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KDE’s Plasma Mobile UI for mobile devices got a lot of improvements and many app updates in February 2021, as the Plasma Mobile team shared their work during the past month.
In February 2021, Plasma Mobile received an improved homescreen to make the drawer behave as an applications list, an initial implementation of horizontal pages for widgets and apps, as well as support for those who want to create new custom launchers.
The revamped homescreen is pretty neat and you can check it out in action on PINE64’s PinePhone Linux phone in the video below, courtesy of Plasma Mobile developer Marco Martin who did all the awesome work.
Plasma Mobile’s Settings for changing the appearance of the UI were improved as well last month as developers Marco Martin and Bhushan Shah removed the appearance KCM in favor of the desktop KCMs. In addition, Devin Lin added a theme selector to the virtual keyboard settings.
Numerous Plasma Mobile app updates are here as well to provide you with a much better Linux mobile experience. For example, the Plasma Dialer app can now send DTMF tones during a call or for navigating the menus of certain automated calling systems, as well as USSD requests, which is used for requesting the current pre-paid balance from the mobile phone operator.
“The new features required not only work on the Plasma Dialer side, but also work on the underlying software stack,” explained the devs. “Several patches have been produced that have been shared among several mobile Linux distributions or if possible directly in the upstream software.”
Other updated apps in Plasma Mobile include KWeather, which now displays local time on the forecast page and features a much smoother location drag animation, Kalk, which now offers improved syntax rules for math expressions and a redesigned interface, and KClock, which received improvements to the stopwatch page to let you see the progress of the current lap and support for persistent alarms during reboot.
Moreover, the Angelfish web browser now lets you open downloaded files in external apps and can open all HTTPS and HTTP urls, not only HTML pages, Alligator RSS reader now lets you adjust the font size, and Koko photo manager now features a built-in image editor and a prettier sidebar.
The Calindori calendar app now supports attendees management, lets you directly open calendar files and links, import tasks and events from files to any existing calendar, and export calendar data. The app also features a new tab-based design for the event and task editor pages, as well as much-improved week and day views.
Last but not least, Plasma Mobile now comes with the latest NeoChat Matrix client, an improved spacebar that now correctly displays messages with an alphabetical sender address, a greatly improved Plasma Discover package manger, and an improved login and account creation pages for the Keysmith time and hash-based OTP generator.
For more details on Plasma Mobile’s updates in February 2021, check out this announcement with screenshots.
Last updated 3 years ago
