minipager in 3.5

as excited as i am over plasma, we do still have to ship a 3.5 and the plasma roadmap gives us till the end of the month to be done with kicker. we're in a feature freeze for kicker right now, though i'm bending the rules waiting on two features that were part of the original feature plan.

but from here on out it's Q/A, bug fixing and finalizing defaults. i'll be in #plasma hosting a kicker bug hunt session on sunday if you care to join. as things settle down it starts to become apparent what kicker will look like in KDE 3.5.

the pager is, for all intents and purposes, feature complete for 3.5. here's a snapshot of it:

the pager has languished in the past as a stable but relatively featureless and not-as-beautiful-as-it-could-be applet. as the pager is part of the default kicker layout, that's not so good. but thanks to the renewed energy around kicker that has changed.

significant changes in 3.5 include:

• drag and drop of windows between desktops and from the taskbar


• option to use the desktop background


• KConfigXT for settings

Matt Broadstone did a bunch of work on the desktop background support and did the KConfigXT stuff, so kudos to Matt. =) there have also been a number of smaller touches like nicer text labels (though the font could use with some nicer size scaling), icons in the window thumbnails, a reworked settings menu (right click -> Show -> *), less flicker when painting, nice highlight of the current desktop (can you guess which desktop i was on in the above shot?) and removal of QPtr* classes in prep for KDE4 porting.

many kicker components have received this kind of luvin since 3.4. this ought to make 3.5 a rather nice release =)