KDE 4.4.0 Software Compilation Codenamed Caikaku Released

The KDE developers have announced the latest release of the KDE Software Compilation branch. The newest release code named “Caikaku” is the 4th major release under KDE4, and brings in 7293 bug fixes along with a wealth of new features, and application sets, including a new authentication framework.

Here’s some info from their release notes:

You can read about some of my earlier KDE blog posts.

Here are some of the new features as reported in the release announcement:

• Plasma Netbook debuts in 4.4.0. Plasma Netbook is an alternative interface to the Plasma Desktop, specifically designed for ergonomic use on netbooks and smaller notebooks. The Plasma framework has been built from the beginning with non-desktop target devices in mind as well. Plasma Netbook shares many components with the Plasma Desktop, but is specifically designed to make good use of the small space, and to be more suitable also for touchscreen input. The Plasma Netbook shell features a full-screen application launcher and search interface, and a Newspaper which offers many widgets to display content from the web and small utilities already known from Plasma Netbook’s sibling.
• The Social Desktop initiative brings improvements to the Community widget (formerly known as Social Desktop widget), allowing users to send messages and find friends right from within the widget. The new Social News widget shows a livestream of what is going on in the social network of the user and the new Knowledge Base widget allows users to search for answers and questions from different providers including openDesktop.org’s own knowledge base.
• The new tabbing feature in KWin allows the user to group windows together in a tabbed interface, making the handling of large numbers of applications easier and more efficient. Further improvements to window handling include snapping windows to a side of the screen and maximizing windows by dragging them. The KWin Team also cooperated with the Plasma developers on further improving the interaction between the workspace applications bringing smoother animations and increased performance. Finally artists can more easily develop and share themes for the windows thanks to the development of a more configurable window decorator with the ability to use scalable graphics.
• With this release of the KDE Software Compilation the GetHotNewStuff interface has been heavily improved, the result of a long term design and planning process. This framework was envisioned to allow the massive third-party contributor community in KDE to connect more easily with the millions of users of their content. Users can download data like new levels in KAtomic, new stars or functionality-enhancing scripts right from within the application. New are social features like commenting on and rating content and becoming a fan of a product which will show the user updates to those products in the Social News widget. Users can Upload the results of their own creativity to the web from several applications, eliminating the boring process of packaging and manually uploading to a website.
• Two other long-term projects by the KDE community come to fruition in this release. Nepomuk, an international research effort financed by the European Community, has reached the point of sufficient stability and performance. Dolphin’s integration of desktop search makes use of this Nepomuk’s semantic framework to aid the user in locating and organizing his data. The new timeline view shows recently used files organized chronologically. Meanwhile the KDE PIM team has ported the first applications to make use of the new data storage and retrieval system, Akonadi. The KDE addressbook application has been rewritten, sporting a new easy 3-pane interface. A more substantial migration of applications to these new technologies will come in future releases of the KDE Software Compilation.
• Besides the integration of these major technologies the various developer teams have improved their applications in many ways. The KGet developers have added support for digital signature checking and downloading files from multiple sources and Gwenview now includes an easy to use photo import tool. Furthermore, new or entirely reworked applications see the light of day in this release. Palapeli is a puzzle game which lets the user solve jigsaw puzzles on his or her computer. Users can also create and share their own puzzles. Cantor is an easy and intuitive interface to powerful statistical and scientific software (R, SAGE, and Maxima). The KDE PIM suite introduces Blogilo, a new blogging application.
• The underlying infrastructure of the KDE software has had a number of significant upgrades. First of all, Qt 4.6 introduces support for the symbian platform, a new animation framework, multitouch and better performance. The Social Desktop technology introduced in the previous release has been improved with a central identity management and introduces libattica as a transparent web-service access library. Nepomuk now makes use of a much more stable backend, making it a the perfect choice for anything metadata, search or indexing related in applications.
• With KAuth, a new authentication framework is introduced. KAuth provides secure authentication and related user interface elements to developers who want to run tasks with elevated privileges. On Linux, KAuth uses PolicyKit as a backend, providing seamless cross-desktop integration. KAuth is already used in a few selected dialogs in System Settings and will be further integrated into the KDE Plasma Desktop and the KDE Applications over the next months. KAuth supports granting and revoking fine-grained authorization policies, caching of passwords and a number of dynamic UI elements providing visual hints for use in applications.
• Akonadi, the Free Desktop groupware cache sees its introduction into KDE Applications with 4.4.0. The address book application delivered with KDE SC 4.4 is the first KDE Application to make use of the new Akonadi infrastructure. KAddressbook supports local addressbooks as well as various groupware servers. KDE SC 4.4.0 marks the beginning of the Akonadi-era in KDE SC, with more applications to follow in upcoming releases. Akonadi is slated to be the central interface for emails, contacts, calendaring data and other personal information. It acts as a transparant cache to email-, groupware-servers and other online resources.

They also released a nice feature guide which tells you a bit more about the KDE Development and move.



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