In recent weeks we have been working on transferring LabPlot’s documentation to a new format.
We decided to move the documentation from the DocBook and MediaWiki format to the Sphinx/reStrcutredText framework. In our perception Sphinx offers a user-friendly and flexible way to create and manage documentation. Easy math typing and code formatting also come along. Additionally, Sphinx supports basic syntax checks, and modern documentation practices, such as versioning and integration with various output formats like HTML, PDF and ePub.
The new user’s manual is available on a dedicated page: https://docs.labplot.org. Please check it out and let us know what you think.
The manual still needs to be supplemented with new content, so we encourage you to contribute to the documentation, e.g. by fixing and adding new sections, updating images, as collaborative efforts can lead to a more comprehensive resource for everyone. Please check the Git repository dedicated to the documentation to find more details on how to help make it better.
We are happy to announce Kdenlive 24.12. This release focuses on bug fixes, improved stability, and usability enhancements across the board. Numerous crashes and glitches have been addressed, including issues with audio capture, effect zones, high DPI display rendering, and subtitle editing. Proxies, rotoscoping, and project management workflows have been significantly refined, resolving lags, incorrect EXIF orientation handling, and archiving problems. We’ve managed to sneak in some little nifty features as well like the ability to resize multiple timeline items, Shift + Del shortcut to extract clips from the timeline, added actions to quickly add Marker/Guides in a specific category and mixes (same track transitions) can be 1 frame long.
Under the hood, we’ve dropped support for Qt5 and now require Qt6, alongside updated dependencies (MLT 7.28 and KF 6.3). This release comes with a lot of code cleanups and refactored Whisper settings. Optimized threading and memory management. Additionally, fail-safe measures have been taken to prevent invalid project profiles and script names.
Subtitles
We’ve added support for Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles, a widely used text-based format renowned for its flexibility in creating highly styled and customizable subtitles. ASS subtitles support advanced features such as font family, size, and color; text outlines and shadows; alignment and positioning; scaling and rotation; margins and spacing; and effects, including masking and other enhancements. This feature was developed by Chengkun Chen as part of Google Summer of Code (GSOC).
Subtitles
Subtitle Manager
The new subtitle manager is now integrated with style management and has been divided into four sections: Files, Layers and Content, Style, and Info, which correspond to the four main components of ASS subtitles.
Files – create, import and export subtitles
Layers and Content – create/remove subtitle tracks and apply styling
Styles – create and manage styles
Info – displays information about subtitles
Subtitle Style Editor
The new and powerful Subtitle Style Editor allows you to control all the styling capabilities of the ASS format.
Animated Subtitles
The ASS format supports three types of effects: Banner, where the text scrolls sideways across the screen; Scroll, where the text moves vertically; and Karaoke, where each word is highlighted in sync with the audio.
Currently, only the Banner and Scroll effects are accessible through the user interface, but additional styling, including Karaoke effects, can be applied using ASS tags.
Speech-to-Text
We’ve polished the Speech to Text features ensuring a smoother and more reliable experience. Seamless installation, GPU translation and threading issues have fixed. We’ve also resolved issues with the display of Vosk, Whisper and Seamless model folder sizes on Windows. Added the ability to update all virtual environment packages have updated to the latest version of Whisper. Lastly, the Whisper settings interface has been refactored.
Effects
With this version, we complete the final task of our fundraiser: builtin effects and a redesigned effects interface. Rendering of keyframe types like Bounce, Circular, and Exponential has been improved, alongside fixes for zone-based effects, rotoscoping lag, shape filter rendering, improved precision for time remapping, motion tracker models and prev/next seeking in monitor. It is also now possible to have single-frame mixes (same track transitions).
Interface redesign
The new Effect Stack redesign enhances usability with clearer organization of keyframeable and non-keyframeable parameters, improved layout consistency, more compact and clean. We’ve also added info buttons in effect headers for quick access to documentation.
Built-in Effects
To make your workflow much more fluid, the new effects panel gives direct access to effect parameters, allowing to quickly and easily adjust them. Currently built-in effects are Transform and Flip for video clips and Volume for audio clips. Built-in effects can be enabled/disabled in the settings.
New Effects
As usual there is always room for some eye candy, so we’ve added two color correction effects, HSL Primaries and HSL Range as well as GPS Effects (Images below displaying Distance, Altitude and Speed among many other values).
Other Highlights
Fix audio capture issues
Added Shift + Del shortcut to extract clip from timeline
Fix clip monitor history menu not showing up on audio clips
Fix spacer tool leaving a few frames after last clip
Implement resizing multiple timeline items
Fix Pexels Videos provider
Fix Alt+click to loop between clips using an effect in project monitor
Titler: ensure only plain text can be pasted
Titler: added support for tabulations
Add Actions to quickly add Marker/Guides in a specific category
All of the Maui repositories have the newly released branches and tags. You can get the sources right from the Maui group: https://invent.kde.org/maui
MauiKit 4 Frameworks & Apps
With the previous version released, MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps were ported over to Qt6, however, some regressions were introduced and those bugs have now been fixed with this new revision version.
Currently, there are over 10 frameworks, with two new ones recently introduced. They all, for the most part, have been fully documented, and although, the KDE doxygen agent has some minor issues when publishing some parts, you can find the documentation online at https://api.kde.org/mauikit/ (and if you find missing parts, confusing bits, or overall sections to improve – you can open a ticket at any of the framework repos and it shall be fixed shortly after)
A brief list of changes and fixes introduced to the frameworks are the following:
For MauiKit Controls
MauiKit is now no longer dependent on MauiKit-Style, so any other QQC2 style can be used with Maui Apps (other styles are not supported).
MauiKit fixes the toast area notifications. The toast notifications can now take multiple contextual actions.
MauiKit Demo app has been updated to showcase all the new control properties
New controls: TextField, Popup, DropDownIndicator,
MauiKit fixes the template delegates and the IconItem control
MauiKit fixes to the Page autohide toolbars
Update style and custom controls to use MauiKit Controls’ attached properties for level, status, title, etc.
Display keyboard shortcut info in the MenuItems
Update MauiKit Handy properties for isMobile, isTouch, and hasTransientTouchInput and fixes to the lasso selection on touch displays
Added more resize areas to the BaseWindow type
Check for system color scheme style changes and update accordingly. This works on other systems besides Plasma or Maui, such as Gnome or Android
The type AppsView has been renamed to SwipeView, and AppViewLoader to SwipeViewLoader
Update MauiKit-Style to support MauiKit Controls attached properties and respect the flat properties in buttons
Fixes to the MauiKit bug in the GridBrowser scrollbars policy
Fixes to the action buttons layout in Dialog and PopupPage controls
Refresh the icon when a system icon-theme change is detected – a workaround for Plasma is used and for other systems the default Qt API
For the MauiKit Frameworks
FileBrowsing fixes bugs with the Tagging components
Fixes to the models using dates. Due to a bug in Qt getting a file date time is too slow unless the UTC timezone is specified
Update FileBrowsing controls to use the latest Mauikit changes
Added a new control: FavButton, to mark files as favorites using the Tagging component quickly
Update and fixes to the regressions in the other frameworks
ImageTools fixes the OCR page
TextEditor fixes the line numbers implementation.
All of the frameworks are now at version 4.0.1
All of the apps have been reviewed for the regressions previously introduced in the porting to Qt6; those issues have been solved and a few new features have been added, such as:
Station, now allows opening selected links externally
Index fixes to the file previewer and support for quickly tagging files from the previewer
Vvave fixes to the minimode window closing
Update the apps to remove usage of the Qt5Compat effects module
Fix issues in Fiery, Strike, and Agenda
Fix the issue of selecting multiple items in the apps not working
Clip fixes to the video thumbnail previews and the opening file dialog
Implement the floating viewer for Pix, Vvave, Shelf, and Clip for consistency
Correctly open the Station terminal at the current working directory when invoked externally
Among many few other details
** Index, Vvave, Pix, Nota, Buho, Station, Shelf, Clip, and Communicator versions have been bumped to 4.0.1
*** Strike and Fiery browser versions have been bumped to 2.0.1
**** Agenda and Arca versions have been bumped to 1.0.1
And as for Bonsai, Era, and other applications still under development, there is still not a ported version to Qt6 as of now
Maui Shell
Although Maui Shell has been ported over to Qt6 and is working with the latest MauiKit4, a lot of pending issues are still present and being worked on. The next release will be dedicated fully on Maui Shell and all of its subprojects, such as Maui Settings, Maui Core, CaskServer, etc.
That’s it for now. Until the next blog post, that will be a bit closer to the 4.0.1 stable release.
I recently saw one of my old branded “stripes”
wallpapers in a screenshot of FreeBSD by someone on X, and that
triggered me to make a new wallpaper in a similar style.
There was a call for artwork for the next Debian release – Trixie,
and I made a modified version of one of my old wallpapers for it. As it
was not chosen to be the default in Trixie, I decided to post it here
for people who might like it.
It is, like all my wallpapers, a calm non-distracting one. (it is
much prettier full-4k-size than in the thumbnail below)
Trixie Tracks
If you like it, you can download it from Debian’s
Wiki – in 1920x1080 and 4k versions. There is also a version with
the Debian logo there for inspiration if you want to create a custom
distribution-branded one.
The open source project I work on for the longest time is KDE and there more specific Kate.
This means I look at user bug reports for over 20 years now.
The statistics tell me our team got more than 9000 bugs since around 2001 (just for Kate, this excludes the libraries like KTextEditor that we maintain, too).
That is a bit more than one bug per day for over two decades.
And as the statistics show, especially in the last years we were able to keep the open bug count down, that means we fixed a lot of them.
Given we are a small team, I think that is a nice achievement.
We not just survived over 20 years, we are still alive and kicking and not just a still compiling zombie project.
Thanks a lot to all people that are contributing to this success!
Let’s keep this up in the next year and the ones following.
This release includes fixes for GreaseMonkey, VerticalTabs, Navigation
bar (security icon), stability fixes, does not advertise the FTP
support, fixes printing and more small fixes.
GreaseMonkey
Fixed loading of sites ending with *.user.js name.
(BUG: 467459)
GreaseMonkey got a support for running scripts on sites through
context menu. (BUG: 469855)
GreaseMonkey context menu
VerticalTabs
Enabled switching tabs with mouse wheel when the scrollbar is
visible. (BUG: 394066)
Pinned tabs are now arranged vertically like a normal tabs in this
plugin. (BUG: 452818)
VerticalTabs: Pinned tabs
Site security icon
Falkon now display more proper security icon in the url bar based on
the state if the SSL certificate exceptions. (BUG: 420902)
Various security icons
Removed FTP support
The FTP support in Chomium and QtWebEngine which is based on it was
removed a while ago. So with this update Falkon will not advertise to
the system that it support FTP protocol and it will instead try to
open other program to handle it. (BUG: 494222)
Now to the bunch of Kaidan’s new and great features:
Group chats with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering are supported now.
In order to use it, you need an XMPP provider that supports MIX-Core, MIX-PAM and MIX-Admin.
Unfortunately, there are not many providers supporting it yet since it is a comparatively recent group chat variant.
You do not need to quote messages just to reply to them any longer.
The messages are referenced internally without bloating the conversation.
After clicking on a referenced message, Kaidan even jumps to it.
In addition, Kaidan allows you to remove unwanted messages locally.
We added an overview of all shared media to quickly find the image you received some time ago.
You can define when to download media automatically.
Furthermore, connecting to the server is now really fast - no need to wait multiple seconds just to see your latest offline messages anymore.
If you enter a chat address (e.g., to add a contact), its server part is now autocompleted if available.
We added filter options for contacts and group chats.
After adding labels to them, you can even search by those labels.
And if you do not want to get any messages from someone, you can block them.
In case you need to move to a new account (e.g., if you are dissatisfied with your current XMPP provider), Kaidan helps you with that.
For example, it transfers your contacts and informs them about the move.
The redesigned onboarding user interface including many fixes assists with choosing a new provider and creating an account on it.
We updated Kaidan to the API v2 of XMPP Providers to stay up-to-date with the project’s data.
If you are an operator of a public XMPP provider and would like Kaidan’s users to easily create accounts on it, simply ask to add it to the provider list.
Please note that we currently focus on new features instead of supporting more systems.
Once Kaidan has a reasonable feature set, we will work on that topic again.
Even if Kaidan is making good progress, keep in mind that it is not yet a stable app.
Changelog
Features:
Add server address completion (fazevedo)
Allow to edit account’s profile (jbb)
Store and display delivery states of message reactions (melvo)
Send pending message reactions after going online (melvo)
Enable user to resend a message reaction if it previously failed (melvo)
Open contact addition as page (mobile) or dialog (desktop) (melvo)
Add option to open chat if contact exists on adding contact (melvo)
Use consistent page with search bar for searching its content (melvo)
Add local message removal (taibsu)
Allow reacting to own messages (melvo)
Add login option to chat (melvo)
Display day of the week or “yesterday” for last messages (taibsu, melvo)
Add media overview (fazevedo, melvo)
Add contact list filtering by account and labels (i.e., roster groups) (incl. addition/removal) (melvo, tech-bash)
Add message date sections to chat (melvo)
Add support for automatic media downloads (fazevedo)
Add filtering contacts by availability (melvo)
Add item to contact list on first received direct message (melvo)
Add support for blocking chat addresses (lnj)
Improve notes chat (chat with oneself) usage (melvo)
Place avatar above chat address and name in account/contact details on narrow window (melvo)
Reload camera device for QR code scanning as soon as it is plugged in / enabled (melvo)
Provide slider for QR code scanning to adjust camera zoom (melvo)
Add contact to contact list on receiving presence subscription request (melvo)
Add encryption key authentication via entering key IDs (melvo)
Improve connecting to server and authentication (XEP-0388: Extensible SASL Profile (SASL 2), XEP-0386: Bind 2, XEP-0484: Fast Authentication Streamlining Tokens, XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS) (lnj)
Support media sharing with more clients even for sharing multiple files at once (XEP-0447: Stateless file sharing v0.3) (lnj)
Display and check media upload size limit (fazevedo)
Redesign message input field to use rounded corners and resized/symbolic buttons (melvo)
Add support for moving account data to another account, informing contacts and restoring settings for moved contacts (XEP-0283: Moved) (fazevedo)
Add group chat support with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering (XEP-0369: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX), XEP-0405: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Participant Server Requirements, XEP-0406: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): MIX Administration, XEP-0407: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Miscellaneous Capabilities) (melvo)
Add button to cancel message correction (melvo)
Display marker for new messages (melvo)
Add enhanced account-wide and per contact notification settings depending on group chat mentions and presence (melvo)
Focus input fields appropriately (melvo)
Add support for replying to messages (XEP-0461: Message Replies) (melvo)
Indicate that Kaidan is busy during account deletion and group chat actions (melvo)
Hide account deletion button if In-Band Registration is not supported (melvo)
Embed login area in page for QR code scanning and page for web registration instead of opening start page (melvo)
Redesign onboarding user interface including new page for choosing provider to create account on (melvo)
Handle various corner cases that can occur during account creation (melvo)
Update to XMPP Providers v2 (melvo)
Hide voice message button if uploading is not supported (melvo)
Replace custom images for message delivery states with regular theme icons (melvo)
Free up message content space by hiding unneeded avatars and increasing maximum message bubble width (melvo)
Highlight draft message text to easily see what is not sent yet (melvo)
Store sent media in suitable directories with appropriate file extensions (melvo)
Allow sending media with less steps from recording to sending (melvo)
Add media to be sent in scrollable area above message input field (melvo)
Display original images (if available) as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
Display high resolution thumbnails for locally stored videos as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
Send smaller thumbnails (melvo)
Show camera status and reload camera once plugged in for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
Add zoom slider for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
Show overlay with description when files are dragged to be dropped on chats for being shared (melvo)
Show location previews on a map (melvo)
Open locations in user-defined way (system default, in-app, web) (melvo)
Delete media that is only captured for sending but not sent (melvo)
Add voice message recorder to message input field (melvo)
Add inline audio player (melvo)
Add context menu entry for opening directory of media files (melvo)
Show collapsible buttons to send media/locations inside of message input field (melvo)
Move button for adding hidden message part to new collapsible button area (melvo)
Bugfixes:
Fix index out of range error in message search (taibsu)
Fix updating last message information in contact list (melvo)
Fix multiple corrections of the same message (melvo, taibsu)
Request delivery receipts for pending messages (melvo)
Fix sorting roster items (melvo)
Fix displaying spoiler messages (melvo)
Fix displaying errors and encryption warnings for messages (melvo)
Fix fetching messages from server’s archive (melvo)
Fix various encryption problems (melvo)
Send delivery receipts for catched up messages (melvo)
Do not hide last message date if contact name is too long (melvo)
Fix displaying emojis (melvo)
Fix several OMEMO bugs (melvo)
Remove all locally stored data related to removed accounts (melvo)
Fix displaying media preview file names/sizes (melvo)
Fix disconnecting from server when application window is closed including timeout on connection problems (melvo)
Fix media/location sharing (melvo)
Fix handling emoji message reactions (melvo)
Fix moving pinned chats (fazevedo)
Fix drag and drop for files and pasting them (melvo)
Fix sending/displaying media in selected order (lnj, melvo)
This time, it’s a short one: We ported KPhotoAlbum to Qt6/KF6. That’s it ;-)
The port itself has been done by Johannes and me, additional commits have been contributed by Randall Rude and Fabian Würfl. Thanks for working on KPA with us!
One thing that’s worth mentioning is: For the map/geodata functionality, we need Marble. The Qt5/KF5 version of Marble can’t be co-installed with the Qt6/KF6 version, and this one is not released yet. But Marble 24.12.0 (which will be the first official Qt6/KF6 release) will be released in a few days. So just wait until it's out before upgrading to KPA 6, to not lose the map parts.
Maybe, the Qt6/KF6 version contains some regressions. The codebase is quite well advanced in years in some parts, and we had to mess with quite some legacy issues to make the whole thing fit for Qt6/KF6. So if you notice anything, please file a respective bug report and/or contact us via our mailing list or Matrix channel (cf. User support → Communication). Thanks for your participation (hopefully, it won’t be necessary too much).
@ivan:kde.org
cullmann
