This week a lot of people made a lot of fixes and improvements to a lot of small-to-medium yet longstanding issues. I challenge any reader to read through the whole post and not find any instances of things that had been annoying them being fixed this week!

New Features

Skanpage now lets you customize its keyboard shortcuts (Someone going by the pseudonym “John Doe”, Skanpage 23.08. Link)

Kate now includes a QML language server option when using Qt 6 (Magnus Groß, Kate 23.08. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview now only inhibits sleep and screen locking during a slideshow while the app is in the foreground (Nikita Karpei, Gwenview 23.04. Link)

Star rating widgets in Elisa are now focusable and usable with the keyboard (Ivan Tkachenko, Elisa 23.08. Link)

KDialog dialogs no longer append ” – KDialog” to their window titles when showing a custom user-provided title (me: Nate Graham, KDialog 23.08. Link)

Energy usage graphs in Info Center are now a bit more readable when using a dark color scheme (Prajna Sariputra, Plasma 5.27.4. Link):

Discover no longer sends notifications for available updates when it’s already running (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Discover now provides better feedback in the main window when asked to delete user data for no-longer-installed Flatpak apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In Info Center, page footers have now been moved to the header area for a more streamlined appearance (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):

Notifications sent by Flatpak apps no longer play a sound by default (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.105. Link)

The portal-based app chooser window can now additionally match apps based on their generic names and the filename extensions and mimetypes they support (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link):

In various Kirigami-based apps, menus with mutually exclusive items now show the correct control–a radio button rather than a checkbox (Ivan Tkachenko, Elisa 23.04 and Frameworks 5.105. Link 1 and link 2):

Installed Flatpak apps from Flathub now respect the Breeze icon theme (Alois Wohlschlager, Frameworks 5.105. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Fixed the common and infamous crash in Gwenview when quickly rotating an image multiple times in a row (Nikita Karpei, Gwenview 23.04. Link)

Pressing the PrintScreen key to take a new screenshot while Spectacle’s main window is already running now works again (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.04. Link)

When browsing files on an Android devices using the mtp: protocol, it’s now possible to modify files on the device (Harald Sitter, kio-extras 23.08. Link)

Fixed a common source of KWin crashes in the Plasma Wayland session when certain external screens turn off on their own after being disabled and re-enabled by something (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Fixed a source of kded5 crashes when switching screens (Luca Bacci, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Discover is now massively faster and more responsive when a lot of system updates are available (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

When a GTK headerbar app themed with the Breeze GTK theme is maximized, the top-right-most pixel in the screen now triggers its close button (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the scroll speed setting now works again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, switching global themes now immediately updates the colors of running GTK apps, without the need to restart them (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

The Baloo file indexing service will no longer pointlessly try to index files in Python virtualenv folders (Ayush Mishra, Frameworks 5.105. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 12 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 13 last week). Current list of bugs
• 48 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 49 last week). Current list of bugs
• 101 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Chromium now supports the fractional-scale-v1 Wayland protocol, which will allow native Wayland apps based on Chromium (e.g. Chrome and Electron apps) to eventually have proper fractional scale support in the Plasma Wayland session (Thomas Anderson, Chromium 113. Link)

…And everything else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, consider working on known Plasma 5.27 regressions! You might also want to check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!

I have been extremely busy the last 2 weeks churning out KDE snaps! All of the have been tested and released on AMD64 and Arm64 architectures. If you run into any problems please file bugs @ http://bugs.kde.org and feel free to assign me. Thanks!

Krita Version 5.1.5

https://apps.kde.org/krita/

Parley Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/parley/

Kate Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/kate/

Okular Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/okular/

Haruna Version 0.10.3

https://apps.kde.org/haruna/

Granatier Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/granatier/

Gwenview Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/gwenview/

GCompris-qt Version 3.2

https://apps.kde.org/gcompris/

Bomber Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/bomber/

Falkon Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/falkon/

Ark Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/ark/

Blinken Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/blinken/

Bovo Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/bovo/

Artikulate Version 22.12.3

https://apps.kde.org/artikulate/

There are many more snaps coming your way!

As usual, I hate to ask, but if you can spare anything we appreciate it, even if they are just kind words, thank you!

https://gofund.me/d73342c3

Just out is isoimagewriter 0.9.1, an unstable alpha release of the ISO image disk writing tool for USB and flash drives.

This adds udisks2 support and drops KAuth support. It also adds Qt6 and KF6 support. However I don’t think Windows support or signature checking is working currently.

https://download.kde.org/unstable/isoimagewriter/0.9.1/isoimagewriter-0.9.1.tar.xz

https://download.kde.org/unstable/isoimagewriter/0.9.1/isoimagewriter-0.9.1.tar.xz.sig

Signed with my key https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

pub   dsa1024 2001-10-09 [SC]
      13C1 6D03 EDE7 2851 4473  AA73 A506 E6D4 DD4D 5088
uid           [ultimate] Jonathan Riddell <jriddell@ubuntu.com>
uid           [ultimate] Jonathan Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
sub   elg1024 2001-10-09 [E]

• Full changelog
• unistd.h does not appear to be needed and breaks windows build
• switch to QRegularExpression API for Qt 6 happyness
• remove build warnings
• Remove old code and debugging
• Bump version number Remove use of KAuth now we use udisks2 on Linux
• Remove KAuth use now that we use UDisks2
• update copyright
• do not use O_DIRECT which makes linux stop using my insecure buffer, try O_EXCL instead which stops block devices being used by multiple apps
• try some debugging but write not working so meh what is going on
• attempt to open device with udisks but it does not work
• port physicaldevice to udisks2
• link to qdbus and use udisks2 to get devices
• Add FreeBSD Qt6 CI support
• don’t duplicate search Auth
• Search kf<version>
• Window doesn’t have it
• We need kauth lib
• Make it compile against last kf6
• Qgpgme has never been required, restore the status quo so the build on Windows can proceed
• Show all headers in qtc6
• Add support for QGpgmeQt6
• adapt to in tree i18n
• Use ecm_set_disabled_deprecation_versions
• Add clickable IsoLineEdit to open file dialog
• Let craft embed the manifest
• CMakeLists.txt if condition is identical to elseif condition
• .gitignore sync with .gitignore from frameworks/kconfig
• Remove explicit use of ECM_KDE_MODULE_DIR, is part of ECM_MODULE_PATH
• Allow compilation on FreeBSD
• Add Qt6 CI
• Port from QRegExp to QRegularExpression
• Port away from deprecated install dirs
• Also adapt nativeEventFilter signatures for Windows and Mac
• Fix some qt6 compile error
• Adapt build system for building against qt6
• Add missing headers
• Add content rating tag
• allow kauth to be optional on linux with cmake -DUSE_KAUTH=off
• set app version and update copyright

Welcome to KDAB News, the monthly update for developers working with Qt, C++ and 3D technologies.

In this edition, we have:

0:00 Intro
0:33 Calls for Speakers
1:18 Interview with KDE's Adam Szopa about KDE Akademy
5:39 Embedded World 2023 Recap
7:31 Tip of the month - qt6.natvis
8:26 Announcements

**

Here you find all the links mentioned in the news:

Calls for Speakers

Qt Desktop Days

https://www.qtdesktopdays.com/

Qt World Summit

https://www.qt.io/blog/call-for-presentations-qtworldsummit-2023?utm_content=242245710&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-64366556

KDE Akademy

https://akademy.kde.org/2023/cfp/

Embedded World 2023 Recap

Demo Videos Playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6CJYn40gN6jTCGzFHL7HmH5K6mC5t0u6

Four-part Whitepaper on Designing Your First Embedded Linux Device

https://www.kdab.com/publications/embeddedlinux/

Tip of the Month

Qt 6 Debugging in Visual Studio and VS Code - qt6.navis

https://www.kdab.com/debug-qt-in-vs-and-vsc/

Announcements

ACCU Conference

https://www.accuconference.org/

Italian C++ Conference

https://italiancpp.org/

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-13.

The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained | snarfed.org

Tags: tech, fediverse, twitter

Twitter continues its slow death… That likely explains why the Mastodon to Twitter bridge I’m using has become so unreliable. I’ll just keep ignoring it I guess.

https://snarfed.org/the-twitter-api-is-now-effectively-unmaintained

Cerebras-GPT: A Family of Open, Compute-efficient, Large Language Models - Cerebras

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss

Clearly aims to demonstrate the superiority of their specialized hardware for training. That said it’s nice to have proper open models available (architecture, training data, weights… it’s all in the open).

https://www.cerebras.net/blog/cerebras-gpt-a-family-of-open-compute-efficient-large-language-models/

What is the origin of model-view-controller? - Quora

Tags: tech, architecture, design, history

Nice historical perspective from Alan Kay about the MVC architecture pattern.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-model-view-controller

Biscuit authorization

Tags: tech, cryptography, security

This looks like an interesting new authorization scheme.

https://www.biscuitsec.org/

Making Python 100x faster with less than 100 lines of Rust

Tags: tech, rust, python, profiling, performance

Nice walk through for a use of PyO3 to make some Python code much faster. Nice to see how useful py-spy turn out to be in such scenarii as well.

https://ohadravid.github.io/posts/2023-03-rusty-python/

Make your own Optionals

Tags: tech, programming, java, type-systems

There are nice mechanism in the Java type system nowadays to no rely on Optional all the time. This is a good reminder of the main alternative.

https://mccue.dev/pages/3-28-23-custom-optional

The Ambiguous Zone - Ben Northrop

Tags: tech, team, craftsmanship, organization

We might start in a software career attracted by the “perfection of the machines” (already debatable) but indeed to make anything meaningful we need to interact with other people. I often say it but I’ll say it again: it is a team sport.

https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2023/the-ambiguous-zone.php

Why Engineers Need To Write - by Ryan Peterman

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, writing, remote-working

Indeed, this is the most important skill we need next to coding. Especially in a remote work culture.

https://www.developing.dev/p/why-engineers-need-to-write

The Definition of Senior: A Look at the expectations for Software Engineers

Tags: tech, career, management, leadership, engineering

Nice (even though a bit long) explanation of the skills needed for a senior software engineers. Definitely a bunch of good advises in there.

https://loige.co/the-senior-dev/

Incompetent but Nice - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: management

Note it’s not about impostor syndrome, I guess lots of us think we’re in this category, that doesn’t make it real.

Anyway, from the management point of view this is indeed a baffling situation when you encounter someone like this. What to do? Definitely not always easy, sometimes induced by the organization as well so it would be too easy to blame on the person alone. We need to pay more attention to those and there’s clearly no magical recipe to handle them.

https://jacobian.org/2023/mar/28/incompetent-but-nice/

The age of average — Alex Murrell

Tags: culture, architecture, design

This is indeed a phenomenon which I find odd. Everywhere you look, culture seems like it became homogeneous… I don’t like this much, but indeed it means it’s easy to be distinctive if you want to.

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Tags: science, physics, bike

Once again an excellent deep dive… We’re getting into the physics of biking, and there are some surprises along the way! In any case this is fascinating all the thinking which went into such an object, the wheels alone are a very clever system.

https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman

Tags: culture, productivity

Good advice to fight against FOMO as far as reading material is concerned… just pluck things as they pass by. There’s so much content there’s likely redundancy anyway, hopefully. Yeah… I’m not cured.

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/river

Bye for now!

Since the last last summary post two month ago a lot has happened around KDE Itinerary again, ranging from supporting more travel document and ticket types to better guidance to the right spot on a train station platform.

New Features

Platform section highlighting

The train station map can now also highlight platform sections, next to the platform itself. Depending on the level of detail of the available information in the OSM map data, the train schedule, seat reservation and the vehicle layout we can use that to much more precisely indicate where on the platform you need to go.

Editor UI revamp

Following the reservation details pages, the reservation editor pages are now also being ported to the new Kirigami mobile form components. Besides a more unified look and improved mobile usability, more fields are now editable as well.

Journey live view

Integration of the onboard API work into Itinerary continued:

• The journey view can now display the current progress and got several layout and alignment fixes.
• The map view adapts the default zoom level based on the mode of transport.
• The settings page contains information about whether onboard API access is possible, and if not, why. This is particularly relevant on Android where specific permissions and system settings are required in order to monitor for Wi-Fi access point changes.

More onboard systems are supported as well, such as the “DB Zugportal” used on some German local trains, and two versions of Panasonic’s inflight entertainment system used by a number of airlines.

Events

KDE Itinerary was presented at FOSDEM in early February (talk, blog post) and FOSSGIS-Konferenz in mid March (talk, blog post). It was also featured in a session about structured email on Tuesday at the IETF meeting in Yokohama.

Upcoming events in the KDE community such as the KDE PIM sprint starting today, Linux App Summit and of course KDE Akademy (or rather their corresponding travel bookings) have also resulted in a number of fixes already.

By copy/pasting or drag/dropping the above link to Akademy into Itinerary you automatically get Akademy added to your travel plan btw :)

Infrastructure Work

More train ticket barcode formats

The Railways and Open Transport track at FOSDEM resulted in a bunch of pointers and material for supporting additional railway ticket types.

This includes the ERA ELB format used by e.g. Eurostar, the RSP-6 tickets used in the UK (thanks to the research published here), and thanks to hints from SBB themselves, also finally support for Swiss domestic railway tickets.

Map data geometry reassembly

The geometry reassembly process that happens as part of loading OSM raw data tiles when opening a train station or airport map has been significantly optimized, now running 12x faster, which makes opening the maps noticeably quicker.

More details about this can be found in the report about the OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe.

Coverage area tooling

There’s ongoing work on improving the tools to maintain coverage area GeoJSON polygons in the Transport API Repository. This is the data KPublicTransport uses to decide which service to query for journey information.

This work was motivated by Itinerary suggesting totally absurd connections between the major railway stations in Paris, due to querying a service only covering long-distance trains in France and thus missing the direct Metro or RER connections. This works correctly now.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• New extractors for Aegean Air, National Express, Taiwan High Speed Rail (台灣高鐵), Octorate, ticket.io and whyline.
• Improved extractors for Accor, Amadeus, availpro, BlaBlaCar, FlixBus, GWR, Indico, Ouigo and SNCF.
• Various fixes for matching and merging hotel and train reservations, as well as program membership cards.
• Improved detection of times specified as text in Apple Wallet pass files.
• Also consider JPEG images and images in multipart/related MIME structures when searching for barcodes.

Public transport data

• Fix OpenJourneyPlanner requests to be compliant with stricter checks in the Swiss OJP instance.
• Adapt to changes in the DB coach layout API.
• Add basic sanity checking for received onboard journeys.
• Deal with TGV brand or vanity names in line name comparison.

Indoor map

• Fix building level distribution for buildings having an underground start level.
• Fix localized tag lookups missing values in some cases.
• Show also indoor doors, not just entrance/exit doors.
• Handle daylight saving time transitions in the graphical opening hours display.

Itinerary app

• Weather forecasts are now also available when only multi-day event or hotel reservations at a different location are available, but not the transport to and from there.
• The weather details page now shows the location the forecast refers to.
• Improved matching of train tickets to results from online queries. This fixes some cases where no realtime data was shown for train connections.
• Ignore expired program memberships when looking for one matching a ticket. This results in the right membership card being found in more cases.
• Better default zoom levels for the favorite location and location editor maps.
• Fix timezone information sometimes not being shown for times specified in UTC.
• Don’t allow to select alternative journeys with a canceled section.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, and there are plenty of other things that can be done without traveling as well. The KDE Itinerary workboard or the more specialized indoor map workboard show what’s on the todo list, and are a good place for collecting new ideas. For questions and suggestions, please feel free to join us on the KDE PIM mailing list or in the #kontact channel on Matrix.

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 10!

Another month in the year, another collection of bugfixes and features I contributed to KDE!

Documentation Improvements

Something I want to improve for KDE Frameworks 6 is the API documentation, it’s pretty bad sometimes:

For plasma-framework, we started marking private QML types as internal. I’m in the process of manually fixing up the custom QQuickItem types in plasma-framework too, although I haven’t gotten around to opening up a merge request for that.

I opened a doxyqml¹ merge request to make it’s output more useful, by automatically adding import statement hints to the page:

Plasma 6 Porting

Early this month, I ended up porting most of our applets to Plasma 6! The current hitlist is:

• Sticky Notes
• Binary Clock
• Color Picker
• Fuzzy Clock
• Web Browser
• Konsole Profiles
• Media Frame
• Quick Launch
• Quick Share
• Timer
• Input Method
• Activity Manager
• Kicker

The two I’m still working on and need further testing and reviewing:

• Comic
• Kate Sessions
• Disk Quota (if you have disk quotas, please help me test this one!)

I also fixed activity switching, and fixed KRunner’s broken layout.

For those who are building Plasma 6 for the first time, extragear modules are now built by default!

PlasmaTube

I started using PlasmaTube which is KDE’s Youtube Client, to replace FreeTube. I started by cleaning up and overhauling the account management, so it flows better.

I also made the info chips non-interactable, fixed the spacing on video grid text, added more loading placeholders and stop desktop users from being able to drag the video page.

Ruqola

Because of $work, I discovered that we have a Rocket.chat client! I miss being able to quickly switch my presence via the tray icon, so that’s the first thing I opened a merge request for.

Dr. Konqi

Someone pointed out that the margins in the bug reporting wizard was terrible, so I started a redesign of the whole UI trying to update it to look similar to our modern applications:

Tokodon

In preparation for the 23.04 gear release, I added a slew of new features and bugfixes!

• The Status Composer is now automatically focused, and you can press CTRL+Enter or CTRL+Return to submit.
• You can now check, allow and deny follow requests.
• When replying to a post, the post now shows up inline in the composer!

• There are now way more notification filter types, not just “All” and “Mentions”.

And of course, there are of course many bugfixes:

• Account strings that are just “@” are now detected and handled properly, so it doesn’t get stuck.
• When searching, it’s clearer for slower connections that the list is temporarily empty because it’s loading.
• Don’t allow users to edit the visibility of existing posts, which doesn’t work.

As a treat for people who manage popular accounts - like our great KDE and Krita promo teams - I have a work-in-progress merge request to allow you to group notifications! I expect to find time next month to finish and polish this feature, but no promises yet.

Miscellaneous

• Finished Nate’s work on hiding separators when the kickoff is sorted alphabetically, this will land in 5.27!
• Added a unit test to Kalendar.

We continued the port to Qt6, prepared the 23.04 release and attended SCaLE in California

We have been busy these past two months!

The last version of Plasma 5 was released in February, and so development work has shifted toward Plasma 6. This involves porting from Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6. As a result, development is quite chaotic right now, but we are hard at work!

There is no set timeline for when the first version of Plasma 6 will come out, but it is expected to be within a year.

For applications, they are now part of the regular KDE Gear releases and will have a release next month (KDE Gear 23.04).

In other news, we (and the rest of KDE) have a new forum! General discussion and support can now take place there, which will provide an alternative to the current matrix room and mailing list.

Devin also attended SCaLE 20x in California, and was able to demo a bunch of devices running Plasma Mobile!

Plasma

Refactoring and major changes are being done in order to improve the architecture of the shell for Plasma 6. A lot of the work is not particularly visual, so please enjoy Konqi & Katie:

The plasma-mobile repository was ported to KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt 6, which now starts! (Yari Polla, Devin Lin, Nicolas Fella, and many more, Plasma 6. Link)

The brightness slider in the action drawer was reworked to be much smoother for user interaction, and not jump around when sliding fast. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

A new system process now manages Plasma Mobile specific configurations, so that KWin configuration does not need to be installed on the system, causing issues with a co-existing Plasma Desktop install. This will largely remove the need for the plasma-phone-settings repository. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

Window decorations now are turned on when a window is moved to an external display, and is no longer automatically fullscreen. This is the first step toward convergence support. (Plata Hill, Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

The task switcher was rewritten and ported to be a KWin effect, similar to Overview on desktop. This offloads the rendering of task previews to KWin rather than plasmashell, which should improve the speed at which they load. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

Mobile related settings modules were all imported into the plasma-mobile repository in order to centralize and ensure they are well-maintained. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link 1, Link 2)

The audio overlay (when pressing audio buttons) was partially rewritten and improved. The speed at which it opens from audio events should be much improved. Sound feedback when changing audio volume has been removed, which appears to have been a cause of shell crashes. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

From user feedback, the direction of the placeholder arrow on the Halcyon homescreen was reversed since it could be interpreted the wrong way. (Devin Lin, Plasma 5.27.1, Link)

The screen rotation quicksetting now hides if screen rotation is not available on the system. (Luca Weiss, Plasma 6, Link)

A quicksetting was added to manage network hotspots. (Yari Polla, Plasma 6, Link 1, Link 2)

The task switcher now can be opened if there are no applications running. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

Quicksettings can now be individually disabled and enabled from the settings. (Yari Polla, Plasma 6, Link)

The hotspot settings module was ported to modern design components. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

Keyboard navigation was added to the Halcyon homescreen. (Yari Polla, Plasma 6, Link)

Keyboard navigation was added to the search component on the homescreen. (Yari Polla, Plasma 6, Link)

Internally, the mobile shell component library was refactored and split into smaller plugins, so that is much lighter to import. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link 1, Link 2, Link 3)

A mobile shell specific DBus API was added in order to facilitate communication between components. (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

The homescreen now properly animates when the screen is unlocked (Devin Lin, Plasma 6, Link)

And countless other bug fixes were made, too many to list here...

Camera

There have been many developments in the broader Linux community regarding cameras!

There is currently no ongoing work by any community members on this topic. If you are interested, this could be something that you could contribute to!

Spacebar (SMS Client)

Using Spacebar with a proxy was fixed. (Michael Lang, Link)

Plasma Dialer

Notifications for missed calls have been implemented. (Marco Mattiolo, Link)

AudioTube (YouTube Music client)

Since the last update, we received a lot of help from our SoK student Theophile Gilgien!

The player was redesigned to display the play queue in a sidebar or a bottom drawer (on mobile) (Mathis Brüchert)

Audiotube received a new Icon (Mathis Brüchert)

Fixes for mobile usability including a new bottom drawer component and overlay buttons to play and shuffle playlists, albums, etc. (Mathis Brüchert)

Added about page using the Kirigami add-ons Mobile Forms (Jonah Brüchert, Mathis Brüchert)

Search history entries can now be removed (Theophile Gilgien)

The playlist can now be cleared (Theophile Gilgien)

Fix some crashes (Jonah Brüchert)

You can now play your favorites and most played songs as a playlist (Theophile Gilgien)

Memory usage was reduced by a lot (Jonah Brüchert)

Songs can now be shared from within AudioTube (Mathis Brüchert)

Keyboard navigation was improved in the player and the search (Theophile Gilgien, Mathis Brüchert)

You can now create your own playlists (Jonah Brüchert, Mathis Brüchert)

Audiotube finally received MPRIS integration (Theophile Gilgien)

The Buttons in the player now display tooltips (Theophile Gilgien)

Plasma Phonebook

The add contact page and the contact details now utilize mobile forms (Mathis Brüchert)

A new design for the overlay action buttons was introduced (Mathis Brüchert)

The search bar is now displayed in the application header instead of below (Mathis Brüchert)

Overflow actions are now displayed in a more mobile friendly bottom drawer (Mathis Brüchert)

Arianna (eBook reader)

Arianna now has settings (Šimon Rataj. Arianna 1.0, Link) and they use the new MobileForm components (Carl Schwan, Arianna 1.0, Link)

Arianna now compiles with Qt6 and Windows (Carl Schwan. Arianna 1.0, Link 1, Link 2)

Prevent excessive stacking of pages (Šimon Rataj. Arianna 1.0, Link)

Fix adding new files to the library repeatedly (Šimon Rataj. Arianna 1.0, Link)

You can now open a file directly with Arianna from a file manager or from the CLI (Carl Schwan. Arianna 1.0, Link)

And generally a lot of cleanup of the code in preparation of the first release.

Tokodon (Mastodon client)

You can now configure a proxy, before logging into your Mastodon account. (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

Tokodon now can handle web+ap:// links referencing a ActivityPub resources. (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

Tokodon message composer now has a language selector where you can select which language the message is written (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

Tokodon message composer will preview the message you are replying to (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

Tokodon notifications can now be filtered by various predefined filters (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

Tokodon now can send polls! (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

On Mobile, Tokodon will now use a separate page for searching (Carl Schwan, Tokodon 24.04.0, Link) and will generally better communicate the current search status (e.g. currently loading, no result found, etc.) (Carl Schwan, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

The error handling in case of connection issues or other server side errors is now better indicated to the user (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

Tokodon now handles follow requests. All incoming follow requests are now displayed on a special page, so that you can accept or deny them. (Joshua Goins, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

The video player introduced in the last update, got some video improvments. (Shantanu Tushar, Tokodon 23.04.0, Link)

NeoChat (Matrix client)

States events now get folded automatically to provide a more compact layout (James Graham, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

Editing messages is now inline. (James Graham, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

We added a new command /knock <room-id> to send a knock event to a room. (Shooting Star, 23.04.0, Link)

Fixed Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn shortcut for room switching (Kevin Wolf, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

Keyboard navigation was overhauled (Kevin Wolf, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

A warning is now shown when a file is too large to download (Tobias Fella, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

Messages that are currently being sent are now marked as such (Tobias Fella, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

The notification count is now properly refreshed when the unread stats change (Joshua Goins, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

The hamburger menu was replaced by a simpler menu which works better when collapsing the room list. (James Graham, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

When creating a room, the room will also be automatically opened (Tobias Fella, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

NeoChat now has more video controls. (James Graham, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

We now close the login window after the account is loaded (Tobias Fella, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

It's now possible to copy an image to the clipboard (Alessio Mattiazzi, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

NeoChat doesn't open the virtual keyboard on mobile anymore when switching rooms (Carl Schwan, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

NeoChat settings on mobile can now be closed without closing the entire app (Carl Schwan, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

There are now settings that allow you to disable the URL preview globally or at the room level (James Graham, NeoChat 23.08.0, Link)

We improved the text handling and added tests for it, making composing and editing messages much more reliable. (James Graham, NeoChat 23.04.0, Link)

We are now handling map events (Tobias Fella, NeoChat 23.08.0, Link)

We added a quick formatting menu in the chatbar when selecting text (James Graham, NeoChat 23.08.0, Link)

We added a context menu to the account switcher (James Graham, NeoChat 23.08.0, Link)

PlasmaTube (YouTube client)

Thumbnails are now rounded (Mathis Brüchert, PlasmaTube 23.04.0, Link)

The media player was completely redesigned (Mathis Brüchert, PlasmaTube 23.04.0, Link)

The trending and search page now have loading placeholders (Joshua Goins, PlasmaTube 23.04.0, Link)

We rewrote the login flow and account management. (Joshua Goins, PlasmaTube 23.08.0, Link)

Kalendar (calendar and contact book)

The contact editor and viewer was ported to MobileForm. (Carl Schwan, Kalendar 23.04.0, Link)

We added multiple new fields to the contact editor. The Instant Messengers (Carl Schwan, Kalendar 23.04.0, Link), the blog field (Aakarsh MJ, Kalendar 23.08.0, Link) and the business information (Aakarsh MK, Kalendar 23.08.0, Link)

We fixed a few bugs where text field could be saved while being empty. (Laurent Montel, Kalendar 23.04.0, Link 1, Link 2)

We added many unit tests for the calendar utils (Joshua Goins, Kalendar 23.08.0, Link), for the addressmodel (Anant Verma, Kalendar 23.08.0, Link) and for the reminder model (Carl Schwan, Kalendar 23.08.0, Link)

Display a placeholder message in the command box when no search result is found (Vanshpreet S Kohli, Kalendar 23.08.0, Link)

Kalendar now supports setting reminders at custom times (Vanshpreet S Kohli, Kalendar 23.04.0, Link)

When creating an event, we don't require putting a leading '0' for hours anymore (Vanshpreet S Kohli, Kalendar 23.04.0, Link)

Fix various issue with the menubar being inconsistent in the contact view (Vanshpreet S Kohli, Kalendar 23.04.0, Link)

Kasts (Podcast player)

Kasts can now be closed to the system tray (Bart De Vries, Kasts 23.04.0, Link)

We added a way to search for episodes in Kasts (Bart De Vries, Kasts 23.04.0, Link)

It's now possible to customize playback speeds (Bart De Vries, Kasts 23.04.0, Link)

Fix issues with too many redirects when streaming episodes (Bart De Vries, Kasts 23.04.0, Link)

Kasts will now obey the global proxy settings (Bart De Vries, Kasts 23.08.0, Link)

Episodes can now be marked as favorite (Bart De Vries, Kasts 23.08.0, Link)

Contributing

Want to help with the development of Plasma Mobile? We are desperately looking for new contributors, beginners are always welcome!

Take Plasma Mobile for a spin! Check out the device support for each distribution and find the version which will work on your phone.

Even if you do not have a compatible phone or tablet, you can also help us out with application development, which can be easily done from a desktop!

View our documentation, and consider joining our Matrix channel, and let us know what you would like to work on!

Our issue tracker documentation also gives information on how and where to report issues.

Donate

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!