KDE 4.3 Plasma Overview Screencast

Ho, ho! Finally! The KDE 4.3 Plasma screencast arrives! It's 10:36 in length and covers some of the nice improvements we've in Plasmaland for 4.3, including:

• The new Air theme


• Small panel sizes


• KWin integration


• Stability & performance improvements (over 2300 bugs.kde.org defect reports triaged and closed during the 4.3 alone!)


• New widgets, including social desktop integration, remember the milk and unit converter


• New DataEngines, including Geolocation


• System tray and job notification improvements


• KRunner improvements in looks, speed and usability

The screencast doesn't cover everything new or improved in 4.3 .. that would take at least an hour instead of the ten minutes I spend in that screencast. You can find a more complete changelog here but even that is just the big stuff and doesn't catch the numerous little tweaks and improvements that have ben made.

We're not done, though. Not by a long shot. There are a lot of things the Plasma team still aren't satisfied with and several goals from the original design sketches that we have yet to implement. The good news is that we have plans in place and code underway for the KDE 4.4 release that will address many of these open issues. In my next blog entry on Plasma I'll give an overview of what we're working on, and why, for KDE 4.4.

Until then, you can grab the KDE 4.3 Plasma screencast via BitTorrent.

Update: Please keep seeding the torrent after you've downloaded it if you can. I do have a version of the .ogv on plasma.kde.org and will probably post a link to it eventually via identi.ca, but I'd really like to be kind to the server bandwidth and rely on bittorrent as much as possible.


Update 2: Direct link for those who can't torrent because they have nasty sys admins: plasma_4.3_overview_small.ogv. Over 400 seeders showing up in KTorrent right now for the torrent, though. :)