 Okay, hear me out, something I complain actually pretty often about is that we don't have enough KD apps or they're not good enough or they're not consistent in design enough and so on. I do think that KD core applications like Dolphin, GuenView, Ocular, KD and so on are absolutely incredible and would win against any competition on any day, but I don't quite feel the same way on apps that are about some smaller use cases or not as maintained. From that point of view I absolutely loved GNOME's initiative which is called Circle which manages to onboard a lot and I mean a lot of little cute applications that are consistent with their design. I have praised this system in previous videos too though so this shouldn't come as a surprise. However Plasma Mobile and Kuri Gami are changing that and it's not just changing it for mobile phones but for desktops as well. When designing with a phone in mind developers realize that many applications had to be rewritten from scratch or straight up written from scratch simply because there was no alternative that was working well on a mobile phone. That was obviously done in Kuri Gami which is KD's toolkit that best supports I think touchscreens which is totally a big deal on smartphones you know. However Kuri Gami is designed for convergency it won't make apps automatically convergent there are some great desktop only Kuri Gami apps and some great mobile only ones too but it will make your life very easy if you decide to make your mobile application a desktop one as well. So now we're getting lots and lots of originally thought for mobile but you know what this works very well on desktop two applications. In fact most Plasma Mobile applications now are published in the KD Gear updates just like any other application. So when is the next KD Gear update for these applications? Well it's this month though it's on the 20th. However through the monthly blog post of Plasma Mobile developers in March we can get a little bit of a preview on how these applications have been improved for the release and let me tell you it's a juicy update. So without further ado and I mean it's only been like 383 words let's start talking about what's new. So audio tube audio tube is KD's client for youtube music it allows you to listen to music ad free from youtube music just like if you were paying for it which I do by the way. In March there has been a complete redesign of the play queue on desktop it will appear in a nice blurry sidebar with options to clear the queue or mix it up and the biggest surprise for me is that in the mobile phone version of the application it looks awesome. So I mean just look at this piece of drawer it's beautiful for so many reasons. You have the nice shadow on the dialogue but also an even nicer shadow underneath the album art. You have this gray ish header area that just looks slightly skeuomorphic it's just so pretty. It does sadly raise some concerns due to my consistency goalhead in fact we did already have a drawer that pops from the bottom so what was wrong with that one why was a new one designed is it a consistent component that multiple apps can use with this one replace the old one and so on. Luckily enough the consistency goal was replaced with a new goal last October so I can happily ignore all of those questions and just say hey it looks beautiful. If you aren't sold on how pretty audio tube is and if so what is wrong with you you can check out this screenshot which showcases the fact that now audio tube current song album art and artist will be correctly picked up by the desktop and displayed in a widget in the system tree or wherever you want. A lot of features were also added and it's not just design changes and I do mean a lot. Now you can clear the current playlist, clear the search history, there's an about page, you have your favorite songs and most played songs as playlists. It's much lighter on the RAM, you can share songs, you can create your own playlists and so on. It's a lot of things which I did not expect to whole happen in just a month. Phonebook This is a contact application and I won't talk much about it given that this one is probably much more on the mobile phone side of things but I do want to point out that the big redesigns happened here as well and this application is also using the bottom drawer that I mentioned above which makes me think that it's indeed some sort of reusable component. Arianna If you follow my channel, you know about Arianna. Actually, you should know about at least two different Ariannas. This one and this one, Arianna, the KD application, is a project that I started working some months ago with idea to have a NEPA breeder for e-ink devices such as the Pinewood. After a bit, Carl Schran basically took over and managed to implement lots of new features that would have taken me years. Now, there's even more contributors to the application. What's new and cool in March is now Arianna works on Windows and will probably soon land in the Microsoft Store. Given that EpoB readers on Windows are kinda meh, there's hope that Arianna will be used on that operating system too. And as you know, as soon as you start using free and open source software applications, it's only a matter of time before you fully convert to Linux. Also, Arianna is getting quite future proof by now compiling with Qt6, which will come with like KD Plasma 6 as well on all of your desktops. I do have a couple of announcements before I go on and it's big changes for my channel. Well, firstly, I reached 15,000 subscribers, so thank you so much for that. To give back from now on, all of my videos will be available as blog posts as well. And I mean literally word per word. If you just prefer to read, you can click in the first link in the video description or go to blog.nico.law. Also, all of my videos will now have manually written English subtitles and each one will have chapter marks. All of this actually takes effort and money, so I started adding some benefits for patrons as well, such as private kind of podcasts, blog posts and polls. Thank you so much to all the people helping me out with the channel. My goal is 700 bucks each month and it's not easy, but if you can chip in something that would be lovely, otherwise don't worry, it's still lovely. Tokodon Tokodon is a must-do-done client. Just a few months ago, I actually tried out on Plasma Mobile, but sadly it could not fit my use case perfectly back then because it lacked a major feature that it now has, being able to create polls. But of course, it doesn't stop there. The view to compose messages has been redesigned to to make sure that you can see the post that you're replying to. You have settings to filter out certain types of notifications. To be fully honest, on all of my devices, I'm always in do not disturb mode. And finally, there's also support for follow requests. Now, I gotta say that in English, this S at the end of the word, it's always so difficult to pronounce. You can see all of the people who would like to digitally stalk you, and you can just go through the list and click on Deny on every single one, except of course if it's me. Plasma Tube. Well, you can't have a YouTube music KD client without obviously also having a YouTube KD client. And that's Plasma Tube. And you guessed it, this client was also redesigned. Now, the thumbnails have rounded corners, similarly to how YouTube itself does it. And the media player has a completely new look that you can see in these screenshots. I really appreciate the fact that the person who did the redesign, Matthews Brouchard, clearly how not you pronounce it, sorry about that, decided to use one of my videos to showcase the feature. Neochat. This is the matrix client of KD. By the way, all KD communication happens on the matrix servers of KD and sometimes it's bridged to telegram as well. And this makes this client immediately quite important for KD developers. In the latest round of changes, we have that all the status updates, people joining the room, people changing the real names and so on, automatically gets aggregated together, which makes navigating rooms much easier on other matrix clients. Sometimes I have an entire screen just of these status changes. There's a new command to send a knock event to another room, which I just love as an idea. And as KD is working on accessibility, keyboard navigation was also improved significantly. There is no longer an hamburger menu, but a more simple plus icon with just a couple of actions like creating a new room or starting a chat. The video controls of the video sent on matrix now have more options like a volume slider. You can copy images to the clipboard. There are quick formatting options when you select text in the message that you're writing. And finally, the account switcher now has context menu with more options about accounts. This is a lot of stuff. And I know that you might not be directly interested in new chat. After all, not everybody uses matrix. But remember that if anybody works on another chart application, all of these progress can be applied to that chart application as well. So it's making KD future proof even on other type of clients. Power plan. Finally, to showcase just how good Keregami is at making well-designed applications, let me talk about a project that has been posted publicly six hours ago at the time of recording. It's obviously still in the early development stages and such, but look at these screenshots, like come on, this application is meant to help you at not killing your plants, which is a pretty tough goal. But it does so in a way that just makes me go, wow. And yeah, this application was created yesterday. Like the day before yesterday, this didn't exist. And now it exists. I think Keri apps have a bright future, you know? Oh, I forgot to put the lights. Lights.