The Plasma Mobile development team continues their efforts to make the KDE interface daily usable on touchable mobile devices. With every major release of KDE, Plasma Mobile gets more new features and performance improvements that bring it closer to what offer Android and iOS.
Earlier this week, version 5.24 of the KDE desktop interface was released, which we touched on the most important new features that it brought in our article about the beta version of it, and today we talk about what's new in this version for the mobile through our review of Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02, which is the Plasma Mobile updates for January to February 2022.
First, the Settings panel underwent a redesign to improve its appearance, gained new media and notification widgets, and tablets got a new landscape layout for this panel. A thorough code cleaning has also been done, and it is now using a better method for detecting flicks, which will provide a smoother gesture experience.
The task switcher has been rewritten to use a single row of thumbnails with gesture support, and the Plasma Mobile development team has fixed bugs in the navigation panel that sometimes caused it to appear gray and in the showing of thumbnails in the task switcher.
The Home screen has received a lot of fixes and improvements in this update, as KRunner now pops up on the home screen when you perform a swipe-down gesture, allowing for easier searching, and the app drawer open/close gesture has been rewritten to fix stutters and make flicks smoother.
Plasma widgets (Plasmoids) and apps on the home screen have also received fixes when placed and removed, and the Startup indicator when launching an app and the task switcher now reuse the home screen window instead of creating new windows, greatly improving the smoothness of animations on Pine Phone.
Settings have a new search feature, as well as a widescreen mode for tablets, and a back button instead of breadcrumbs has been added in the Settings app header.
Calindori app gets a new maintainer, and work has begun on improving the app's UX, PlasmaTube (YouTube app) uses now a bottom toolbar for navigation and has back-button based headers, and Kasts (podcast player) got improved player controls for landscape orientation on mobile.
In Tokodon, file upload and the mobile sidebar handle icon have been fixed. Dialogs that were immediately closing when opened in Recorder have been fixed, and some visual issues when new recordings were being added.
The clock app better supports custom ringtones for alarms, and the UX of list editing and forms in the application has been reworked. In-app dialogs have also been added to control the ringing alarms and timers, rather than being able to do so in notifications only.
Similar to other apps, the Plasma Dialer sidebar button style has been updated to follow the Plasma style and improve page navigation. Settings and About Pages.The application has also got support for choosing phone numbers via the Contacts' menu when there are several numbers for the same contact. A quick dialog has been added to it to clear the call history.
In addition to this, the Dialer app has now a setting and About page and can pause active media players on the device during incoming calls.
The developers have added a desktop user interface to the Angelfish web browser with almost the same set of features as the mobile user interface. As a result, the settings appear in an additional window on the desktop, while still appearing as a page when viewed on mobile devices. In addition, AdBlock Filter List Updater also got some fixes.
Last but not least, NeoChat (a Matrix client) has got support for minimizing the app to the system tray on Startup, as well as support for sharing files directly from NeoChat with other apps and online services, such as Nextcloud, Imgur, etc.
The NeoChat team has also improved internet connection checking, as it now uses a server connection instead of a global network connection, and a feature has been implemented that allows users to add labels to accounts, making it easy to use NeoChat with multiple accounts.
