This week in Usability & Productivity, part 33

Time for your weekly dose of Usability & Productivity ! It’s another big one, and there’s a ton of stuff winding through the review pipeline that didn’t quite make the cut this week. So tune in next week too–but for the moment, check out all these neat improvements:

New Features

• There’s now a new Plasmoid that provides easy access to the screen layout switcher, with a new “Presentation mode” toggle that prevents the screen or computer from going to sleep or turning off (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• The logout screen now displays a a warning when other users are still logged in (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• AppImage apps now get thumbnails (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 18.12.0):
  Getting rid of the unnecessary frame and shadow for these icons is in the works: https://phabricator.kde.org/D15069

Bugfixes

• Open and Save dialogs in non-KDE Qt apps (or apps using a Qt wrapper, as LibreOffice does) now remember the last-used location (David Faure, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
• Fixed a security issue that could allow the last item in the user’s clipboard to be pasted into the lock screen’s password field (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
• Fixed a bug that could cause System Settings to crash when switching tabs on some pages (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Plasma no longer freezes when a media player controllable with the playback status Plasmoid becomes frozen (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plas,a 5.13.5)
• Improved syntax highlighting for SQL , SCSS , and Javascript files (Jonathan Poelen and Nibaldo González, KDE Frameworks 5.50)
• Gwenview’s Crop tool no longer gets partially cut off when toggling the Advanced settings with a narrow window and no longer sometimes selects a random crop preset (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.08.1)

UI Polish & Improvement

• Thumbnails for Windows icons (e.. via WINE) now look much better (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 18.12.0):
  
• The display settings chooser OSD now has prettier, more Breeze-y icons –and they also show up even for users of other icon themes (Philip Stefan, KDE Frameworks 5.50):
  
• The “Properties” menu item in the context menu for desktop icons now has the correct icon (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Konqi now looks good in the “About KDE” dialog when a HiDPI scale factor is being used (me: Nate Graham and Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.50):
  
• Breeze now has an icon for LabPlot files (Matthew Trescott, KDE Frameworks 5.50):
  
• Menu shadows are now created on demand, slightly speeding up application launch times (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Dim Inactive effect now smoothly animates all state transitions (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• The optional non-default “Shade” button in the titlebar now has the same visual behavior as other buttons that toggle between states (Andy Kluger, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Gwenview’s Crop and Reduce Red Eye tools now have improved keyboard navigation and shortcut support (Henrik Fehlauer, KDE Applications 18.08.1)
• Dolphin is now slightly faster to open folders with many items (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 18.12.0
• Dolphin window and tab titles are now identical (David Hallas, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• The Recent Documents view (available by browsing to recentdocuments:/ in Dolphin now only shows actual documents, and automatically filters out web URLs (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.12.0)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved , and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

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