On January 18th, KDE released the third release candidate (RC3) for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

Highlights of the 4.10 releases include:

Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces -- Qt Quick is continuing to make its way into Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE's extension on top of Qt Quick, allows deeper integration with the system, as well as more powerful apps and Plasma components. Plasma Containments can now be written in QML (the declarative language in Qt Quick). Various Plasma widgets have been rewritten in QML. Many performance, quality and usability improvements make Plasma Desktop and Netbook Workspaces easier to use.

New Screen Locker -- A new screen locking mechanism based on Qt Quick brings more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop.

Animated Wallpapers -- Thanks to a new Qt Quick-based wallpaper engine, animated wallpapers are now easy to create.

Improved Zooming in Okular -- A technique called tiled rendering allows Okular to zoom in closely while reducing memory consumption. Okular Active, the touch-friendly version of the powerful document reader, is now part of the KDE combined releases.

Faster indexing -- Improvements in the Nepomuk semantic engine allow faster indexing of files. The new Tags kioslave allows users to browse their files by tags in any KDE-powered application.

Color Correction -- Gwenview, KDE's smart image viewer, and the KWin window manager all now support color correction and can be adjusted to the color profiles of different monitors, making for more consistent representation of photos and graphics.

Notifications -- Plasma's notifications are now rendered using Qt Quick. Notifications themselves, especially power management, have been improved.

New Print Manager -- Printer set up and job monitoring have been improved thanks to a new implementation of the Print Manager.

Kate, KDE's Advanced Text Editor, received multiple improvements based on user feedback. It is now extensible using Python plugins.

KTouch -- KDE's touch-typing learning tutor has been rewritten and features a clean, elegant user interface.

KDE Games improvements -- Many parts of libkdegames have been rewritten. Porting instructions for third party developers are available.

KSudoku now allows for puzzles to be printed.

KJumpingCube has seen many improvements that make the game more enjoyable.

More improvements can be found in the 4.10 Feature Plan. We want to give this release a good testing in order to continue to improve the quality and user experience of KDE software.

Testing

KDE is running an extra detailed Pre-Release Testing Program throughout the 4.10 process. To participate, get the latest KDE 4.10. Instructions for installing the latest test release can be found here. Some areas of KDE are getting special testing attention this time around. We have testing checklists and recommendations for special attention on the wiki.

The KDE Pre-Release Testing Program is a way for anyone to contribute to the quality of KDE software. You can make a difference by carefully testing the programs that are part of the KDE 4.10 Release Candidate and assist developers by identifying legitimate bugs. This means higher quality software, more features and happier users and developers.

The Pre-Release Testing Program is structured so that any KDE user can participate, regardless of skill level. If you want to be part of this quality improvement program, please contact the Team on the IRC channel #kde-quality on freenode.net. The Team Leaders want to know ahead of time who is involved in order to coordinate testing activities and make the best use of people's time. They are also committed to having this project be fun and rewarding. After checking in, you can install the beta through your distribution package manager. The KDE Community wiki has instructions. This page will be updated as packages for other distributions become available. With the Release Candidate installed, you can proceed with testing. Please contact the Team on IRC #kde-quality if you need help getting started.