There are two reasons for the “half” in the release name:

The first is that I made the requirements of M3 release (contacts section) before making the parts applet more powerful

And the second is that the parts applet is now a very neat thingie, but not completed yet.

The new contacts section contains unread mail list, and the list of Kopete contacts you have seen before. The old code for Kopete integration was lost, so it had to be rewritten.

Since Kopete’s D-Bus interface still leaves much to be desired, the list in Lancelot is not real time, but is based on polling at certain intervals of time. Also, there is no way to retrieve whether the contact is online, away or something. (fortunately there is a way to tell if it is offline)

KMail is much better because it notifies Lancelot when new mail arrives. It still has some polling, but it works much better than Kopete contacts.

Parts applet

Although you still can not add the search box and application browser to the desktop, Parts applet has been revamped. Now, you can place it in the panel - it then behaves like the Device Notification applet.

Also, now is possible to add multiple lists to one applet which you can see in the screenshot:

It somewhat resembles the currently developed (a Summer of Code project) concept of Plasma’s Extenders (the most requested plasma feature TM), but, obviously, works only on Lancelot’s items. With the release of Extender-enabled Plasma (KDE 4.2 probably), you’ll see more Lancelot Parts improvements.

Bug squashing

The last, but not the least important part is that a couple of bugs were fixed. A few crashes related to KRunner integration (reported by Sergey Sedlovsky) and a couple of wishlist/behaviour glitches are gone. I have to thank Josh Rickmar for posting a couple of very pedantic bug reports at BKO.

p.s. If the trunk version looks like it is broken, it is only because of the theme - I’ll port the theme from 4.1 branch when it is finished.