14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project just announced the immediate availability for download of the first RC of KDE Software Compilation 4.10 branch.
KDE SC 4.10 RC1 arrives as a surprise, but the huge number of changes and new features has turned it in an early Christmas present.
“KDE already improved the quality noticably. Further polishing new and old functionality will lead to a rock-stable, fast and beautiful release in January, 2013,” stated the official announcement.
Highlights of KDE 4.10 RC 1:
• Plasma Containments can now be written in QtQuick. Various Plasma widgets have been rewritten in QtQuick, notably the system tray, pager, notifications, lock & logout, weather and weather station, comic strip and calculator plasmoids; • A new Screen Locker has been implemented and it's based on QtQuick, bringing more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop; • A new QtQuick-based wallpaper engine is now available and animated wallpapers are easier to create; • A technique called tiled rendering, which internally splits up the document in parts and only renders visible parts allows Okular to zoom in much more while reducing memory consumption; • A new indexer allows the Nepomuk semantic engine faster indexing of files; • Gwenview, KDE's smart image viewer and Plasma's window manager now support color correction; • Plasma's notifications are now rendered using QtQuick; • Setup of printers and monitoring jobs was improved; • Kate, KDE's Advanced Text Editor received multiple improvements regarding user feedback and now can receive Python pluings; • KDE's touch-typing learning utility has been rewritten; • KSudoku now allows printing puzzles; • KJumpingCube has seen a large number of improvements making the game more enjoyable.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements.
Download KDE 4.10 RC1 sources right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.