The text for the announcement is available here: https://notes.kde.org/p/applications_17.12.0_announcement

Pinging @ngraham @kossebau @knauss @mlaurent @aacid @ltoscano @rkflx @mardelle @heikobecker in case they want to review it and make sure their work is communicated as intended.

Special thanks to @skadinna for her feedback and @zimmerman for her help on writing it.

Thanks for working on the announcement text!

@neofytosk If you want, I can create more up-to-date variants of the screenshots for KTextEditor Preview Plugin and KUIViewer live preview plugin you listed as possible images.
So tell what you would like to see improved in the screenshot, and I would take it into account tonight. Would upload to share.kde.org, where shall I note the link then?

"[...] and Kate has a new Preview plugin that allows you to see a live preview of the text document in the final format."
hm, as developer/author of that feature I am surely biased, but I think that lost half of the meat. For one it would be good to have it mentioned that this plugin is also ready to be used in KDevelop (actually was it done for KDevelop and only shared to Kate). For the other would it good to note the technical details that the actual preview is delegated to further plugins, which are not part of Kate or new here. But instead reusing existing software. So users have a better idea what to expect and/or to here.

What about this, still short and compact enough?
"[...]. Kate has a new Preview plugin that allows you to see a live preview of the text document in the final format, applying any available KParts plugins (e.g. for Markdown, SVG, Dot graph, Qt UI, or patches). That plugin also works in KDevelop."

@kossebau regarding the images, a screenshot representative of what the plugin does/how it helps users/devs should be fine imo. Feel free to update the link to the new image directly on the pad. I don't have access to publish the announcement myself, so I put the links for images there for editors to choose from. I've already updated the plugin description as you provided it, thanks for taking the time.

Keep up the good work!

If there is need to create screentshots for any new feature in kontact just ping me or @dvratil

@knauss @dvratil Dolphin got some user-facing changes that would be nice to highlight with screenshots--in particular the saved search UI. There's an animated GIF showing the feature available on https://phabricator.kde.org/D8454; would be great if we could display a nicer and more professional version of that (or just static images, that's fine too).

@ngraham dvrail and me are kontact devs. And at least for me I don't have a master dolphin running - so I can't help creating a screenshot for dolphin features, sorry.

Thanks, https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-17.12.0.php

I made some minor changes, please review before I mark it invisible again.

EDIT: No screens yet, I will have to check how to best add them. I am not a web designer, though, so if someone else beats me to it, the better :)

But I wanted the text committed today, so translaters have a day to translate.

"the rendering of documents that were slow to load has been accelerated"

that is not true, it shows the partial rendering earlier so you see things are happening, but its not faster.

Please fix.

Dolphin and Gwenview text looks great to me, @cfeck.

@cfeck fine from my side too

In T7467#120474, @aacid wrote:

"the rendering of documents that were slow to load has been accelerated"

that is not true, it shows the partial rendering earlier so you see things are happening, but its not faster.

In fact, it is slower, but let's not focus on that :)

How about this:

…and documents that take a long time to display render progressively to the screen.

There is also a comparison video. Let me know if you need a slower or otherwise different version, then I could record something like I did for D8379#164630 (but not those, as they show bugs…).

Smaller things to fix:

• Ark zip support → Ark's zip support
• Juk → JuK, Kget → KGet, Kmix → KMix, Kmouth → KMouth
• KStars and has → KStars has

Thanks @cfeck for moving this forward. =)

Kudos to everyone for the feedback and of course the hard work you put into this release.

And yeah, it would be nice in the future to include some screenshots and videos of new features when this is possible. They will make the Applications announcements more visually pleasing and informative.

@apol and @colomar and I were discussing in the #discover-design Telegram room how release notes are presented in Discover and it turned into a larger conversation about the merits of Appstream descriptions. If we include description fields in the <release> tags for our apps' AppStream metadata, then our Discover users will get nice changelogs in the UI. We're hoping to take the lead here with KDE apps, and if it's not too late, we'd like to give this a shot for 17.12.

Relevant documentation: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#sect-Metadata-GenericComponent (scroll down to "<releases/>)

The release is tomorrow, it's obviously too late. Besides breaking the string freeze one day doesn't even allow for the translation roundtrip and get the translations back to the json file

OK, thanks for the info. Maybe next time!

In T7467#120426, @neofytosk wrote:

@kossebau regarding the images, a screenshot representative of what the plugin does/how it helps users/devs should be fine imo. Feel free to update the link to the new image directly on the pad. I don't have access to publish the announcement myself, so I put the links for images there for editors to choose from.

Gah, I sadly did not get to create some updated screenshot (something broke for logging in to my show room user session, created for screenshots with default Plasma settings, and last nights did not manage to fix it). So the old screenshots for the plugins will have to do sadly (and yes, my normal users setups are too customized and then do not have access to the custom builds).

@kossebau no worries. =) I hope you manage to resolve your issues soon.

More images, gifs etc, are always welcome, so whenever you all have something to showcase, do share it so it can be included.

@ngraham that level of automation would be great, so any potential author of a future announcement can pull in some automatic way all the changes. Looking forward to it.