KDE Connect 1.0 is here!

Today we are officially publishing the first stable release of KDE Connect. Hooray! This version is the most solid yet feature-packed version we ever released. It’s been in development for a year now and it took a lot of hard work, we hope you like it!

New features

• Trigger custom commands from your phone

Pre-configure commands  in the KDE Connect desktop settings so you can trigger them from your phone. Use it to extend KDE Connect’s functionality to suit your needs!

• Reply to SMS messages from your desktop

Probably the most awaited feature ever! Now when you receive a text message notification on the desktop, a ‘Reply’ button will allow you to text back without having to use your phone at all. Note you will need the version 1.4 of the Android app for this to work, already available, as we had to ask for a new permission for it to work.

• Receive desktop notifications on your phone

Contributed by Holger Kaelberer, this is the counterpart of the phone-to-desktop notification sync we already had. It might be a bit spammy sometimes, so we decided to ship it disabled by default. Make sure you enable it both in the Android app and the System Settings module if you are interested in this feature. From the plugin settings you can choose which notifications you want to forward to your phone and which not.

• TLS encryption

Thanks to the Google Summer of Code project of Vineet Garg, KDE Connect now uses TLS sockets instead of RSA private-key encryption. This is not only safer against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks, but also faster and less battery-consuming to compute on your devices. Like SSH, we do trust-on-first-use (or TOFU, which sounds funnier) of the device certificate, and we have added a command line option to allow you to check the certificate fingerprints match on both ends.

How to update?

If your favorite Linux distribution doesn’t release an update for KDE Connect 1.0 soon, please contact the distro packagers and let them know you want it! If you are familiar with building software from sources and can’t wait for your distro to package it, you can always build KDE Connect 1.0 from the sources available on download.kde.org.

While the Android app is backwards compatible with desktops running old versions of KDE Conect, the just released desktop version requires you to use the version 1.0 or newer of the Android app. Since we have seen that Android updates reach final users much faster than their desktop counterparts, this shouldn’t impact your ability to use KDE Connect. Just make sure you are using a recent version from F-Droid or the Play Store.

Update 20/09/16: This is no longer the latest version of KDE Connect. If you are looking for the sources to download, make sure to get the latest ones from the KDE downloads site.

KDE Connect: Screenshots of new functionality

Two weeks has passed since my last post about KDE Connect. This is mainly because most of the work done was on the internals of the platform and there was nothing to show until now. That why I think this is the perfect moment to put here some screenshots of a new functionality that we just pushed to GIT: Notifications sync for Android 4.3! It is still in a very early stage, but we have ambitious plans for it.

And here is a a screenshot from our new and beautiful KCM that we already posted some days ago on Google+. Everything but the file transfers is already working now, so we should be in time to finish it before the end of the GSOC.

This KCM shows part of the work done in the GUI, that is being improved in both KDE and Android (and that’s the reason why we have dropped support for Androids prior to 4.0 again, sorry! we are using new GUI elements like action bars,  but we will make them optional to support 2.3+ again soon).

And last but not least I want to thank Àlex Fiestas (my mentor in this GSOC) and Aleix Pol because they are awesome, and because without their help and advice this project would not be possible. Really, thank you guys!

As always, you can grab the sources and a precompiled APK for Android from those links:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8820360/apks/KdeConnect.apk

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/albertvaka/kdeconnect-kded
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/albertvaka/kdeconnect-android

Stay tuned!

KDE Connect improvements

After the feedback we have received (you guys are awesome), we have made some improvements and fixes to KDEConnect. The most notable are:

• Support for Android 2.3!
• More reliable connection backend, using broadcast messages instead of Avahi
• Improved MPRIS controls including volume control
• Removed annoying connection notifications :P

We have received lots of great ideas to implement too, and that’s why we are working on a plugin system to make it really easy for any developer to implement  his/her ideas.

You can download the latest “stable” APK from the same URL as before:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8820360/apks/KdeConnect.apk

If you prefer to download the latest development APK, use this URL instead:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4fmgnssgiu9oatz/-tcd-oDD1p
Please note that if you already have the previous APK installed, you will need to manually uninstall it before being able to install this one.

And as always you can download the KDED and Android app source code from git:

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/albertvaka/kdeconnect-kded
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/albertvaka/kdeconnect-android

Have fun!

KDE Connect: Fuse your devices with KDE (GSOC 2013)

Our daily lives are becoming more gadget-assisted every day and (as we approach to the “internet of things”) we have more and more computers around us in the shape of TVs, smartphones, cameras, media centers…

We dream in a future where our fridges will be able to automatically do the sopping for us, that is, a future where all our devices are connected and interact with each other. Something is going wrong if we still use the email to send a picture from our phone to our PC…

And precisely this is the reason behind KDE Connect: we want to make your computer aware and seamless integrated with all your devices, to simplify your daily tasks.

We have started with Android integration, but we want to support any kind of device so we encourage other platforms developers to implement the KDE Connect protocol for their devices!

If you want to peek into the code you can grab if from these repos, but please note that it is in a very early stage:

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/albertvaka/kdeconnect-kded
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/albertvaka/kdeconnect-android

For battery reporting to work you will also need to apply this patch to kdelibs: solid-backend.patch

You will need Android 4.1 or greater. If you are not an Android developer, download the compiled app directly form this link: KdeConnect.apk

We hope you like this project! Looking forward to hear your feedback :)