While one week ago, the KDE Community was announcing the latest 4.2.4 stable version of the popular desktop environment, today marks a new development release of the upcoming 4.3 version. KDE 4.3 boasts a large number of new features and improvements that will surely appeal to a lot of users.

"After the first beta, the focus has now shifted clearly from the implementation of new features to polishing the user experience for the 4.3 release.[...] In the last month, 2991 bugs have been closed and 3008 new bugs opened, meaning that there is a lot of testing and fixing going on." was stated in the official release announcement.

If everything goes according to plan, KDE 4.3 will become stable somewhere near the end of July 2009. The main focus will be around integrating new technologies, including PolicyKit or Geolocation functionalities. Windows will benefit from revamped animations, the Run Command will be more efficient and Plasma will come with a bunch of fresh addons. Of course, thousands of bugs are expected to be addressed and thus hopefully improve the overall stability of KDE.

Improvements in Plasma Desktop and the KWin Window Manager:

· Spacers can be placed on panels;
· Finished tasks will provide notifications with an "Open" option;
· Fading effects for the desktop switcher;
· Sliding animations for windows whenever focus is changed;
· Improved JavaScript API;
· Hovering the cursor over a directory in folder view mode will open a pop-up with its contents;
· Extenders will have grouping support;
· Customizable keyboard shortcuts;
· Elements in the window manager will change with the Plasma theme;
· The clock calendar will also display holidays;
· The desktop and panel toolboxes are now themed using SVG.

KDE 4.3 - Image Courtesy of KDE

The Plasma Addons are a great way to customize KDE in order to get the best functionality out of it. Some of the new Plasmoids that will be available in KDE 4.3 are a funkier system monitor (Bubble Monitor), the Magnifique Plasma magnifier, a Media Player, openDesktop with seamless social networking integration, Remember The Milk for better time management, a system load monitor with a retro look and a very useful Unit Converter. 

The dataengines that will be used in KDE 4.3 have new additions such as Calendar Geolocation, Nepomuk, Open Collaboration Services, Picture of the day, sun positioning and sunrise/sunset times. The Notes applet will be more complete with rich-text editing and text-zooming capabilities and various jobs will now be grouped. Also, the Microblogging Plasmoid will support Identi.ca, the clock is now able to "speak," weather wallpapers will match the actual weather and a fun virus wallpaper will eat your desktop away.

The applications used for PIM (personal information management) functions are also set to bring new features and improvements: Akonadi will be able to sync with Google Calendar, KMail will support inline images and Export and drag & drop are scheduled for the Alarm Notifier, which will also benefit from improved configuration options.

Download KDE 4.3 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.