This week in Usability & Productivity: part 17

Here’s another big one, folks!

Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve stopped the weekly Discover posts. I’ve decided to centralize that information here, and so I’d like to highlight several weeks’ worth of awesome new features and improvements for Discover:

Discover

Discover now shows star ratings on lists and detail pages (Me, Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
Discover now displays app icons in conformance with the active icon theme, which also fixes the issue of Discover showing Nautilus’s icon for Dolphin in Debian-based distros (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
In Discover, when an app is available from multiple Flatpak repos, it’s now possible to choose and change which version is shown first by default (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
In Discover, apps are no longer sorted by reverse alphabetical order under certain circumstances (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Discover’s Flatpak transactions are now cancellable (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Discover no longer crashes when Flatpak transactions are canceled (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
When using Discover to perform system updates, unchecked items no longer ever become spontaneously re-checked when the “Update” button is clicked (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Discover now always displays the same number of updates on both the sidebar and on the updates page (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
Discover’s sort order chooser (added in 5.13.0) now shows what the current sort order is without having to click on it (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)

Lists in Discover (and all other Kirigami apps) now have vastly better scrolling performance (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.45)
List items on the Settings page in Discover (and all other Kirigami apps) now have a more appropriate desktop-specific UI for the hidden buttons: rather than demanding that you swipe or drag the item to the left, they appear on mouse hover (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.46):

In future posts, Discover improvements will be shown inline along with all the other changes.

Next up, here’s the week’s process on the Open/save dialog project:

Open/Save dialog project

When a file name is highlighted, the extension now remains unselected (Alex Nemeth)
The zoom slider now has a minimum size so it can’t become uselessly tiny when the window is small, and the zoom buttons disable themselves when the maximum or minimum zoom levels have been reached (Henrik Fehlauer)
The Places Panel no longer grows in width by 1px every time an open or save dialog is opened, and its width is now saved if you opt to hide it (Henrik Fehlauer)
The “Name” and “Filter” boxes are now perfectly aligned with the view above them (Henrik Fehlauer)
Inline previews are now smooth and pretty just like Dolphin’s (Alex Nemeth):

These improvements will land in KDE Frameworks 5.46.

And of course that’s not all; here’s the usual assortment of miscellaneous goodies:

New Features

Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode now has a magnifier effect to help you capture pixel-perfect screenshots (Tao Guo, KDE Applications 18.04.09):
Okular now supports intelligently changing the focus in editable forms to the “next” form field (Andre Heinecke, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Okular now supports form fields that become visible conditionally–e.g. only after another form field is filled in, or a warning is read and acknowledged (Andre Heinecke, KDE Applications 18.08.0)

Bugfixes

The device notifier no longer erroneously claims that it cannot mount a USB device that it’s in fact just mounted (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.46)
Custom login sounds now play as expected (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Baloo (the file indexing service) no longer stalls and consumes excessive CPU resources when the index database has become corrupted (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.46)

UI Polish & Improvement

When you drag a file or folder to Konsole, it always pastes the path into the terminal window instead of showing a menu of options (the old menu behavior can be brought back with Settings > Edit Current Profile > Mouse > Uncheck “Disable drag and drop menu for URLs and files”
Gwenview now remembers and restores the width of the sidebar (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Gwenview’s video player icons are now intelligible (Huon Imberger, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
Confirmation dialogs for file operations that are not undoable now emphasize this fact with bold text (Me, Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.46):
Confirmation dialogs for deleting or trashing single files now use a regular dialog rather than a list-style dialog:
Messages in Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode now indicate the available shortcuts more clearly, and respect the active color theme (Henrik Fehlauer, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
User pictures displayed in the User Manager and Kickoff (the systemwide application launcher) are now rendered more clearly and retain their aspect ratio if they’re not square (Kirill Tatunov, KDE Plasma 5.13):
K3B gained HiDPI support (Andrew Crouthamel, KDE Applications 18.04.1):

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This week in Usability & Productivity, part 16: new lock and login screens

Get ready for a Usability & Productivity avalanche! There’s so much to announce this week that I’m breaking it up into two posts! I’m super excited to announce that in addition to the normal stream of little quality-of-life improvements, a major and long-simmering change has landed: we’ve overhauled the lock and login screens to provide better usability and aesthetics, and more features!

The lock screen now displays the default Plasma wallpaper and behaves more like a screensaver: only the clock and date are displayed at first. Here’s how it looks with the new Plasma 5.13 wallpaper:

And after moving the mouse, typing on the keyboard, or tapping the touchscreen, the image is darkened and blurred, and the controls become visible:

Doesn’t this look really, really good!?

People who prefer less flashiness can set the background to a solid color, and the controls will not fade in and out–just like before. Those who want more bling can set a slideshow or an animated effect for the background, and it will be just like the attractive screensavers of yore!

Even cooler, if you don’t change the default settings, then every time you upgrade Plasma, the lock and login screens will automatically use the new wallpaper for that Plasma version.

We’ve also resolved a usability issue with the old version: light-colored or very busy backgrounds no longer obscure the text and user interface elements for either the login or lock screens because the background is blurred and darkened whenever they’re shown, and at other times the clock and date have a subtle drop shadow applied:

I pushed pretty hard for this redesign and did a bit of the work, but the overwhelming majority of it was done by Marco Martin, who deserves our praise and congratulations!

Users will be able to enjoy these incredibly beautiful and classy lock and login screens in KDE Plasma 5.13, which is slated for release in June.

I’ll note that this is a big change that’s just landed so we may tweak it a bit before the Plasma 5.13 release. The plasma wallpaper itself may be adjusted, and we might also decide to use a slightly different image by default. But for the most part, this is what Plasma 5.13 users are gonna see, and we think you’ll love it!

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.

But wait, there’s more… see it in part 2!

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 16: everything else

We weren’t done after implementing the new lock and login screens! Here’s this week’s process on the Open/save dialog project:

Open/Save dialog project

The dialogs now display previews for the same assortment of file types as Dolphin does (Alex Nemeth)
Grid Spacing in icons view has been tightened up to match Dolphin, allowing more to be shown in the window (Alex Nemeth)

These improvements will land in KDE Frameworks 5.46.

And of course that’s not all; here’s the usual assortment of miscellaneous goodies:

New Features

The System Monitor Plasmoid can now be configured with a custom update interval (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13)
Gwenview’s image resize dialog now lets you resize by percentage and has received a visual overhaul (Huon Imberger and Henrik Fehlauer, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
Gwenview now shows a count of the total number of images and videos, as well as the position of the currently-viewed one (Huon Imberger, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
In Kate (and other pieces of KDE software using the KTextEditor framework), single-clicking on a line number in the left gutter will select that line (Randy Kron, KDE Frameworks 5.46)

Bugfixes

Hardware power management (e.g. what happens when pushing the power button or closing the laptop lid) works again following a recent regression (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
Changing your user picture now correctly updates the image used in the Kickoff Application Launcher (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13)
Okular no longer saves files with the wrong permissions (Ranjan Pradhan, KDE Applications 18.04.1)
Dolphin window titles are now always correct after closing a split view (Robert Jennings, Dolphin 18.04.1)
When using the blur background behind a wallpaper, the blur is now rotated correctly when the image has a rotation tag (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)

UI Polish & Improvement

The Places Panel (in Dolphin, file pickers, Gwenview, etc) now has entries for Desktop and Downloads by default (Me, Nate Graham, in KDE Frameworks 5.46):

Dolphin’s context menu now shows the “Open With” and “Open In” entries on top where they are logically grouped together, and also shows the name and icon of the default app that will be used to open the selected file (Me, Nate Graham, in KDE Frameworks 5.45 and KDE Applications 18.08.0):
The Fonts page on System Settings now shows you a preview of the different sub-pixel anti-aliasing options (Julian Wolff, in KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
The Application Menu (Kicker) is now able to show longer app and document names (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Plasma 5.13.0
KDE authentication dialogs have gotten some much-needed polish: they now show better information when the Details button is clicked (Scott Harvey, KDE Plasma 5.13)
The desktop’s context menu now has more keyboard shortcuts (Kau Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13.0
Gwenview now displays an interpolated (smoothed and slightly blurry) version of the image up to 400% magnification–increased from the prior 200% threshold (Huon Imberger, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
When typing a username into the login window, the enter key now moves to the password field (Fabian Vogt, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)

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This week in Usability & Productivity, part 15

Let’s have some more Usability & Productivity!

I’ve initiated a big project: overhauling KDE Open & Save dialogs for greater usability and productivity. If you would like to follow along, here is the meta-task tracking the work: https://phabricator.kde.org/T8552

So far, we’ve:

Fixed column widths (Scott Harvey)
Added view mode buttons to the toolbar (Me, Nate Graham)
Made the dialog always save the view settings even when canceling or closing (Me, Nate Graham)

All of this work–and hopefully the rest of the “open/save panel improvement” work–will ship with KDE Frameworks 5.46.

(Also, what do people think of the above style for these bullet points instead of the typical one I’ve used below?)

As usual, there’s more! Here’s the other Usability & Productivity-related work from the past week:

New Features

Kate and other programs using the KTextEditor framework gained syntax highlighting for GDB files (KDE Phabricator revision D11902, implemented in KDE Frameworks 5.46, authored by Milian Wolff)
Konsole now supports more XTerm-style cursor shapes (KDE Bug 347323, implemented in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Ahmad Samir)

Bugfixes

Bold, italic, and underline effects now work again for Kate’s syntax highlighting modes (KDE Phabricator revision D12221, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.46, authored by Christoph Cullman)
Dolphin’s icon view grid spacing no longer changes unpredictably when previews are turned on or off, and has tighter spacing when previews are on and icons are large (KDE bug 393306, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.1, authored by me, Nate Graham):
Gwenview no longer crashes when zooming after reloading an SVG image (KDE bug 359736, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Peter Mühlenpfordt)
Gwenview’s “Failed to save” warning dialog no longer displays raw HTML in it (KDE bug 393170, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.04, authored by Peter Mühlenpfordt)
Okular no longer loses highlighted search results when a page is rotated (KDE bug 387282, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04, authored by Ahmad Osama)
The Media Frame widget’s mode chooser now displays the modes corrently even for languages where the words are very long (KDE bug 393232, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12, authored by Friedrich Kossebau)

UI Polish & Improvement

Changes to a Konsole profile’s keybingings are now immediately applied to that profile (KDE Phabricator revision D12255, improved in KDE Applications 18.08, authored by Ahmad Samir)
Plasma and Plasma widgets now all use the same color picker widget (KDE Phabricator revisions D12330 and D12318, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Friedrich Kossebau:
Gwenview now positions the viewport more intelligently after crop and resize operations (KDE Phabricator revisions D12167 and D12170, authored by Peter Mühlempfordt)
Gwenview no longer shows duplicate confirmation dialogs when overwriting an existing image (KDE Phabricator revision D12346, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.1, improved by Peter Mühlenpfordt)
The KDirOperator widget (commonly used for inline file browsers in apps like Kate, Kile, and RKWard, as well as open and save dialogs) now has a reload button in the context menu (KDE bug 199994, improved in KDE Frameworks 5.46, authored by me, Nate Graham)

Might seem a little light this week, but trust me, there’s a ton of stuff in progress right now. It may not quite be ready yet, but it will be awesome once it is!

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This week in Usability & Productivity, part 14

Time for your weekly dose of Usability & Productivity! We’ve got some good stuff today, including some nice improvements for the Open & Save dialogs–with a lot more on that front to come soon!

Additionally, another major bug worth highlighting has been fixed! Previously, image slideshows used for the desktop wallpaper or in a media frame widget would leak memory like crazy, eventually crashing the system. Veteran KDE developer David Edmundson traced this to a Qt bug and submitted a patch that’s been accepted! It’ll go into Qt 5.11 which hasn’t been released yet, so go bug your distros to backport the fix into their Qt 5.9.x or 5.10.x branches, as we plan to do for the upcoming Kubuntu 18.04 release. Soon KDE Plasma users will once again be able to use slideshow wallpapers without blowing up their computers!

But wait, there’s more…

New Features

When audio is set to switch to new sources that become active, this is now indicated with an on-screen display depicting the new device (KDE Phabricator revision D12083, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik):
You can (once again!) copy the text of the date and time from the Clock widget (KDE bug 355190, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Bernhard Schiffner))

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug that prevented removable devices from automounting correctly (KDE bugs 391706, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.5 and KDE Frameworks 5.46, authored by Stefan Brüns)
Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to crash when switching the desktop from Folder View to Desktop View (KDE bug 391642, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by David Edmundson)
Fixed a bug that could cause Konsole to not copy long text correctly under certain circumstances (KDE bug 352616, fixed in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Mariusz Glebocki)
Fixed a bug that could cause Gwenview to not update an image’s thumbnail in the Thumbnail bar after rotating it (KDE bug D11714, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Peter Mühlenpfordt)
Fixed a bug in Gwenview that could cause an image’s thumbnail to not update properly after undoing a crop or rotate operation (KDE bug 356998, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Peter Mühlenpfordt)
Fixed a bug in Gwenview that could cause changed shortcuts to not take effect until after the program was restarted (KDE bug 389331, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Peter Mühlenpfordt)
Fixed a bug causing Baloo (KDE’s file indexing service) to incorrectly
handle complex boolean queries (KDE bug 392620, fixed in KDE Frameworks 5.46, authored by Stefan Brüns)

UI Polish & Improvement

Columns in KDE Open & Save dialogs are now always sized correctly, and resize appropriately as the window is resized (KDE bugs 354388, 338502, 196508, 177743, and 96638, improved in KDE Frameworks 5.46, authored by Scott Harvey):
The Open dialog now opens in the correct location when using a file located on a remote filesystem (KDE bug 374913, improved in KDE Plasma 5.12.5, authored by Alex Richardson)
A consistent (and better) icon is now used for “configure” everywhere (KDE Phabricator revision D12034, improved in KDE Frameworks 5.46, authored by me, Nate Graham):
The login screen now uses the same icon as the Lock screen for the “find or log in as other user” feature (KDE bug 392830, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Scott Harvey)
Dolphin’s Information Panel can now optionally show condensed absolute dates rather than long relative dates – try right-clicking on it! (KDE bug 392352, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Gwenview now displays a better background for parts of images that are transparent, and lets the user configure more alternate backgrounds if desired (KDE Phabricator revision D11630, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Huon Imberger):
Gwenview now honors the chosen background color setting for SVG images (KDE bug D11629, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Huon Imberger)
Gwenview’s transition effect between images has been improved (KDE bug 373161, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Huon Imberger)
Dolphin’s “Open path” and “Open path in new folder” actions now scroll to and highlight the selected file (KDE bug 377510, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by me, Nate Graham)
Non-square icons can now be used for the Application Launcher’s button (KDE Phabricator revision D12161, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik):
🙂

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This week in Usability & Productivity, part 13

Another week in Usability & Productivity, another wish that I could make more announcements about all the cool stuff we have in progress! The wheels of software sometimes turn more slowly than we might wish, but in the end, the better result will be worth it. KDE’s patch review process is there to ensure that code quality is high as possible before making it in!

Nevertheless, we landed some great improvements this week, including a few long-standing requests. Come and see:

New Features

The volume of the program that’s playing media can now be adjusted by positioning the cursor over the Media Player widgets icon and scrolling (KDE bug 386588, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Radek Hušek)
Dolphin’s Information panel is now able to show Group membership information for files and folders (KDE bug 308002, implemented in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by me, Nate Graham):
New splash screens can now be easily downloaded and installed right from within System Settings (KDE bug 358839, implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Marco Martin)

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug causing Kate to open multiple empty windows after session restoration (KDE bug 360066, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Алексей Шилин (Aleksei Shilin))
Fixed a bug in Gwenview that made the left and right arrow keys not work for navigating between images after using the crop tool (KDE bug 321091, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Peter Mühlenpfordt)
Fixed a bug in Gwenview causing the window title to not update when a different images becomes selected in Comparison mode (KDE bug 314724, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Silas Lenz)
Fixed a bug causing the desktop Trash icon’s “Empty Trash” menu item to not update properly (KDE bug 392738, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.5, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik)
Fixed a bug that could cause Konsole to execute hidden code when copy-and-pasting from a maliciously-crafted piece of text in a web browser (KDE Phabricator revision D11859, fixed in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Martin T. H. Sandsmark)

UI Polish & Improvement

Dolphin’s “Image Size” column has been split into separate “Height” and “WIdth” columns, to enable proper sorting (KDE bug 374559, improved in Dolphin 18.08.0, authored by Julian Schraner)
Gwenview now displays the selection rectangle using a correct size for SVG images (KDE Phabricator revision D11796, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Huon Imberger)
Dolphin’s Information Panel now displays folder previews for folders that have been added to the Places panel (KDE bug 392621, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by me, Nate Graham)
Context menus for Desktop items and the Wallpaper now show the appropriate keyboard shortcuts that can be used to invoke them (KDE bug 392730, improved in KDE Plasma 5.12.5, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik)
Dolphin’s close-multiple-tabs confirmation dialog is now more explicit about what will happen when you click any of the buttons (KDE Phabricator revision FFFF, improved in Dolphin 18.08.0, authored by Elvis Angelaccio):

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This week in Usability & Productivity, part 12

Welcome to week 12 in Usability & Productivity! Despite all the awesome improvements I’m about to share, there are EVEN MORE that I wasn’t able to announce this week because they’re not quite done yet! But In the coming weeks, some very nice fixes and improvements are going to land. Without further ado…

New Features

Mouse settings now fully support using libinput as the backend (KDE bug 350688, Implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Roman Gilg):

Keep in mind that this this user interface is rough and will be substantially refined before Plasma 5.13 is released!
Hidden files on Windows partitions are now properly marked as hidden (and are no longer visible by default) when viewed in Dolphin (KDE bug 171537, implemented in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by Roman Inflianskas)

Bugfixes

Fixed a few bugs that could cause Spectacle’s Rectangular Region selection box to jump around (KDE Phabricator revisions D11598 and D11704, fixed in Spectacle 18.04.0, authored by Tao Guo)
Fixed a bug causing the Shift+Home/End keyboard shortcuts to not work while editing the name of a file or folder on the Desktop (KDE bug 392318, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik)
Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to lock up when an app updates its window’s title very rapidly (KDE bug 365317, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by David Edmundson)
Fixed a bug causing the weather widget’s BBC source to not fetch data after the BBC changed the URL on us (KDE Bug 392510, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Friedrich Kossebau)

UI Polish & Improvements

In Open/Save dialogs, the context menu’s “Show Containing Folder” action now highlights and scrolls to the selected files in the window that appears (KDE bug 392330, improved in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by me, Nate Graham)
Kdenlive icons now look good in HiDPI mode (KDE bug 390104, improved in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Andrew Crouthamel)
Improved the look of Task Manager tooltip previews (KDE bug 390457, improved in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by Fredrik Höglund):

Before and after
Made it slightly easier to figure out how to change the wallpaper by adding a wallpapery icon to the “Configure Desktop” menu items (KDE Phabricator revision D11253, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by me, Nate Graham):
Icons and text in Dolphin’s Places panel are now always perfectly aligned with one another with any font and size, including the common Noto Sans 11 (KDE bug 390771, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Scott Harvey)
Improved the appearance of the category and subcategory headers in System Settings (KDE bug 392340, improved in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by me, Nate Graham):
The logout screen’s buttons are now more readable against a dark background (KDE bug 382264, improved in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Radek Hušek):

Stay tuned, because this should get even better in the near future…

Every week, you can see the omissions being remedied and the papercuts being healed one by one. We’re on a mission to make KDE Plasma the best graphical desktop on planet Earth. There’s a lot of ground to make up, and we need your help! Climb on board and be a part of something truly magnificent.

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.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 11

Check out what KDE contributors have been up to this week in the world of Usability & Productivity! The KDE Applications 18.04 feature freeze happened this week, so there was a burst of energy to get in some last-minute new features for core KDE apps, among other welcome changes:

New features

Dolphin’s trash view now has a visible “Empty Trash” button (KDE bug 163306, implemented in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Roman Inflianskas):

Okular gained support for forms with read-only fields that update based on other fields (KDE Phabricator task T8097, implemented in KDE Applications 18.04.0 and poppler from git master, authored by Andres Heinecke)
Gwenview’s crop tool can now constrain the crop proportions to those of the current image (KDE bug 236970, implemented in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Huon Imberger)
Gwenview’s crop tool now allows the cropping proportions to be constrained to their current shape by pressing the shift or ctrl keys (KDE Phabricator revision D11380, implemented in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Huon Imberger)
Gaming controllers with batteries now appear in the Battery and Brightness plasmoid (KDE Phabricator revisions D11553 and D11331, implemented in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by Florian Dollinger)

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug that was causing KRunner to require two presses of the down arrow key to navigate to the list of search results (KDE bug 392197, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by me, Nate Graham)
Fixed a bug that could cause the Device Notifier plasmoid to display a confusing message about unmounting a device right after it had been mounted (KDE bug 391180, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.4, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik)
Fixed a bug that was causing different feedback options in the Launch Feedback System Settings page to not take effect when chosen (KDE bug 392050, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Scott Harvey)

UI polish and improvements

The SDDM login screen now has a more appropriate Breeze-style default avatar (KDE Phabricator revision D11057, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Phil Stefan):
Gwenview’s crop tool settings are now remembered after navigating away from the current image (KDE bugs 391757 and 392036, improved in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Huon Imberger)
Gwenview’s Recent Folders list now shows folder paths in a much more human-readable manner (KDE bug 383850, improved in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Henrik Fehlauer)
Dolphin no longer shows two redundant ways to open a folder in a new window (KDE bug 391997, fixed in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik)
KMenuEdit gained HiDPI support (KDE bug 390737, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Andrew Crouthamel):
Konsole’s “Edit Key Binding List” window now has a more reasonable default size (KDE Phabricator revision D11637, improved in Konsole 18.08.0, authored by Ahmad Samir):

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This week in Discover, part 11

This week we landed a significant visual improvement for Discover: the app lists have been re-implemented using a new “cards” style in Kirigami. This was a lovely collaboration between Marco Martin, Aleix Pol, and myself. And best of all, this pretty “cards”-style list is also available to other Kirigami apps!

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug that could cause Discover’s “active tasks” view to not show any progress (KDE bug 391760, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Aleix Pol)

UI polish & improvements

Discover’s list items look much prettier now (KDE Phabricator revisions D11316 and D11625, and commit 29a1228f67b8b65e866128df0d8aa85a72345f5b, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by Marco Martin Aleix Pol, and me, Nate Graham):
The Proceed dialog no longer shows a redundant close button in the corner (KDE Phabricator revision FFFF, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by me, Nate Graham):

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Guest post: The Importance of QA

Today we have a guest post from Buovjaga, our friendly local QA evangelist for LibreOffice, KDE, Inkscape, Firefox and Thunderbird. Without further ado, I’d like to present…

The Importance of QA

With this post I hope to convince you that a strong quality assurance team can do miraculous things for a free software project.

The spectrum of QA is wide, and reducing the skill requirements is particularly relevant for KDE’s onboarding initiative.

The critical phase of onboarding a new contributor is the first contact. Sometimes the new person does not know what they want to do. Often you do not have a clear picture of what skills they have. You need to act fast or they will lose interest and disappear! This is the moment where you should hand them snacks: a query of bugs that need to be confirmed or re-confirmed. This is the lowest threshold for them to step across and into being a contributor, because:

They do not need to learn version control
They do not need to learn the patch submission processes
They do not need to be wordsmiths
They do not need to know interface design or how to draw pretty pictures
They should not even need to know how to use the features they are testing, because a valid bug report includes clear steps on what to do!

QA is highly important in itself, but it is also a gateway drug. A simplified story of the evolution of a contributor might be as follows:

They work on something meaningful
They get familiar with the structure of the project
They discover their own potential and the multitude of things they can help with

Not only does this evolution flow naturally through the QA team, but the experienced members are in a unique position to speed it up. This is because QA in the course of its work typically has to ferret out information from all the other teams. This leads to QA

Knowing who the subject-matter experts are
Discovering weak points in the organisation
Helping the various teams stay in sync with each other

In this aspect QA is acting like neurotransmitters in the body of the project.

The most apparent beneficial effect of having a strong QA team is that the developers are not distracted by massive amounts of first-stage bug analysis.

Primitive development team working in the bug tracker without the luxury of a QA team

In QA, too many cooks do not spoil the broth. A large and diverse team is more effective than a small one when trying to keep up with a myriad of software and hardware configurations.
A large teams allows the freedom for members to level up their skills. The more experience on advanced triaging techniques the members have, the less work developers have to spend per bug fix.

There is a long road ahead for KDE to reach a healthy state regarding QA. Recruit contributors early and often. Aim for a feedback loop of recruiting, where even fresh contributors brainstorm to come up with ways to find new people.

I invite everyone to go through these articles and improve them:
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging/Identifying_duplicates
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Debugging/How_to_create_useful_crash_reports

I also recommend KDE to look into making it easy for QA to perform git bisects for pinpointing regressions. Perhaps this could be achieved by offering compressed repositories containing binary snapshots for every single commit in a project like LibreOffice does.