Author: Nate

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 28

Here’s another big week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative. We’re getting ready for the release of KDE Applications 18.08–the second of our three yearly Applications releases. As the numbers in the version suggest, it will be released in August of 2018, about a month from now. As such, there’s been a lot of focus on new features and polish for core KDE apps such as Dolphin, Gwenview, Konsole, and Spectacle. We’re also ramping up our work for KDE Plasma 5.14, which is scheduled for release in October.

To learn more about KDE’s software release schedule, check out https://community.kde.org/Schedules. To learn more about what we did last week, keep reading!

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Wanna be a part of this? Of course you do, because you want to make a difference, and you want to help make the world’s best free operating system even better. It’s more important than ever. So hop on over to https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved! There’s room for everyone, and you don’t even need to be a programmer! I’d never written a line of C++ or QML before getting started in the KDE community. You can do 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. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 27

Get ready for a humongous week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative! KDE developers and contributors squashed a truly impressive number of bugs this week, all the while adding features and polishing the user interface.

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

There are still more bugs I’d like to get fixed ASAP, though, including a number of high-profile regressions with the mouse and touchpad settings in Plasma 5.13. I hope very much that we can fix these soon. If anyone reading this feels like they could help out, please do so! We’re happy to lend a hand when first getting started as a KDE contributor. There are lots of other ways to get involved, too.

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. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 26

This was quite a bugfixy week in KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative, but we managed to squeeze in a cool new feature! See for yourself:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

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.

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. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usabilitity & Productivity, part 25

Hot on the heels of last week, we’ve got a ton more Usability and Productivity for you! Look at all this cool stuff:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

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.

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. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 24

After a light week, we’re now roaring back with a veritable avalanche of Usability and Productivity! Look at all this cool stuff:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

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.

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. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 23

Howdy folks! This has been a bit of a light week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative, probably because everyone’s basking in the warm glow of a well-received release: KDE Plasma 5.13 came out on Tuesday and is getting great reviews!

Don’t worry, we’ve got lots of great stuff queued up though.

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

  • The Libinput-backend Mouse and Touchpad System Settings pages received a visual and usability overhaul (Furkan Tokac, KDE Plasma 5.14):

  • Discover’s Updates page is now clearer about what version is being upgraded (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.14):
  • Scrollbars in Konsole are now overlay style and disappear entirely when the view isn’t scrollable, e.g. with a full-screen CLI program like top (Tomaz Canabrava and Alex Nemeth, 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.

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.

Become a patron Donate using Liberapay donate with PayPal

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 22

This has been another strong week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative! Quite a few longstanding bugs got fixed, among lots of other nice improvements. Look at all this cool stuff:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

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.

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.

Become a patron Donate using Liberapay donate with PayPal

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 21

Another week, another dose of Usability and Productivity in KDE land! We picked up a lot of great improvements to Discover, a much-requested change to allow Kate and Dolphin to be run with the root user account again, and quite a lot of important bugfixes. Take a look!

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

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.

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.

Become a patron Donate using Liberapay donate with PayPal

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

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

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.

Become a patron Donate using Liberapay donate with PayPal

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 19

This week we announced a beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.13 release, and so far the internet seems pretty excited about it. 🙂 But we’re nowhere near done, and here’s another week of Usability and Productivity enhancements to highlight:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

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.

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.

Become a patron Donate using Liberapay donate with PayPal