Last month we had our annual Plasma sprint and as it’s been a while since I last blogged, let me show you some of the work we did and what’s coming up next.
A feature I teasered in my last blog post is media controls on the lock screen. The patch has now landed and will be part of the next Plasma release, 5.10, to be released end of May.
A feature that went missing in the transition from Plasma 4 to Plasma 5 was the ability to configure the icon widget. The upcoming Plasma 5.9 release is where this dialog will finally make its entry into the 5.x series.
In keeping with tradition of LTS aftermaths, the upcoming Plasma 5.9 release – the next feature release after our first Long Term Support Edition – will be packed with lots of goodies to help you get even more productive with Plasma!
Plasma’s mantra is to help you get stuff done faster, to not stand in your way. In past releases we added many small tools for you to achieve your tasks more quickly and spend less time fiddling with the desktop environment.
With Plasma 5.8 LTS out the door it’s time to look ahead at future Plasma releases. In our first long term support release we introduced “modifier only shortcuts” that allow you to open the application launcher with just the Meta key. Judging from feedback on the Internet this is one of the best features introduced in all of KDE’s history ;) I was quite surprised to find that the global menu is a close second.
KDE is turning 20, let’s celebrate!
Date: Friday, 14 October 2016 (the actual birthday!)
Time: 19:00
Place: Der Vogelbräu, Kapellenstraße 50, 76131 Karlsruhe
Who: You! And fellow KDE developers and users
What we’re going to do: Have a few delicious unfiltered beers, a delicious dinner, talk, have fun, …
Please ping me and/or add yourself to the Wiki page, if you’re around and planning to come (contact info can be found in the Impressum, or tell kbroulik in #plasma on Freenode), so I can extend the reservation, if needed.
In a couple of days Akademy will start and it’s co-hosted with QtCon in Berlin. This will be a super exciting event bringing together not just KDE folks but also enthusiast people from Qt, FSFE, and VideoLAN.
I’ll be giving a talk on what it’s like to use Qt to compete on the mobile app development market. See you all soon!
Plasma 5.8 will be our first long term support release of Plasma 5 and together with Qt 5.6 also being an LTS release this makes for a rock-solid combo. Let’s have a look at some of the tweaks I did on the occasion.
I recently stumbled upon a feature request about the ability to drop files onto a task manager entry to have the associated application open them. You can pin applications to the task manager after all, so why would those launchers behave differently from other application icons?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WHx5J_W4fqo
When I arrived in beautiful Randa on Sunday, the week seemed like it would never end but it’s Saturday already and tomorrow I’ll be leaving again.
It’s been an extremely productive week – in the few days since my last blog post I managed to fix a tremendous amount of bugs and added lots of new features and improvements throughout the workspace.
For the first time I managed to go to Randa, a beautiful quiet village in the Swiss Alps. Here at Randa we’re currently having a week of intense hacking sessions and cross-platform porting and planning efforts.