From February 4th until February 9th I attended a Plasma Mobile sprint in Berlin, Germany. I met a lot of people that share the vision of an open, privacy-friendly mobile platform. However, we all agree that such a platform can only succeed if there are enough people sharing that vision creating suitable apps for it. There already is a nice amount of mobile-friendly Linux apps, many of them created by the KDE Community, but of course we need more :)
Today we released version 1.10 of the KDE Connect Android app. Therefore it’s time again to share what we’ve been working on.
Targeting Android Oreo As of this month app updates uploaded to Google Play need to target Android 8. This has several implications. Targeting Oreo comes with an updated Support Library, which forces us to drop support for Android 4.0 and below. According to our Google Play data this will affect approximately 400 users.
Since a few months KDE Connect has a Telegram group to discuss development. Since the over 100 people joined. I did not expect such an interest in it. Few people asked to have this group bridged to an IRC channel since they prefer IRC over Telegram. I’m happy to announce that we finally made this happen. Let’s celebrate the birth of #kdeconnect on Freenode. You can also access it from matrix.
It’s time for another feature update for KDE Connect! You can now run commands on connected devices from the Plasmoid.
The Dolphin context menu entry for sending files to a connected device has been dropped in favour of a Purpose plugin, which groups nicely with other Share features and supports more apps such as Okular and Spectacle. Albert Vaka added a presentation mode to Android which allows you to control slideshows from your phone.
Hi, For once this is not a post about KDE Connect (at least not directly). Besides KDE Connect I also work on several other KDE projects, one of them being the awesome Purpose framework created by Aleix Pol. After Nate highlighted my latest work on Purpose (the new share menu in Dolphin) in his blog post I received quite some feedback. I’m glad that many people like the idea, but I also received some criticism/suggestions for improvements.
The digital world has changed over the last 10 years. The usage of mobile devices skyrocketed whereas the desktop market is stagnating. The trend is also going towards smaller and convertible devices. The mobile market is controlled by two major corporations. One of them is religiously cutting down your personal freedom and aiming towards a walled garden proprietary ecosystem, the other one is disrespecting your privacy enormously. With Plasma Mobile the KDE community is envisioning a mobile experience that is giving you maximal freedom while ensuring your privacy.
One of KDE’s Community goals for the next years is streamlined onboarding of new contributors. It’s very important that new people regularly join the community for various reasons. First of all, there will always be something to do and the more contributors the merrier! But there are also people becoming very inactive or leaving the community and these people need to be replaced. Furthermore new people bring in new and fresh ideas.
Definitely one of the best use cases of KDE Connect is this: Watching a movie while laying in bed or on the couch and controlling your unreachable computer from your phone without needing to stand up. Thanks to our new media control notification you can pause and skip without even unlocking your phone. But what if the movie is too silent? If your media player is implementing the MPRIS2 specifications you are already lucky and can control your players volume from KDE Connect.
Since my first blog post we got an huge amount of feedback and it’s amazing to see that you are as excited about KDE Connect as we are. This way I want to say “Thank you” for all your kind words and tell you that this kind of positive feedback is what keeps us going. I would also like to share some tips and tricks about KDE Connect that you might not know yet, but first I would like to clear up a common misconception.
After I shared the link to the KDE Connect Development Telegram group almost 20 people joined within 24 hours. I certainly did not expect such a interest in KDE Connect. When I joined the project about a year ago the hardest part for me was setting up a proper development workflow, meaning configuring, building, installing and debugging the application and interacting with git and Phabricator. To ease your start in KDE Connect development I would like to give you the guide I wish I had back then.
