Today KDE released the first release candidate for its renewed Workspaces,
Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature
freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further
polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.9 include:

* Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces -- Qt Quick is continuing to make its way into
the Plasma Workspaces, the Qt Quick Plasma Components, which have been
introduced with 4.8, mature further. Additional integration of various KDE
APIs was added through new modules. More parts of Plasma Desktop have been
ported to QML. While preserving their functionality, the Qt Quick
replacements of common plasmoids are visually more attractive, easier to
enhance and extend and behave better on touchscreens.

* The Dolphin file manager has improved its display and sorting and searching
based on metadata. Files can now be renamed inline, giving a smoother user
experience.

* Deeper integration of Activities for files, windows and other resources:
Users can now more easily associate files and windows with an Activity, and
enjoy a more properly organized workspace. Folderview can now show files
related to an Activity, making it easier to organize files into meaningful
contexts.

* Many performance improvements and bugfixes improve the overall user
experience, making the KDE Applications and Workspaces more productive and
fun to use than ever before.


More improvements can be found in the 4.9 Feature Plan. As with any large
number of changes, we need to give 4.9 a good testing in order to maintain and
improve the quality and our user's user experience when they get the update.