KDE 1446 Published by

KDE 4.10 Beta 1 has been released



November 21, 2012. Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed
Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and
feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and
further polishing new and old functionality.

Highlights of 4.10 include, but are not limited to:

* Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces -- Qt Quick is continuing to make its way into
the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE's extensions on top of QtQuick allow
deeper integration with the system and more powerful apps and Plasma
components. Plasma Containments can now be written in QtQuick. Various Plasma
widgets have been rewritten in QtQuick, notably the system tray, pager,
notifications, lock & logout, weather and weather station, comic strip and
calculator plasmoids.

* New Screen Locker -- A new screen locking mechanism based on QtQuick brings
more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop.

* Animated Wallpapers -- Thanks to a new QtQuick-based wallpaper engine,
animated wallpapers are now much easier to create.

* Improved Zooming in Okular -- A technique called tiled rendering, which
internally splits up the document in parts and only renders visible parts
allows Okular to zoom in much more while reducing memory consumption. Okular
Active, the touch-friendly version of the powerful document reader is now part
of KDE SC.

* Faster indexing -- A new indexer allows the Nepomuk semantic engine faster
indexing of files. The new Tags kioslave allows users to browse their files by
tags in any KDE-powered application.

* Color Correction -- Gwenview, KDE's smart image viewer and Plasma's window
manager now support color correction and can be adjusted to the color profile
of different monitors, allowing for more natural representation of photos and
graphics.

* Notifications -- Plasma's notifications are now rendered using QtQuick,
notifications themselves, especially concerning power management have been
cleaned up.

* New Print Manager -- Setup of printers and monitoring jobs was improved
thanks to a new implementation of the Print Manager.

* Kate, KDE's Advanced Text Editor received multiple improvements regarding
user feedback. It is now extensible using Python plugins.
* KTouch -- KDE's touch-typing learning utility has been rewritten and
features a cleaner, more elegant user interface.

* libkdegames improvements -- Many parts of libkdegames have been rewritten,
porting instructions for 3rd party developers are available.

* KSudoku now allows printing puzzles.

* KJumpingCube has seen a large number of improvements making the game more
enjoyable.

More improvements can be found in the 4.10 Feature Plan. As with any large
number of changes, we need to give 4.10 a good testing in order to maintain
and improve the quality and our user's user experience when they get the
update. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because
developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We're counting on
you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release.
Please consider joining 4.10 thoroughly and report any bugs you find to
bugs.kde.org.
  KDE 4.10 Beta 1 released