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.
Adding applets
There was a time when I complained about the convoluted process of adding new Plasma applets. Not anymore! Today I can say it’s easy and much more intuitive, although still not flawless. For instance, scrolling between the available applets horizontally is not very user-friendly.
The changes made here were cosmetic. The scrolling looks nicer and the information about the applets being displayed is more detailed.
KRunner like YaKuake
A very nice change in KRunnera! Now we can configure it in the way that it’s displayed not in the centre of the screen but shows up in an elegant way at the top of the screen.
Animated Oxygen
Now the window decoration of Oxygen has all the items animated, making it seem more lively. The effects are delicate and it a good taste.
I was too lazy this time to make my own video, so I’ll use the one prepared by Nuno to illustrate what I’m talking about.
Direct link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Cv0z0dqfk
Grouping windows
The best change ever is the window grouping feature. Now we can put together many windows into one and switch between them using the tabs located in the window title. Have you seen something like that before? Very useful!
Other changes
The module responsible for configuring the mouse actions have been finally cleared up, and the window with System settings got the tooltips.
Stability
To my great surprise, the whole thing works fast and the system is responsive. I haven’t encountered a single crash when playing with KDE 4.4 r1055000. This makes my hope that the next release of my favorite desktop envoronment will be a great success.
The original text was published on official Polish KDE blog: KDE 4.4 r1055000
