Feature Guide for 4.6 Releases
Would you like some publicity for your KDE application, library or feature? Do you want to help promote KDE software? If so read on. Actually read on anyway: there’s cute picture of a pony a bit later as a reward.
Background to the Feature Guide
Early next year, KDE will release new versions of the Plasma workspaces, many of our applications and the KDE Platform that makes the rest possible. You may remember that for our 4.4 releases we had a feature guide that gave a nice visual description of the new features. This helps existing and potential users of KDE software see what is cool in the new releases and gets picked up by other news outlets. Getting your app or feature into this guide is a Good Thing.
However, preparing the guide takes a lot of time. We did it for the 4.4 releases, but for 4.5, with Akademy happening too, we did not have time. Normally we create the guide by looking at the release Feature Plan and trawling through developer blogs that appeared on Planet KDE.
How developers and application teams can help in a few minutes
Please check the 4.6 Feature Plan and update it to reflect what will be getting into the 4.6 releases. This is very important as it also helps to pick items for the release announcement
Also, if you can spare a few minutes, please add your features to our shared document on KDE’s Etherpad (you don’t need an account). If you can write a description of the feature, that is great. If not, just give it a name and provide a link to a relevant blog post and/or screenshot and we’ll do the rest. You don’t need to worry about your English skills or spending time making it read well (unless you want to). The Promo team can take care of that for you.
Just listing your features and providing links to info will help us hugely. You know what is new in your app/library for SC 4.6 – we do not and would have to search for features and maybe miss yours.
You want to be a KDE Promoter?
Of course, you don’t have to be a developer or attached to one of the development teams to help with this. Anyone can find features in the Feature Guide, look through blogs and add the information to the shared document. You can also expand and improve what other people have written. Etherpad has a full revision history so you won’t accidentally break stuff.
If you are interested in this, please also drop us a mail on kde-promo@kde.org to say hi, tell us who you are and ask any questions. Or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly using the comments below or contact details on the ‘about’ page.
A team effort
Last time we got several people involved in writing the Feature Guide:
- Aron Asor
- Carl Symons
- Jos Poortvliet
- Justin Kirby
- Luca Beltrame
- Ricky Laishram
- Sebastian Kügler
- Vivek Prakash
- Other contributors who did not get properly credited
If you edit the doc, add your name to the list of authors at the end and we’ll give you a mention in the final feature guide.
A cute pony
I promised, so I deliver (image courtesy of Katie@!)
Cute Pony
Are there just feature targets but also stability and quality targets e.g. regarding krazy2 issue reduction, cross-plattform compilation, more complete support of languages?
I’m not aware that there’s one public, central list. It would be useful in fact to have such a list for the release announcements in which of course we talk about significant bugfixes too.
Of course, bugfix and stability improvements are done in the monthly updates, same for languages. The feature list not only helps from the promo side, but helps planning so the various teams know what each other are doing.
The Best feature to include, in my opinion, would be to substantially replicate the wonderfully intuitive KDE3 user interface. The new interface is non-intuitive, hard to master, and varies according to distro.
Is there anything stopping you setting up a KDE3-style interface using Plasma Desktop?
It won’t make the feature guide as this has been possible since early in the SC4 releases (desktop as folderview let’s you scatter icons everywhere, you can have a KDE3 style start menu, have superkaramba style widgets on the desktop, use Konqi as your file manager…)
Please fix
1) Strigi/Nepomuk indexing problems.
2) KDE taskbar trying to stay on top when playing a movie with smplayer or trying to play a game with wine .
Thank u!
PD: where can i post this bugs so a developer can address them?
https://bugs.kde.org/
And as a general comment, I’m asking here about features that are done, not features/bugfixes that people would like. The bug tracker is the right place for those.
And what about old KDE SC feature tables?
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.5_Feature_Plan
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.4_Feature_Plan
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.3_Feature_Plan
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.2_Feature_Plan
they need a great washing machine 😉
Does it matter to have them, or are you saying they should be updated? Really they are to track what happens in each release, so even if a feature planned for SC 4.4 was implemented in SC 4.5 it seems ok to have it as TODO in the 4.4 feature plan.
Hopefully, those that do not get done each time are added to the plan for next time, or dropped for some good reason.
mmm, I don’t knew this track function, but is not easy track with separated tables.
Maybe is a interesting (and great) job make a KDE feature historic table, to watch when each feature is released and when (and why) dropped, features in progress and future possible features….
sometimes a global view is helpful for planing, work or marketing. or not, I don´t know.
Kmail port to Akonadi is finished?
the tables says no, but…. the work is done.
There are probably better ways of doing this. I’m not a huge fan of wikis in general for organisation – they can be good for documentation as wikipedia and userbase etc show.
Actually, Aaron blogged about this kind of stuff [1] and it is something we should think about as there is a bit of suck in a lot of the stuff we are using. However, it kinda works and it is what we have so it is what we use :-/