I have managed to find some time to cover the recent changes in the development version of KDE 4.4. The number of changes is not impressive but they are interesting enough to write an article.
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.
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.
Finally the day has come, when the curiosity about the KDE4.3 development branch took the better of me. Unfortunately the gap between what I was blogging on caused some confusion on what is really new out there. So the review will be a little unusual, more like a shooting in the dark ‘oh this looks like it’s not in 4.2′ 
If anything, you’re welcome to send corrections just in case.
First visible change concerns the different presentation style of the search results in KRunner. Previously these were presented ‘checkerboard’ style, now however, they are simply listed out. Interestingly, I haven’t found any setting to make it work ‘old style’. However KRunner has an impressive list of available plug-ins expanding its functionality, which is cheering us up.
Quicksand might be a good option for the future – so far it is far from being handy and intuitive. Maybe someday …
A while ago, Nuno has presented mock-ups of the new, default Plasma style for KDE 4.3 commonly dubbed Air. Today I took the first closer look at it… But let me talk about experience later on.
Just to let us compare the key elements, let’s try to remind ourselves the Oxygen style:
and now, how they look Air style :
Well Personally, I think Air is heading in the right direction, as an alternative for “the darkey”
