Software Update: KDE 3.4

After about half a year of development, the KDE organization’s website can now download version 3.4 of the K Desptop Environment, the desktop environment for Unix-like systems. The emphasis in this version is on making the software more accessible. For example, text-to-speech is one of the most eye-catching additions. Below is a summary of the major improvements in this release:

Highlights at a glance

• Text-to-speech system with support built into Konqueror, Kate, KPDF and the standalone application KSayIt
• Support for text to speech synthesis is integrated with the desktop
• Completely redesigned, more flexible trash system
• Kicker with improved look and feel
• KPDF now enables you to select, copy & paste text and images from PDFs, along with many other improvements
• Kontact now supports various groupware servers, including eGroupware, GroupWise, Kolab, OpenGroupware.org and SLOX
• Kopete supports Novell Groupwise and Lotus Sametime and gets integrated into Kontact
• DBUS/HAL support allows to keep dynamic device icons in media:/ and on the desktop in sync with the state of all devices
• KHTML has improved standard support and now close to full support for CSS 2.1 and the CSS 3 Selectors module
• Better synchronization between 2 PCs
• A new high contrast style and a complete monochrome icon set
• An icon effect to paint all icons in two chosen colors, converting third party application icons into high contrast monochrome icons
• Akregator allows you to read news from your favorite RSS-enabled websites in one application
• Juk has now an album cover management via Google Image Search
• KMail now stores passwords securely with KWallet
• SVG files can now be used as wallpapers
• KHTML plugins are now configurable, so the user can selectively disable ones that are not used. This does not include Netscape-style plugins. Netscape plug-in in CPU usage can be manually lowered, and plug-ins are more stable.
• more than 6,500 bugs have been fixed
• more than 1,700 wishes have been fullfilled
• more than 80,000 contributions with several million lines of code and documentation added or changed