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Monday, 16 December 2024

We've recently discovered that the QML code editor in Qt Creator 14.0 and 15.0 is not working as expected out of the box. The QML Language Server integration is currently broken, and we’d like to address it openly and provide solutions for those affected.

Welcome to the @Krita-promo team's November 2024 development and community update.

Development Report

Community Bug Hunt Ended

The Community Bug Hunt has ended, with dozens of bugs fixed and over a hundred bug more reports closed. Huge thanks to everyone who participated, and if you missed it, the plan is to make this a regular occurrence.

Can't wait for the next bug hunt to be scheduled? Neither will the bug reports! Help in investigating them is appreciated anytime!

Community Report

November 2024 Monthly Art Challenge Results

For the "Fluffy" theme, 22 members submitted 26 original artworks. And the winner is… Most "Fluffy" by @steve.improvthis, featuring three different fluffy submissions. Be sure to check out the other two as well!

KJ's Clouds by @steve.improvthis

The December Art Challenge is Open Now

For the December Art Challenge, @steve.improvthis has chosen "Tropical" as the theme, with the optional challenge of using new or unfamiliar brushes. See the full brief for more details, and find yourself a place in the sun!

Best of Krita-Artists - October/November 2024

Seven images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread, which was open from October 15th to November 11th. When the poll closed on November 14th, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:

Ocean | Krita by @Gurkirat_Singh

Ocean by @Gukirat_Singh

Winter palace by @Sad_Tea

Winter palace by @Sad_Tea

Order by @Valery_Sazonov

Order by @Valery_Sazonov

Curly, 10-24 by @Celes

Curly, 10-24 by @Celes

Afternoon Magic by @zeki

Afternoon Magic by @zeki

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors.

Visit Krita's funding page to see how user donations keep development going, and explore a one-time or monthly contribution. Or check out more ways to Get Involved, from testing, coding, translating, and documentation writing, to just sharing your artwork made with Krita.

The Krita-promo team has put out a call for volunteers, come join us and help keep these monthly updates going.

Notable Changes

Notable changes in Krita's development builds from Nov. 12 - Dec. 11, 2024.

Stable branch (5.2.9-prealpha):

  • General: Fix rounding errors in opacity conversion, which prevented layered 50% brushstrokes from adding up to 100%. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • General: Fix snapping to grid at the edge of the canvas. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • General: Disable snapping to image center by default, as it can cause confusion. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • Calligraphy Tool: Fix following existing shape in the Calligraphy Tool. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • Layers: Fix "Copy into new Layer" to copy vector data when a vector shape is active. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • Selections: Fix the vector selection mode to not create 0px selections, and to select the canvas beforing subtracting if there is no existing selection. (bug report, CCbug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • General: Add Unify Layers Color Space action. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • Layers: Don't allow moving a mask onto a locked layer. (Change, by Maciej Jesionowski)
  • Linux: Capitalize the .AppImage file extension to match the convention expected by launchers. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):

Bug fixes:

  • Color Management: Update display rendering when blackpoint compensation or LCMS optimizations are toggled, not just when the display color profile is changed. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)

Features:

  • Text: Implement Convert to Shape for bitmap fonts. (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
  • Filters: Add Fast Color Overlay filter, which overlays a solid color using a configurable blending mode. (Change, by Maciej Jesionowski)
  • Brush Engines: Add Pattern option to "Auto Invert For Eraser" mode. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • Wide Gamut Color Selector Docker: Add option to hide the Minimal Shade Selector rows. (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
  • Wide Gamut Color Selector Docker: Show the Gamut Mask toolbar when the selector layout supports it. (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
  • Layers: Add a warning icon for layers with a different color space than the image. (Change 1, by Dmitry Kazakov, and Change 2, by Timothée Giet)
  • Pop-Up Palette: Add an option to sort the color history ring by last-used instead of by color. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
  • Export Layers Plugin: Add option to use incrementing prefix on exported layers. (wishbug report) (Change, by Ross Rosales)

Nightly Builds

Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.9-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Sunday, 15 December 2024

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).

Kate Bug Statistics
Kate Bug Statistics

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.

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week aside of releasing KDE Gear 24.12.0 and Kaidan 0.10.0, we added an overview of all your data in Itinerary and polished many other apps. Some of us also meet in Berlin and organized a small KDE sprint where aside of eating some Crêpes Bretonnes, we had discussion around Itinerary, Kirigami, Powerplant and more.

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Itinerary has a new "My Data" page containing your program membership, health certificates, saved locations, travel statistics and let you export and import all the data from Itinerary. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0 — Link)

The new My Data tab
The new My Data tab

Calculator A feature rich calculator

Fixed the "History" action not working (Joshua Goins, 25.04 — Link)

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

Version 0.10.0 and 0.10.1 of Kaidan were released! See the release announcement for the full list of changes.

Kongress Conference companion

Show the speaker's name for each event (Volker Krause, 25.04 — Link)

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

Improved the dialog showing results of decrypt and verify operations (Tobias Fella, 25.04, Link)

Fixed a Qt6 regression that causes the dropdown menu for certificate selection to behave in unexpected ways (Tobias Fella, 25.04 — Link)

Improved the messages showing the result when decrypting and verifying the clipboard (Tobias Fella, 25.04 — Link)

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Fixed web shortcuts not working (Joshua Goins, 24.12.1 — Link)

Improved how colored text sent by some other clients shows up (Joshua Goins, 24.12.1 — Link)

Stop NeoChat from crashing when sending messages (Tobias Fella, 24.12.1 — Link)

Okular View and annotate documents

Improved the look of banner messages (Carl Schwan, 25.04 — Link)

PowerPlant Keep your plants alive

Mathis redesigned various part of Powerplant and added a tasks view. (Mathis Brucher)

Powerplant Overview
Powerplant Plant Detail
Powerplant Tasks

Other

More Kirigami applications are now remembering their size accross restart by using KConfig.WindowStateSaver. (Nate Graham, 25.04.0 — Skanpage and Elisa)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

Saturday, 14 December 2024

This week's headliner change is something that I think will make a lot of people happy: better fractional scaling! Vlad and Xaver have been hard at work to snap everything to the screen's pixel grid, with the effect that using a fractional scale factor now results in a lot less blurriness as well as no more gaps between windows and their shadows. You'll see it in the screenshot below (which was taken at 175% scale) but the effects are subtly better everywhere. Really great stuff!

And lots more too, of course:

Notable New Features

At very high zoom levels, KWin's Zoom effect switches to a sharp pixel-perfect representation and overlays a grid on top of the screen. This makes it easy to see how individual pixels look relative to other ones, which can be useful for artists and designers. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.3.0. Link)

KWin now offers you the option to prefer screen color accuracy at the expense of some system performance, should that be your preference (e.g. if you're a digital artist and not a gamer). (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)

If the feature to be able to maximize a window horizontally or vertically by double-clicking on one of its edges doesn't agree with you, you can now disable it. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Landed a huge overhaul of how fractional scale factors are handled in KWin. Now it makes an effort to always snap things to the screen's pixel grid, greatly reducing blurriness and visual gaps everywhere. I've been using these patches with a 175% scale factor for a week, and everything looks just fantastic! (Vlad Zahorodnii and Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)

On login, Plasma panels now appear on screen only after their contents have been fully loaded. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a nasty bug affecting people using the X11 session that could sometimes cause the lock screen to be all black. (Philip Müller, 6.2.5. Link)

Fixed a specific instance where you could end up with a black screen when wiggling the pointer while the screen is about to lock. (David Redondo, 6.2.5 Link)

Fixed a visual bug in Discover that caused UI elements to overlap on expanded list items on the Updates page. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, 6.2.5. Link)

Fixed the application menu appearing in a wrong position when opened via the window titlebar with Qt 6.8. (David Redondo, 6.2.5. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause windows on a screen that gets disconnected to become lost and stuck in an off-screen position in the new screen arrangement. (Vlad Zahorodnii and Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)

You can no longer slightly break the Overview effect's Desktop Grid view by dragging windows outside of the screen area. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)

Dragging an image from the clipboard to the desktop now shows the normal drop menu, rather than creating an empty Media Frame widget. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)

Non-rectangular-region screenshots taken in Spectacle and copied to the clipboard can now be pasted into Dolphin as expected. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)

Standalone (not in System Tray) "Power and Battery" and "Brightness and Color" widgets once again work properly, as expected. (Jakob Petsovits, 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a bug in the Breeze Dark icon theme that caused places/folder icons to remain colorful at small sizes where symbolic icons are normally expected. (David Redondo, Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Plasma and lots of apps no longer crash when your /etc/fstab file contains any loop mounts in it. (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.10. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Ported the clipboard to use a standard SQLite database, rather than its own internal custom format. This improves reliability, support for saving many data types, and memory efficiency especially with images. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Thankfully, thousands of you have stepped up in the past week to do just that financially, donating a record-breaking amount of money to KDE e.V., which is just incredible, awe-inspiring even.

So that's a great way to help out. But if you've got more time than money or want to make a difference more directly, then you can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!

You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Friday, 13 December 2024

This release fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changelog

Bugfixes:

  • Fix displaying files of each message in appropriate message bubble (melvo)
  • Fix sending fallback messages for clients not supporting XEP-0447: Stateless file sharing (melvo)
  • Fix margins within message bubbles (melvo)
  • Fix hiding hidden message part (melvo)
  • Fix displaying marker for new messages (melvo)

Download

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Packaging status

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-50.


Census III of Free and Open Source Software

Tags: tech, foss, supply-chain

Interesting report, some findings are kind of unexpected. It’s interesting to see how much npm and maven dominate the supply chain. Clearly there’s a need for a global scheme to identify dependencies, hopefully we’ll get there.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/census-iii


Open Source Archetypes: A Framework For Purposeful Open Source

Tags: tech, foss, business, strategy

An important white paper which probably went unnoticed. It gives a nice overview of the strategies one can build around Open Source components.

https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/MZOTS_OS_Archetypes_report_ext_scr.pdf


Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse

Excellent post from Cory Doctorow about why he is only on Mastodon. Not being federated should indeed just be a deal breaker by now. Empty promises should be avoided.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/


Firefox is the superior browser

Tags: tech, web, browser, firefox

Obviously I agree with this. It’s time people stop jumping on chromium based browsers.

https://asindu.xyz/posts/switching-to-firefox/


TRELLIS: Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation

Tags: tech, 3d, ai, machine-learning, generator

Looks like a nice model to produce 3D assets. Should speed up a bit the work of artists for producing background elements, I guess there will be manual adjustments needed in the end still.

https://trellis3d.github.io/


Who and What comprise AI Skepticism? - by Benjamin Riley

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

Excellent post showing all the nuances of AI skepticism. Can you find in which category you are? I definitely match several of them.

https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/who-and-what-comprises-ai-skepticism


Reverse engineering of the Pentium FDIV bug

Tags: tech, cpu, hardware

It’s interesting to see such a reverse engineering of this infamous bug straight from the gates layout.

https://oldbytes.space/@kenshirriff/113606898880486330


How to Think About Time

Tags: tech, time

A good summary on the various concepts needed to reason about time.

https://errorprone.info/docs/time


Galloping Search - blag

Tags: tech, algorithm

Nice principle for a search in a sorted list when you don’t know the upper bound.

https://avi.im/blag/2024/galloping-search/


I’m daily driving Jujutsu, and maybe you should too

Tags: tech, version-control, git

Jujutsu is indeed alluring… but its long term support is questionable, that’s what keeps me away from it for now.

https://drewdevault.com/2024/12/10/2024-12-10-Daily-driving-jujutsu.html


mise-en-place

Tags: tech, tools, developer-experience

A single tool to manage your environment and dev tools across projects? Seems a bit young and needs a proper community still. I’m surely tempted to give it a spin though.

https://mise.jdx.dev/


Raw loops vs. STL algorithms

Tags: tech, c++, algorithm

An old one now, but since I keep giving this advice it seems relevant still. If you’re using raw loops at least that no again, there is likely a good alternative in the STL.

https://www.meetingcpp.com/blog/items/raw-loops-vs-stl-algorithms.html


Generic programming to fight the rigidity in the C++ projects

Tags: tech, architecture, type-systems, generics, c++

A good reminder that genericity can help fight against the rigidity one can accumulate using purely object oriented couplings… but it comes at a price in terms of complexity.

https://codergears.com/Blog/?p=945


Nobody Gets Fired for Picking JSON, but Maybe They Should? · mcyoung

Tags: tech, json, safety, type-systems

JSON is full of pitfalls. Here is a good summary. Still it is very widespread.

https://mcyoung.xyz/2024/12/10/json-sucks/


JSON5 – JSON for Humans

Tags: tech, json

Interesting JSON superset which makes it more usable for humans. I wonder if it’ll see more parsers appear.

https://json5.org/


Improving my desktop’s responsiveness with the cgroup V2 ‘cpu.idle’ setting

Tags: tech, systemd, cgroups

Nice little systemd trick, definitely an alias to add to your setup.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/CgroupV2CpuIdleForResponsiveness


“Rules” that terminal programs follow

Tags: tech, shell, tools, unix

Good list of the undocumented rules terminal programs tend to follow. It’s nice to have this kind of consistency even though a bit by accident.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules/


htmy

Tags: tech, web, backend, frontend, python, htmx

The idea is interesting even though it probably needs to mature. It’s interesting to see this kind of libraries popup though, there’s clearly some kind of “backend - frontend split” fatigue going on.

https://volfpeter.github.io/htmy/


The errors of TeX (1989)

Tags: tech, latex, history, estimates, craftsmanship

A very precious document. Shows great organization in the work of Knuth of course but the self-reflection has profound lessons pertaining to estimates, type of errors we make, etc.

https://yurichev.com/mirrors/knuth1989.pdf


An Undefeated Pull Request Template

Tags: tech, codereview

This is indeed a nice template for submitting changes for review. It’s very thorough and helps reviewers.

https://ashleemboyer.com/blog/pull-request-template/


On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules

Tags: tech, design, architecture, research

We’re still struggling about how to modularize our code. Sometimes we should go back to the basics, this paper by Parnas from 1972 basically gave us the code insights needs to modularize programs properly.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145361598.361623


TDD as the crack cocaine of software

Tags: tech, tdd, flow

Indeed, it is often overlooked that TDD can really help finding a state of flow. Unlike other addictive activities presented in this article it requires a non negligible initial effort though, that’s why I wouldn’t describe it as an addiction though.

https://jefclaes.be/2014/12/tdd-as-crack-cocaine-of-software.html


Demo Driven Development

Tags: tech, agile, product-management

A good reminder of what agile is about from the product management perspective. If you can regularly demo your work you ensure a feeling of progress.

https://oanasagile.blogspot.com/2013/12/demo-driven-development.html


The 6 Mistakes You’re Going to Make as a New Manager

Tags: tech, leadership, management

Good points, this is indeed often where we are struggling when we move to a leadership role. This changes the nature of the work at least in part and we need to adjust to it.

https://terriblesoftware.org/2024/12/04/the-6-mistakes-youre-going-to-make-as-a-new-manager/



Bye for now!

Monday, 9 December 2024

Screenshot of Kaidan in widescreen Screenshot of Kaidan

We finally made it: Kaidan’s next release with so many features that we cannot summarize them in one sentence!

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Assure and NGI Zero Entrust with public money provided by the European Commission. If you want Kaidan’s progress to continue and keep more free software projects alive, please share and sign the open letter for further funding!

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.

The complete list of changes can be found in the changelog section. There is also a technical overview of all currently supported features.

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)

Notes:

  • Kaidan is REUSE-compliant now
  • Kaidan requires Qt 5.15 and QXmpp 1.9 now

Download

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Packaging status

Sunday, 8 December 2024

Hey team!

Back with a series of updates on the Plasma Design System work that we are doing. All videos contain English captions.

Leave your feedback or let us know if you have any questions.

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week, we are adding the final touches to our applications for the KDE Gear 24.12.0 release coming next Thursday. We are also releasing KPhotoAlbum and KGeoTag, now based on Qt6; improving Itinerary's ticket extractor support coverage in central Europe; and continuing our work on Karp, KDE's new PDF editor.

Meanwhile, as part of the 2024 end-of-year fundraiser, you can "Adopt an App" in a symbolic effort to support your favorite KDE app. This week, we are particularly grateful to Stuart Turton for NeoChat; Lukas, Stuart Turton and J. for Merkuro; Andreas Pietzowski, Dia_FIX and Alex Gurenko for Ark; Stuart Turton and Cameron Bosch for Tokodon; Alex Gurenko and Steven Dunbar for Gwenview; Alex Gurenko, Kasimir den Hertog and Pokipan for KWrite; crysknife, Ian Kidd and Felix Urbasik for KRDC; Ian Nicholson for Alligator; Cameron Radmore for ISO Image Writer; Marcel Janik Kimpel and @siriusfox@social.treehouse.systems for KDE Partition Manager; Marton Daniel for Plasma System Monitor; Alessio Adamo for AudioTube; zukigay for Kasts; Anael for Elisa; Stuart Turton and Clément Aubert for Konqueror; Ulrich Palecek, @ddjivan.bsky.social and Andreas Zautner for Discover; Butters for KolourPaint; KjetilS for krfb; and finally fabacam, Michael Klingberg and Gianmarco Gargiulo for GCompris.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

When updating, adding, or removing a tag/category to a calendar event, the update is immediately visible without having to sync again with a remote server (Daniel Vrátil, 24.12.0 — Link).

Alligator RSS feed reader

The "Refresh" action is now also visible on mobile (Mark Penner, 24.12.0 — Link).

Amarok Rediscover your music

A beta release of the upcoming Amarok 3.2 music player is out for testing — see the announcement email.

Amarok devs fixed Ampache version check. Ampache is self-hostable music streamer service server and the version check was broken since Ampache changed their version format, but it works again now (Ian Abbott, Amarok 3.2.0 — Link).

You can also filter a collection by tracks that have tags missing or when tags are empty (Tuomas Nurmi, Amarok 3.2.0 — Link — an 11 year old feature request!).

Arianna EBook reader

Arianna now uses foliate-js instead of epub.js to render EPUB files. foliate-js provides some advantages like no longer requiring to load the whole book into memory, and comes with a better layout engine (Ajay Chauhan, 25.04.0 — Link).

AudioTube YouTube Music app

AudioTube now displays album information in the maximized player view (Kavinu Nethsara, 25.04.0 — Link).

Dolphin Manage your files

Accessibility support in Dolphin was adapted to better work with Orca 47 (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0 — Link), and, continuing with accessibility improvements, after activating a folder in the Dolphin sidebar, the view is now always focused (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0 — Link). Likewise, when clicking on "Open Path" and "Open Path in New Tab" after searching for an item, the view will scroll to the selected item (Akseli Lahtinen, 25.04.0 — Link).

The placeholder message when Samba isn't and can't be installed was improved (Ilya Katsnelson, 25.04.0. and partially backported to 24.12.0 — Link), and the Flatpak version now allows compressing files into an archive (Justin Zobel, 25.04.0 — Link).

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

When removing the last track associated with an artist or a music genre, the artist or genre is now removed from the internal database (Jack Hill, 25.04.0 — Link).

Gwenview Image Viewer

We fixed the incorrect numbering in full screen mode for the first image (Pedro Hernandez, 25.04.0 — Link).

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Volker wrote a recap for the past two months in Itinerary and can read it on his blog. The post includes a report on work unrelated to Itinerary development, but nevertheless important, like the lobbying of DELFI, a cooperation network of all German federal states for public transport.

The "Vehicle Layout" page and the "Journey Details" page were slightly tweaked and use the new unified component to display the name of the train or bus (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0 — Link 1 and link 2).

We also made significant progress on Itinerary's extractors this week, with many new extractors, including:

  • The Colosseum Ticket in Rome (David Pilarcik, Link)
  • The Polish online ticket sale system Droplabs (David Pilarcik, Link)
  • The train booking platform Leo Express (David Pilarcik, Link)
  • The German trade fair, congress, and event ticket sale system, Dimedis Fairmate (Kai Uwe Broulik, Link)
  • Google Maps links (Kai Uwe Broulik, Link)
  • The European Sleeper seat reservations in French (Luca Weiss, Link)

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

Kaidan will now display a map preview by default when receiving a geo location (Melvin Keskin — Link).

Karp KDE arranger for PDFs

Karp, KDE's new PDF editor, received visual improvements to its main interface (Carl Schwan — Link 1, link 2 and link 3).

And Nicolas setup crash reporting for Karp (Nicolas Fella — Link).

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

We moved the list of devices to the sidebar in an effort to bring the app to parity with the KCM (Darshan Phaldesai, 25.04.0 — Link).

We also added icons to the plugin config list (Leia uwu, 25.04.0 — Link).

For the bluetooth backend, we improved the speed of transferring data between devices (ivan tkachenko, 25.04.0 — Link).

KGeoTag Photo geotagging program

KGeoTag 1.7.0 is out! This release brings Qt6 support to the app. Read the full announcement.

KPhotoAlbum KDE image management software

KPhotoAlbum 6.0.0 is out! This release also brings Qt6 support to the app. Read the full announcement.

Konsole Use the command line interface

It is now possible to resize Konsole's search bar (Eric D'Addario, 25.04.0 — Link), and to search for an open tab by its name (Troy Hoover, 25.04.0 — Link).

Kongress Conference companion

We now display the speaker's name (if available) in the talk info (Volker Krause, 25.04.0 — Link).

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

We fixed a crash when the output directory for decrypting doesn't exist (Tobias Fella, 24.12.1 — Link).

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

We fixed the "Grab Keys" feature on Wayland when switching from and to full screen. Additionally the "Grab Keys" feature, now also correctly forwards every shortcut to the remote applications (Fabio Bas, 25.04.0 — Link 1 and link 2).

We also fixed building KRDC on Haiku (Luc Schrijvers, 24.12.1 — Link).

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

You can now sort rooms in the sidebar based on their most recent activity instead of by unread notifications (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 25.04.0 — Link), and added a "Copy Link Address" context menu when clicking on a message (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.04.0 — Link).

We fixed the capitalization of the account dialog as well as many of NeoChat's settings pages (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0 — Link), and removed device details from the device display name, as this could leak sensitive information (Tobias Fella, 24.12.0 — Link).

Okular View and annotate documents

When creating a new signature, Okular will automatically pick a font size depending on the available size instead of using a hardcoded size. This allows you to make signatures much smaller than before (Nicolas Fella, 25.04.0 — Link). This work was sponsored by the Technische Universität Dresden.

PlasmaTube Watch YouTube videos

We improved the support for Piped, an alternative privacy-friendly YouTube frontend, in PlasmaTube, as we have improved the parsing of its media format information (Alexey Andreyev, 25.04.0 — Link).

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

The Mastodon client used when posting on Mastodon is now displayed as a Kirigami.Chip element (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0 — Link).

We also fixed the support for GoToSocial (snow flurry, 24.12.0 — Link 1 and link 2), and added prelimary support for Iceshrimp (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0 — Link)).

Spectacle Take screenshots and recordings

Spectacle can now export to an animated WebP or a GIF (Noah Davis, 25.04.0 — Link).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

Thanks to Michael Mischurow and Tobias Fella for proofreading this post.