KDE 4.4 is scheduled to be on your desktops in a few more months. This post details some of the new and changed things in it.

The Desktop

A lot of visual changes are present in the KDE Desktop. There are changes to Style, Behavior and the Plasma – the one which provides the desktop and widgets to boost your desktop experience.

Activities

Desktop activities, a concept introduced in KDE 4.2, has received a ton of improvements. An activity in KDE is simply as the word goes – a separate view for a specific behavior. You have probably used, or heard of the Virtual Desktop concept – in which one can manage their applications with separate views.

Extending that concept, an Activity is a separate view for your group of widgets. Right now you may notice that switching virtual desktops does not change the widgets available on the desktop – this task’s possible if you use Activities.

New features in Activity include Mouse Plug-ins, and two new types of Activities – Search & Launch and Newspaper.

Mouse Plug-ins

This is a configuration area of any activity that, for now, allows you to configure (mouse) shortcuts for your desktop operations like switching activities, showing the context menu, switching tasks, etc..

New Activities

Ever since 4.2, there have been two types of activities in KDE, namely Folder View and Desktop (Default). The former shows the desktop area as a traditional one – with icons from a set folder, while the latter is an empty and clean one with only your added widgets. The two new activities – Search & Launch Containment and Newspaper Activity bring about some refreshing changes to the whole Activity concept.

Search and Launch Containment

This is an interesting activity that could replace your need for a panel. It essentially transforms your desktop area into a launcher. There’s a favorites area at the top, followed below by a runner-like search bar and then the Menu groups, which can be double-clicked to open and show all applications contained within. Navigation is simple and animated prettily and bookmarks/favorites can be added by clicking on the star that appears when you hover over an item/application.

Newspaper Activity

I haven’t found a use for this yet, but it seems to automatically align your widgets in a columnar fashion. It’ll be neater after a little more polish – maybe give you that grid aligning feature for widgets if you needed it. I’ll report more on this as the development progresses in the coming months till the 4.4 Final.

Style

In my opinion, the best attraction of the KDE 4 desktop is its Oxygen style. In 4.4, it will be cleaner, have more icons, new animations, fabulous new artwork, and some fine-tuning. You’ll love the amount of advanced customization and simple fine-tuning options Oxygen will give you in KDE 4.4.

Title-bars

The window borders have an improved style than before. The difference can be seen in the screen-shots below as artwork is hard to explain with words. Let’s just say it feels more liquid, and is much more responsive to press actions. Not a change that’d make you care about, but its pleasing and refreshing nevertheless.

Window Borders

Borders are all gone. The Oxygen style does not apply any window borders anymore and instead has added inner and outer glows, which are configurable (colors, spread size, etc.) in System Settings – Appearance. Also changed, are the neat drop shadows, whose colors can also be customized. Once this kicks in, it feels easier to work with non-maximized windows.

Animations

A lot of animations have been added to the Oxygen style and what I’ve noticed is that a fade effect is applied to every kind of change in the UI. That means you’ll see smoother label transitions, fading effects while you switch from a tab to another, fading selectors as you scroll through the options in a context menu, and etc.. These also apply to the hovering effects, like the glow that appears when you hover on a tab. At first the thought of irritation in seeing these animations popped into my head but as good as the Oxygen-Project guys are, the default rates of the animations are well above that barrier although not configurable.

Progress-bars also have animations now and a progress, like from 30% to 50% is done with smoother, running progressions than abrupt and instant ones. This change is very welcome by me; I could do with some fancy feedback stuff while an application makes me wait. Using progress-bars must also adhere to certain standards and not be like how most applications on Windows are.

Since I can’t show the new animations with mere screen-shots, here’s a video to watch – by the developer himself.

Plasma

Under Plasma, there are too many changes and improvements to count. Its perhaps the most concentrated-upon part of KDE. I’ve listed some easily-visible changes like the new Widget Chooser, Remote Widgets, System Tray and the Device Notifier.

Widget Chooser

The classic Add Widgets… dialog has been replaced with a more wider, flashier chooser. Currently, it does not support removing widgets like the former dialog does, and in behavior and style it is pretty similar to the Search and Launch Containment, which I mentioned earlier. It’s still pretty handy, as it makes listing and scrolling through categories and the widgets under each much easier than when done vertically. What I might be missing is an easier way to see the full name and descriptions of each widget, which was easily displayed in the earlier dialog.

Remote Widgets

A concept I could not try out, since I have only one terminal. It seemingly lets you share any widget over the network and allows you, or others to use it remotely. Every widget can be asked to enable sharing, and the configuration dialog has a privacy option for it as well.

System Tray

The System Tray has improved in many ways. Firstly, the Auto Hide feature has gotten way better than the selective thing it was before. It now supports, for each of the registered items, three modes – Hidden, Auto and Always Show. Auto probably hides it after a certain amount of time or inactivity. Second, there’s a new feature that lets you add your widgets to the tray, or at least some of them. This is useful, from what I could make out, if you’d like to hide some of your panel widgets from showing all the time.

Device Notifier

The device notifier widget in KDE has received a good amount of new features – called Actions. Its similar to how Windows shows a dialog when you insert a device. Appropriate actions can now be added via System Settings – Advanced – Device Actions and they will show up for each type of devices as you configured. Actions can then be seen while or after mounting the device. There is also an auto-mount configuration coming in KDE 4.4, but that’s a different thing for a different article.

That’s it, under Desktop!

More articles with screen-shots regarding enhancements in File and Window Management, new Application Features under various KDE extensions coming soon. Mostly by the Beta 1 KDE 4.4 release, which is at the beginning of December 2009.

There are also enhancements made for Netbook users but that’s beyond my scope of interest at this point – since I don’t own one.

Oh, and did I mention the amount of bugs fixed? Tons!

Polishing your K Desktop never seems to stop. First its the Desktop appearances, the plethora of widgets available to choose and use from for the desktop and the taskbar, the hilighting schemes in Kate/KWrite, it keeps going on. Maybe a bad thing – you never settle.

I was trying out the kde-extragear-plasmoids AUR package yesterday on my ArchLinux’s plain KDE installation and I came across this wonderful plasmoid known as Smooth Tasks. While nothing innovative in itself, its a simple plasmoid that apes the Windows 7 taskbar. Provides icon views of the applications running and allows peeking into them when hovered upon, and if grouped – lets you switch using the previews. I’ll leave the screenshots to do the rest of explanation.

What I liked most about Windows 7 is its ability to color the hover-glow on the icons in the taskbar based on the average computed color of the icon itself. This feature, as explained by Long Zheng, “delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.” I completely agree with that point. However, Smooth Tasks missed this feature, and the built in light feature didn’t move entirely with the mouse pointer as well.

I cloned the code today to add, at least an initial working version, the color hot-tracking to Smooth Tasks and it was done by the afternoon. I’ve pushed the changes to the Smooth Tasks fork over at Bitbucket (which is a great site, by the way) and the image below describes how the initial work looks like. Notice the soft color glow. Here are some more pictures, with other icons.

Now all I’ve to figure out is a way to enhance the glow or another component of the effect to give it a more polished look. Windows 7 also colors the border of the taskbar item with the average color but that’s not possible with the way the KDE’s glow around items work, as far as I know. Please let me know if am wrong.

Just upgraded to it on Gentoo (via kdesvn-portage overlay).

KDE 4.1.0

Its pretty much usable now than when I had tried before (4.0 alpha). I like the new way of selecting files Dolphin has to offer, a nice round clicker that appears on hover. Besides that, Dolphin’s file-preview has improved a whole lot, giving previews for almost anything under that hard-drive cover.

Plasmoids are nice things, but I feel they waste too much space and aren’t always persistent with their configuration options – making me have to re-enter my preferences all the time. But its good, I’ve even gotten used to KDE-Twitter as my desktop twittering application. But the Plasma and Plasmoids are a very unstable feature of KDE right now, with changes happening in the svn every other day.

I’ve been a GNOME user all these days, so the shift to KDE 4 was very much troublesome. In installation terms I mean. I don’t have, nor would like to have, KDE3 libs installed so am pretty much stuck with only what KDE4 wishes to offer and am using only those. Its got Okular (PDF Viewer), K3B (Burn Baby Burn) and GwenView (Image Viewer) and these suffice for my daily tasks as of now since I rely on irssi/bitlbee/ncmpc and rtorrent command-line applications for the other deeds of mine.

The worst part of KDE is the how it makes GTK applications look. You’ll have a hard time with Firefox, a really hard time. I tried for around 4 hours changing GTK styles, cycling through many and installing some more, but in the end I had to build Opera-Qt4 and be done with Firefox 3. It were slow too, on my Prescott P4 3.0 GHz system anyway. Will use Firefox again when I get my new PC. Opera is being okayish, I’ve hidden the menus so that it doesn’t look ugly too.

My Desktop

KDE4 Desktop

Konsole still needs a lot of work as a terminal emulator. Kate is awesome and I even configured it for my liking and it was way easier to theme it than it were for Gedit. I’ll quit using Kate in a few days as I learn more of vim (I’ve been very slow on this part) so there goes another KDE dependency.

About the media players, my KDE set had two basic ones included in it – Dragon and Juk. Dragon is a simple Video/CD/DVD player while Juk plays my music files. The quality exhibited by Dragon was far less than what MPlayer could show (I use SMPlayer as my MPlayer frontend) but nevertheless, its basic interface covered many features including video enhancements while playing etc. Juk on the other hand was nice as a media player but I feel it could do better with a differently styled media-browser than the vanilla Winamp style one it uses. Plus since it had no Last.fm integration, I decided not to set it as my default player and continued to use MPD/MPC.

The Control Center has gone away to be replaced with System Settings. It still lacks a switch to take you to root level for modifying certain special properties but that can be done via a sudo command from the command line. Apart from that the entire management application seems fine with a nice new interface for configuring things. I especially like the new color-setting interfaces available across KDE4.

Will be using this for quite some time, seeing how much its improved from KDE 4.0.0, I would be expecting it to get far better over the next 2 releases to become one of the best DE ever. GTK/GNOME seems far behind KDE’s awesomeness and  Qt’s cross-platform power, way far behind.