Most software has code-names for different releases. Lancelot doesn’t, but I’ve decided to dedicate a new tagline to this version – “I just get carried away…”. It is still from the same motion picture as the last one (“In my own idiom” – for Lancelot 1.0).

The news of a new version can never be as grand as the introduction to a new program (especially when a lot of hype preceded it like it was the case for L1.0), so I’ll not bother to make it more grandiose than it is.

Themes

The first thing you’ll notice is that the themes have changed. All themes but Aya which kept its Spartan look.

You can see the Air theme in the main picture above, Slim Glow in the first screenshot and Aya in the second. The other “dark” themes such as Heron and Elegance look similar to S-G.

I’m aware that there will be complaints, so I’ll prepare a “classic” theme pack for the complainers.

Features

There are no ground-braking new features – most of them are related to configuration options. So, if you want to see what’s new in that area, just open the configuration dialogue.

A lot of small improvements have been made – finished keyboard support, some usability improvements, some fixes, better Kopete and KRunner integration, better Parts applet (ok, this one can be considered a grand improvement since the Parts applet has become useful yet again), sorting of the applications in the list according to the XDG specifications…

And, as a topping on a cake, the Contacts section now supports plugins, so you can write them for your favourite mail/chat application. This feature is hidden from the user, and will be until it stabilizes for KDE 4.4.

The continued development – for KDE 4.4

Since the known bugs are sparse (or to be exact, I have only one that I need to investigate), I have continued the real development in a branch in SVN (hard feature freeze is upon us, so I can not do that in the trunk). The liblancelot is now much lighter memory-wise – a couple of bytes per Lancelot::Widget (and that is a lot of bytes per Lancelot application), it is refactored and is a step closer to the API stability and maybe even ABI stability.

That’s all for now – I’m bored and I need to prepare for my talk about Free/Libre software and KDE that is due later today…