, which makes it possible to use the standard Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut to paste text into Kate’s embedded terminal (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• When spectacle has minimized itself during a timed screenshot, if you un-minimize it, the “Take a new Screenshot” button will have turned into a cancel button, which displays an inline progress bar showing how much time is left before the screenshot is taken (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0):
  

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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

After a somewhat light week, we’ve back with week 79 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and there’s a ton of cool stuff for you!

New Features

• The popular Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin can now pull images from Unsplash.com (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps like KDevelop can now insert a non-indented newline with the ctrl + enter/return keystroke (Ahmad Samir, KDE Frameworks 5.60)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The kstart5 command (e.g. kstart5 dolphin) now works on Wayland (Igor Kovalenko, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• The ubiquitous translucent blur effect no longer looks too dark with certain Intel graphics hardware (Fredrik Höglund, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• The System Settings Fonts page’s “Force Fonts DPI” setting now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Eliminated screen flickering at boot-up when using high DPI scaling (Aleix pol Gonzales, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The “Go to line” feature in kate and other text editors that use the KTextEditor framework once again always centers the zoomed-to line, even if it’s at the end of the document (Christoph Cullman, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• The “collapse all” icons used in many apps now correctly change their colors when using a dark theme (Natsumi Higa, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• Gwenview now correctly loads and displays files located on remote locations accessed using KIO (Tom Moebert, Gwenview 19.08.0)
• Fixed an issue causing Konsole to randomly scroll down at times, especially for i3 users (Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Konsole no longer eats the shift+backtab keystroke, so for example it’s once again possible to see history when using default zsh keybindings (and you can fix it for yourself right now by removing the Shift+Tab shortcut for “Next View Container” in Settings → Configure shortcuts) (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Kate’s “Quick Open” feature once again sorts items by recency of use and pre-selects the top item (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 19.08.0)
• Kate’s “recent documents” feature now works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settingsnow works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settings (Ahmad Samir, Kate 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• On Wayland, the user-configured keyboard repeat rate is now respected (Sam Edwards, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• When a mounted device is ejected using the Device Notifier, the message telling you it’s safe to unplug an unmounted device now remains visible for a little while instead of immediately disappearing (Stefan Brüns, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When there are no speakers or other audio output devices, Plasma now represents this by actually telling you that instead of creating a fake “Dummy output” device that can’t be interacted with (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Discover’s “Updates are available” notification is now persistent for greater visibility, and no longer clutters up your notification history after you’ve dismissed it or installed the updates (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• It’s now possible to set a global keyboard shortcut to turn Night Color on or off (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Konsole’s settings window has received a user interface overhaul, and now follows the common FormLayout style (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0):
  
• Spectacle’s “on click” trigger now works on Wayland (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0)
• Yakuake now offers blurred backgrounds, just like Konsole (Owen Chia, Yakuake 3.0.6)

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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

It’s time for week 78 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! This week I think people have been taking a breather following a super intense sprint, and some are even on vacation–myself included. So this week’s report is going to ba a bit light, but it’s still got a few cool goodies!

New Features

• It’s now possible to assign a global keyboard shortcut to turn off the screen (Martin Blumenstingl, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• In Konsole’s new tiled split mode, it’s now possible to re-arrange views by drag-and-drop! (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 19.08.0):
  
• The System Settings Energy Saving page now offers an option to hibernate after a period of sleep, when supported by the system (Alejandro Valdes, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When adding a folder to the Places panel that has been given a custom icon, its Places panel entry now correctly displays that custom icon (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• When deleting multiple files, the notification that tracks its progress now reports the total number of files correctly (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.60)

User Interface Improvements

• Added support for filtering out old Plasma 4 themes from the store.kde.org downloader (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• Dolphin’s sort order chooser now uses human-readable text (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 19.08.0):
  
• When taking a time-delayed screenshot, Spectacle now displays the remaining time before the screenshot is taken in its window title, which is visible in its Task Manager item (Felix Ernst, Spectacle 19.08.0)

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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.