The KDE development community has issued the first official KDE 4.1 beta. This release includes the Kontact PIM suite and significant improvements to KDE's Plasma desktop layer. Many of the components in beta 1 are extremely unstable and subject to frequent crashes, but the overall level of polish and functionality in the environment is increasing at an extraordinary pace.

We have been closely watching the evolution of the Plasma interaction layer during the 4.1 development cycle and have seen the addition of many exciting features. There are some particularly intriguing Plasma improvements in beta 1 that deserve scrutiny.

The Plasma-based KDE panel can now be configured interactively with simple drag operations. The user can access the configuration system by clicking on a small button on the right-hand edge of the panel. This will display the panel configuration block and sizer arrows. The user can resize the panel by dragging the blue and green arrows and can change its position along the screen edge by dragging the silver arrow or clicking the alignment buttons. To move the panel to another edge, the user simply clicks and drags the configuration block. This is a big improvement over the previous configuration system which consisted of a simple dialog window.

Although the new system makes it easy to change the panel's width and position, I couldn't figure out how to get it to adjust the panel's height—a task that was relatively easy with the last prerelease that I tested. This is a regression that will likely be fixed before the final release.

Another significant Plasma change in this release is the elimination of desktop icons. In KDE 4.0, the contents of the user's desktop folder were displayed as individual launcher plasmoids on the desktop—a confusing paradigm mismatch that we criticized in our review. That problem is finally resolved in beta 1, which now includes a folder view plasmoid that displays labeled icons for the contents of a specific folder and will launch them when they are clicked.

The Plasma activities system is also starting to come together. Each activity is a group of plasmoids with a particular layout. It's a bit like virtual desktops, but for plasmoids instead of programs. Users can add and view activity groups by zooming out with the Plasma corner menu. Plasmoids can be added to the activity groups while the view is zoomed out. Zooming out further will make it possible to see more groups at once.

Another very significant addition in beta 1 is the Kontact suite, which has finally been ported to KDE 4. Kontact offers a comprehensive set of applications for personal productivity, including support for e-mail, calendaring, contacts, and RSS feeds. I tested several of its features and encountered no significant problems. It seems to be progressing very nicely. There are several other new programs like the Dragon multimedia player and a new printer applet.

KDE's Dolphin file manager also got a big boost with new stuff like support for tabbed file management and full tree mode support. These additions round out Dolphin's feature set very well and make it an exceptionally capable file manager.

KDE 4.1 development is moving at a swift pace and the environment will offer much of the functionality required by average users when it is finally released in late July. Those who want to try it early should check out the KDE4Daily initiative, which offers frequently updated builds that can be tested in a Qemu environment.

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