I installed KDE 3.4.0 on my Debian boxes today. There are some minor issues (as is expected with a point-zero release), but I’m very pleased overall.

Here are some of the interesting nooks and crannies I’ve found.

• The kicker (panel) has some very pretty new eyecandy.
  Large, colorful tooltips, with a slick fade-in effect.
• KMail can now show a graphical representation of spam status if fancy headers are enabled.
  
• Kopete offers enhanced KAddressBook integration, including contact photo display.
  
• Konqueror’s new media:/ ioslave shows realtime media status. It currently can’t distinguish between certain kinds of CDs and DVDs (blank and data), but it handled Video DVD, VCD, SVCD, blank CD, and data CD fine. Hopefully, this will allow for better integration with multimedia apps- click a video DVD, VCD, or SVCD, and it plays in Kaffeine. Click a blank CD or DVD, and a K3b CD/DVD project is opened. Click a data CD or DVD, and have it mounted.
  
• Konqueror has a few new visual tweaks, as well. The “Up” button has been moved to the right side of the forward/back buttons, which should help people migrating from other platforms. It also color-codes the Location bar for SSL-enabled sites.
• Konqueror also adds a new Photobook view mode for viewing photo collections.
• KAddressBook has a RSS URI for your contacts. Hopefully, aKregator will be able to import these, or create an auto-updated Contacts folder from them.

All in all, I’m very impressed. KDE 3.4.0 is a worthy upgrade for any current KDE user. It adds a lot of polish to the KDE experience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2005 at 7:23 am and is filed under General, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.