This Week in KDE Apps
A new whiteboard app, Vector-based map rendering in Itinerary, and new releases
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
We kick off the year with everything that's new in the KDE App scene. Let's dig in!
Travel Applications
KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant
Jonah Brüchert added a MapLibre-based backend to Itinerary maps views. This allows us to render vector-based tiles, which means they can be displayed at any size without visible pixels. Zooming in and out should also be much smoother. Another advantage is that the map now shows labels in the local language as well as English. This makes the map much more useful in case you cannot read a locally used script. In the future, we might even be able to use map tiles that can display labels in your preferred language. (26.04.0 - pim/itinerary MR #454)
Carl Schwan ported multiple dialogs to a convergent dialog/bottom drawer style (26.04.0 - pim/itinerary MR #413 and pim/itinerary MR #464).
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Volker Krause added support for marking reservations as cancelled in your timeline, so that these reservations are not counted in your yearly statistics (26.04.0 - link).
Luca Weiss updated the KLM boarding passes extractor to also extract the boarding group (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #205). Thomas Arrow added an extractor for KLM's "Ticket for your trip" emails (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #206).
Tobias Fella added support for extracting GOMUS annual tickets (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #207).
PIM Applications
KMail A feature-rich email application
Albert Astals Cid made KMail's system tray icon also work when KMail is run inside Kontact (26.04.0 - pim/kmail MR #187).
Office Applications
Okular View and annotate documents
Cody Neiman fixed the extreme downscaling of custom stamps, which resulted in pixelated stamp annotations (25.12.1 - graphics/okular MR #1280).
Creative Applications
Drawy Your handy, infinite, brainstorming tool
Thanks to Prayag Jain, KDE has a new whiteboard app called Drawy! It combines a simple interface with an infinite canvas, giving users the freedom to think and draw without limits.
Some of its features are:
- An infinite canvas with no drawing constraints
- Support for drawing tablets and touchscreens
- Tools to group and ungroup items on the canvas
- A text tool for typing notes
Drawy is still under development, but you can already download a nightly flatpak. You are invited to test the app and share feedback to help shape Drawy as your handy, infinite brainstorming tool!
Since the incubation started, Prayag Jain has been fixing various performance issues (graphics/drawy MR #108 and graphics/drawy MR #115), and Laurent Montel did a lot of code cleanup to follow KDE best practices more closely (link).
Utilities Applications
Konsole Use the command line interface
Leonardo Malaman added a new "Force New Tabs" option to Konsole. This forces Konsole to open a new tab in an already open Konsole window instead of opening a new window (utilities/konsole MR #1112).
Kate Advanced text editor
Christoph Cullmann added out-of-the-box support for neocmakelsp, an LSP server for CMake (26.04.0 - utilities/kate MR #1974).
KAIChat AI Chat
Laurent Montel released KAiChat 0.6.0. This release introduces Wikipedia and weather integration, the capability to copy block code to the clipboard, and a quick search widget.
Network Applications
NeoChat Chat on Matrix
Károly Veres unified the space selection logic, so that using the quick switcher or clicking on a notification to jump to a room will now switch to correct space (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2551).
Nate Graham improved the hamburger menu button. Now the menu opens right beneath the button, the button has a pressed state while the menu is open, and the menu will close when clicking on the button again. (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2553)
Azhar Momin added a button to cycle through unread highlights (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2552).
Joshua Goins re-arranged the profile dialog and grouped similar actions together (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2544). And he made it possible to view the profile dialog when receiving an invitation (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2548).
Tobias Fella added some fixes for the new version of Matrix rooms (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2550).
Kaidan Modern chat app for every device
Melvin Keskin released Kaidan 0.14.0. This release allow you to resend failed messages via the context menu, cancel and restart uploads, join group chats or add contacts by their XMPP URIs, and improves compatibility for servers using LDAP.
System Applications
KCron Task Scheduler
Alexander Wilms fixed running commands containing spaces in their path (26.04.0 - system/kcron MR #46).
…And Everything Else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out This Week in Plasma, which covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment every Saturday.
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.