This Month in KDE Apps
After a long pause, welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (more or less) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps. Due to my vacation, this issue covers the past 4 weeks.
Creative Applications
Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom
Wolthera van Hövell continued to improve the text rendering in Krita. She wrote a very detailed blog post about font metrics. She implemented the css-text-decor-4 spec for text decoration (Link), implemented css-inline-3 and SVG2 spec for the baseline handling (link).
Mathias Wein fixed various bugs with the color palette editing. (Link)
The port to Qt6 is still ongoing, Freya Lupen ported the Python plugins integration to PyQt6 (link), and Joshua Goins fixed a crash in the thumbnailer (link).
Finally, Nicolas Fella made it possible to run Krita natively on Wayland (instead of using XWayland). Note that this is still not officially supported and should only be used for development purposes. (Link)
Kdenlive Video editor
Balooii made various parts of the application use the system color (25.08.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4).
Atelier 3D Printer Host
Mark Penner ported Atelier and the supporting library AtCore to Qt6/Kf6. (Link 1 and link 2)
Multimedia Applications
Photos Image Gallery
Carl Schwan changed the color of the sidebar to now be the same as other KDE/Kirigami applications (25.08.0. link).
Gwenview Image Viewer
Joshua Goins fixed Gwenview not being able to open OpenRaster (ora) files (25.08.0. link).
AudioTube YouTube Music app
Tobias Fella ported the application to use modern QML tooling, improving the performance and making the code more maintainable (25.08.0. link).
Dragon Player Play video files and streams
Harald Sitter ported Dragon Player to Kirigami. (25.08.0. link)
Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio
Pedro Nishiyama added support for the MediaSession API on Android. This means the music currently playing is now properly displayed as a notification. (25.08.0. Link)
This is how this looks on Android 16...
... and on Android 11.
Travel Applications
KTrip Public transport navigator
Carl Schwan and Volker Krause continued working on unifying KTrip's and Itinerary's user interface, and moving the shared code to KPublicTransport. This week the backend selector was unified (25.08.0. Link 1 and link 2), along with the location search (link).
KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant
Volker Krause added an option to select a OpenRailwayMap map styles for the live status map view. This provides valuable information for any train nerds and includes the following 5 variants: infrastructure, signalling, max speed, electrification, and gauge. (Link)
When available, Volker also made the ticket validity times visible. (Link)
Aside from benefiting from more shared code with KTrip, Itinerary received a few improvements too. Carl Schwan ported the health certificates details from FormLayout to FormCard (25.08.0. Link).
Carl also improved the statistics page to handle the case where no country was visited on a specific year. (25.08.0. Link)
As always, there are some improvements regarding ticket extraction, with Kai Uwe Broulik adding support for Gastronovi, a digital management system for restaurants (25.08.1. Link); Volker Krause adding support for Kolumbus ferries (Link); David Pilarčík adding support for EventLook and Tootoot.fm (Link, link 2 and Preemly.eu (link 3); and Carl Schwan adding support for British Airways confirmation emails (Link).
Volker also improved the existing support for ÖBB NightJet tickets (Link), generic UIC 918.3 tickets (Link), and DB regional tickets (link).
Qt
From the Qt side, Matthias Rauter published a blog post about hardware accelerated vector map rendering in Qt. This could become very useful for Itinerary and KTrip.
System Applications
Dolphin Manage your files
Akseli Lahtinen fixed the background of the new status bar when using a style different from Breeze. (25.04.01. Link)
Felix Ernst added Filelight to the Tools menu. (25.08.0. Link)
Felix also fixed the session restore functionality. (25.04.1. link)
Journald Browser Browser for journald databases
Andreas Cord-Landwehr fixed a race condition when using KJournalD with remote devices. (Link)
Educational Apps Applications
WordQuiz Flash card trainer
Tobias Fella adopted modern QML declaration in WordQuiz to improve its performance (25.08.0. Link).
KStars Desktop Planetarium
Hy Murveit added two new guiders to KStars: Linear and Hysteresis. Linear is a conservative guide algorithm that uses a little of the history to advise guiding pulses. Hysteresis uses a fraction of the last guide correction combined with the current one. (Link)
Office Applications
Marknote Write down your thoughts
Valentyn Bondarenko fixed the formatting bar overlapping with the content (Link) and improved the performance by minimizing unnecessary UI updates (Link).
KMyMoney Personal finance manager based on double-entry bookkeeping
Thomas Baumgart added an option to select the format used by backups of KMyMoney (Link) and protected opening multiple files at the same time by using a lockfile (Link). He also made it possible to choose the price source for the foreign exchange company OFX (Link).
Social Applications
Tokodon Browse the Fediverse
Joshua Goins fixed a few issues when encountering a login issue (25.08.0. Link). The list of favorited posts is now correctly updated when switching accounts and Tokodon correctly switches to the homepage of the newly selected user.
Joshua also added placeholders for empty followers/following list (25.08.0. link).
Joshua improved the push notification support, notably it is now using content encryption (25.08.0. link)
NeoChat Chat on Matrix
Tobias Fella fixed a crash during logout (25.04.01. link).
James Graham did a lot of background works splitting the application in many small QML modules.
Browsers
Angelfish Webbrowser for mobile devices
Yelsin Sepulveda added an option to disable the Adblock (25.08.0. link). Yelsin also added more shortcuts: Ctrl+W to Close Current Tab and Ctrl+Shift+O to toggle the bookmarks (link) and added a right click menu to the history buttons to quickly navigate to a specific entry in the history of the current tab.
Carl Schwan ported the application to modern QML registration (25.08.0. link).
Carl also ported the authentification dialog from FormLayout to FormCardDialog (25.08.0. link).
And similarly Carl also refreshed the print dialog (25.08.0. link).
(A preview of the PDF should be displayed on the left but it seems there is an issue somewhere on the stack).
Utilities
KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices
Albert Vaca Cintora replaced the KDE Connect icon (link).
Christoph Wolk improved the keyboard navigation with arrow keys (link).
On the Android side, Vala Zadeh improved the reliability of sharing URLs with offline devices (link).
Barcode Scanner Scan and create QR-Codes
Jonah Brüchert switched the navigation mechanism of Qrca to use a bottom tab bar also on desktops. (25.08.0. Link)
Recorder Audio recorder
Carl Schwan ported the context menu of KRecorder to the new convergent option. (25.08.0. Link)
KDE PIM
Allen Winter reduced the size of the icons in the agent creation dialog (Link), and additionally, made a serie of improvements to the ical resource configuration dialog (link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4).
Tobias Fella fixed loading the colors from the Plasma PIM Calendar integration which was previously chosen randomly. (Link)
KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application
Allen also improved the calendar removing flow in KOrganizer, in particular handling some edge cases which corrupted calendars (link).
Third Party Applications
Joshua Goins announced his new project: a BlueSky client called Morpho.
…And Everything Else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
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