This week in Usability & Productivity, part 55

First I have some exciting personal news to share: I’ve been hired by Blue Systems to work on KDE projects full time as QA manager!

This means I don’t need community sponsorship via Patreon and will be shutting it down after this month. I’ll be keeping the PayPal and LiberaPay links to serve as a sort of “digital tip jar”, but I don’t need longer looking for internet money to support my family. Blue Systems is seeing to that now.

I have a lot of plans for how to polish up KDE software 2019 and I’m super excited to get started with no distractions!

Anyway, let’s move onto week 55 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. I want to give a shout-out to our Breeze icon team, whose members have been just knocking it out of the the park lately. For example Rafael Brandmaier just fixed a 14 year-old bug yesterday ! A lot of the work will show up in Plasma 5.16, but some of it will be visible in upcoming Frameworks releases too. Check out the full Breeze Icons commit log ! Of course we have more than just icons:

New Features

• been rewritten for better usability and consistency with other pages

  The System Settings Colors page has been rewritten for better usability and consistency with other pages (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):

  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Tooltips in GTK 2 apps like GIMP and Inkscape are no longer unreadable when the app is launched by opening a document from the file manager (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• The Date & Time icon is now visible when using Breeze Dark and in System Settings’ tooltips (Rafael Brandmaier, KDE Frameworks 5.55):
  
• On the System Settings Cursors page, the cursor size combobox now reflects your actual cursor size instead of always saying “Resolution Independent” (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Global Menu widget now displays its name when there’s no menu available , which improves the default display and makes it harder to think you’ve accidentally deleted the contents of your panel or something (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Various QML-based System Settings pages are no longer very slow when opened in standalone form using kcmshell5 (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The Analog Clock’s configuration window now has an improved layout and looks good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The button that lets you configure a panel now has a tooltip to make this more obvious (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Desktop Toolbox now shows its own name and better displays the current activity when it’s not in the corner (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Kate now displays a Cancel button to allow you to end long-running tasks such as large search-and-replace operations (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Okular’s Trim tools now have fancy new icons (Rafael Brandmaier and me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved , and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .