This Week in KDE Apps: Gear 24.12.0 incoming
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 A powerful music player that lets you 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.
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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.
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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.