This Week in KDE Apps: Python bindings

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 release the first beta of what will become KDE Gear 24.12.0. If your distro provides testing package, please help with testing. Meanwhile, and 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 George Fakidis, tmpod, Paxriel for showing their support for Okular; Ian Lohmann, Anthony Perrett, Linus Seelinger and Nils Martens for Dolphin, Erik Bernoth for Arianna and Daniel Lloyd-Miller and mdPlusPlus for KDE Connect.

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. So consider donating today!

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

Global Changes

KWidgetsAddons, a collection of add-on widgets for QtWidgets, and KUnitConversion now have Python bindings. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, KDE Frameworks 6.9.0. Link 1 and link 2)

The "About" page of Kirigami applications now provides helpful "Copy" button that lets you copy system information, which can be useful when filling a bug report. The same feature was also implemented for QtWidgets-based applications. (Carl Schwan, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6.9. Link for Kirigami apps and link for QtWidget apps)

Additionally Joshua added icons to the "Getting involved", "Donate", and other actions for the Kirigami version. (Joshua Goins, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0. Link)

The "share" context menu of many applications can now copy the data to clipboard. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 6.9.0. Link)

Alligator RSS feed reader

Alligator now lets you bookmark your favorite posts. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 25.04.0. Link)

The selected feed will also now be highlighted correctly and the text of an article can now be selected and copied. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 24.12.0. Link and link 2)

AudioTube YouTube Music app

Fix parsing certain playlists. (Eren Karakas, 24.12.0. Link)

Clock Keep time and set alarms

Fix a crash of the Clock Daemon when waking up. (Devin Lin, 24.12.0. Link)

digiKam Photo Management Program

Digikam 8.5.0 is out! This releases improves the Face Management system, adds colored labels to identify important items, increases its list of supported languages to 61, and fixes over 160 bugs.

Read the full announcement

Dolphin Manage your files

When Dolphin is started on a location which does not report a storage size (for example "remote", or "bluetooth") the status bar will no longer pointlessly show a empty storage size indicator for a split second before hiding it again. (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0. Link)

Gwenview Image Viewer

We fixed a bug where indexed-color or monochrome-palette images (e.g. from pngquant) would render with garbled colors or black and white noise when zoomed. (Tabby Kitten, 24.12.0. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Itinerary's Matrix integration now uses encrypted Matrix rooms by default and Itinerary can now do session verification, which is going to be mandatory in the future. (Volker Krause, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2). Volker also fixed various small issues with the Matrix integration (too many to list them all) and backported these fixes for the 24.12.0 release.

Kate Advanced Text Editor

It is now possible to disable the autocompletion popup which appears when you are just typing. (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0. BUG 476620)

KCalc Scientific calculator

We redesigned the bit edit feature of KCalc. (Tomasz Bojczuk, 25.04.0. Link)

Kdenlive Video editor

Several Kdenlive effects got the capacity to animate their parameters with keyframes. (Bernd Jordan, Julius Künzel, and Massimo Stella, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4)

Keysmith Two-factor code generator for Plasma Mobile and Desktop

Keysmith can now import OTPs from andOTP's backup files. (Martin Reboredo, 25.04.0, Link)

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Fixed a crash when migrating old iCal entries in Akonadi to be properly tagged. (Daniel Vrátil, 24.12.0. Link)

Fix style of configuration dialogs for Akonadi agents on platforms other than Plasma. (Laurent Montel, 24.12.0. Link)

Port away IMAP resource from KWallet and use QtKeychain instead. This ensures your email's credentials are correctly stored and retrieved on other platforms like Windows. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

KMail A feature-rich email application

Reduce temporary memory allocation by 25% when starting KMail. If you are curious how, the merge requests are super interesting. (Volker Krause, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Kodaskanna A multi-format 1D/2D code scanner

Kodaskanna was ported to Qt6/KF6. (Friedrich W. H. Kossebau. Link)

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

We added various options related to security of the RDP connection and the redirection of smartcards to the remote host. (Roman Katichev, 25.04.0. Link)

Kup Backup scheduler for KDE's Plasma desktop

We rephrased all yes/no buttons in Kup's notifications to use more descriptive names. (Nate Graham, 25.04.0. Link)

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

When receiving stickers with NeoChat, they will be displayed with a more appropriate size (256x256px). Same with custom emoticons, which are now displayed with the same height as the rest of the message. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

We don't show the filename underneath images anymore, and also make the download file dialog fill out the filename by default. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link 1 and link 2)

We redesigned the list of accounts in the welcome page. Now we show the display name and avatar of your accounts there, which makes it easier to recognize. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

We rearranged the room, file and message context menus. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Add "Open in Browser" action to profile pages. (Sean Baggaley, 24.12.0. Link)

Fix various issues on Android, most prominently ensure all icons required by Tokodon are packaged correctly. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0)

... 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 Tobias Fella and Michael Mischurow for the proofreading.