Aaron Seigo has published a list of changes and new features to Plasma, the desktop shell for KDE4, that will be included in KDE4.3. This list is quite long, so I will only try to show the most important changes.

Notifications

The system tray of KDE4.3 finally supports notifications fully. Also the configurability has changed there. Now we can select the group of icons that are to be shown at all times – e.g. the Hardware group, containing i.e. KMix – if not enabled, the KMix icon won’t be shown in tray. The notification icon is shown at all times, unlike the earlier KDE4 versions. The notifications can now be grouped together and also they can e.g. display the Kopete contact avatar. Also the possibility to choose whether the notifications are to be hidden after some time, or to be always visible, has been added – when the mouse pointer floats over the notifications icon, a Notifications and jobs tool-tip is shown.

Plasma::Dialogs

The dialogue windows of Plasma are now animated. These animations work if the KWin effects are on. So far, the animation is not too smooth yet.

libplasmaclock

Can now speak out the current time (using text to speech) and show the holiday days for a chosen country in the calendar.

Plasma desktop shell

Cashew is now smaller and its appearance can be changed. If not docked, it can show the given activity’s name in one of the corners of the screen. Also the keyboard shortcuts of Plasma options are now in Cashew menu. Also as I mentioned earlier in the article on KDE4.3, Plasma has now a separate table to dock Plasmoids on. They appear when this table is turned on, not on the desktop as until now. Now the empty space on a panel can be added directly from its configuration tool. The empty space can be resized at will. The new “show windows underneath” option causes the windows to be visible in the background of the panel.

New Plasmoids

  • Bubble Monitor – system monitor
  • Media player – audio/video player
  • RememberTheMilk – integration with this site
  • Unit converter
  • Weather

New wallpaper plug-ins

  • Virus – burn-out the screen pixels D
  • Weather – the wallpaper adjusts to current weather
  • Mandelbrot
  • Marble – the Earth on your desktop

These are the most visible changes from the user perspective. Obviously there were many changes under the bonnet too.

The full list of Plasma changes can be found here

This article was posted originally as Wybrana lista zmian w Plaźmie dla KDE4.3 / Selective list of Plasma changes for KDE4.3 on the Authors’ blog.
Translated-by : el es

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