KDE 4 will be released in the next months, and most of the developers focus on polishing. At the same time, the big 3rd party KDE applications are ported to KDE 4.
Plasma drag&drop
During the Plasma development Aaron Seigo mentioned that the final version of Plasma will allow it to the user to drag&drop Plasmoids between the “task bar” and the desktop. While the coding style for such applets was already available the actual implementation was still missing in Plasma’s task bar. This changed now:
Yesterday, Aaron landed a series of larger changes in plasma, making it possible to drag applets onto the panel.
So in he future there will be no difference between Plasmoids on your desktop and Plasmoids on your task bar. You can drag&drop them from one to another, and will even take over a design to fit the new environment (actually I’m not sure if all Plasmoids will support this or only these which provide a design for both environments).
While this might not make that much sense for big Plasmoids like image viewers it makes a lot of sense for clocks, feed readers, commit readers, etc.
Digikam multiple storages
KDE 4 is a project which tries to provide a fertile ground to other, 3rd party developers. Therefore the adoption of KDE 4 by these developers is important and also shows if KDE is proceeding in the right direction.
Digikam is one of these 3rd party programs which are ported to KDE 4 now. It progresses well, and recently added an important new feature: multiple storage places. With the KDE 4 release of Digikam it will be able to not only manage images in one certain place but also images on DVDs, network storages, etc.:
These collection types are able to use:
- Local drive.
- Remote drive (NFS/Samba) previously mounted in local file system.
- Removable drive as CD/DVD/USB hard drive.
This makes it much easier to backup images but still manage them with Digikam.
Writing about 3rd party apps: K3B is also ported these days, but the release date is not set yet.
