September news from Plasma Mobile: Virtual Keyboard, Lockscreen, KWeather and more
The Plasma Mobile team presented the September updates on their blog. This month’s update includes various improvements and bug fixes to file dialogs, the virtual keyboard, the lock screen, various applications, and updates from KDE’s annual conference, Akademy.
Virtual Keyboard
Plasma Mobile changed the virtual keyboard to maliit2. Due to this change, several changes have been made to the various repositories:
- Aleix Pol integrated the input-method-unstable-v1 protocol in kwayland-server and kwin.
- Aleix Pol also switched Plasma Mobile to use maliit instead of the QtVirtualKeyboard in plasma-phone-components
- Bhushan Shah created a patch that fixed an issue in the maliit-keyboard to make it use the correct wayland shell-integration plugin.
- Marius Gripsgard from UBports fixed the maliit-keyboard for usage under wayland .
- Marco Martin created a patch that resizes the virtual keyboard if the screen resolution changes.
- Marius Gripsgard from UBports updated the input-method area even when the keyboard is hidden, which provides a smoother animation.
- Bhushan Shah created a patch that sends surrounding text and content type hints to the input method.
- Bhushan Shah created a patch that closes the keyboard when the focused text input goes away.
- Bhushan Shah added text-input-v3 support in kwayland-server and kwin, enabling virtualkeyboard for GTK3 applications.
The new virtual keyboard has a few minor issues, but Plasma Mobile Team plans to fix them in the coming days.
Lockscreen
Devin Lin has rewritten the lockscreen and merged the changes.
The main time and date text has been shortened and resized to take up less screen space. A new tablet layout has been added so that everything scales nicely on different display sizes.
A new keyboard with smears has also been added. This improves its appearance, and also shows consistent sizes for different display sizes. An indicator panel has been added to the top of the lock screen. Very basic notifications have also been added to the lock screen.
KClock
KClock has been split into a daemon and a client application to reduce memory consumption by constantly having the full qml runtime in the background. The timer page has been rewritten to use smooth animations. Also fixed issues with the counters causing crashes.
KWeather
KWeather’s development team is working on adapting the application to the functionality of its Android / iOS counterparts. Currently, work is underway to create an animated background for various weather conditions, with the possibility of using the current flat style as well. Weather alerts are also planned. This shouldn’t affect those of you who are using the stable version, but the Plasma Mobile neon image is updated daily so the plasmoid and other stuff can break.
The entire article about the September update of Plasma Mobile here: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2020/10/09/plasma-mobile-update-september.html
