As you may know Plasma 5.3 will be released soon. This means that we need screenshots for the Plasma 5.3 beta and Plasma 5.3 final announcement. Plasma 5.3 beta is going to be released on 2015-04-14. Yeah I know that there is not much time left (sorry for that). Here is the first draft of the announcement (please do not repost this link outside this forum thread). If you have any comments/opinions regarding screenshots (visual inconsistencies etc) please post them here.

Okay, here are me 2ct:

• I'd place the power management stuff on the top. It might sound less important at first, but it's likely to affect more people than PMC or Bluez: Probably only few people have their PC connected to a TV, and not everyone is actively using Bluetooth. The power management stuff, however, affects everyone with a laptop.
• The XWayland stuff on that detail level is way too technical for a general user audience. Suggestion: Write something along the lines of "KWin has made significant progress with regards to Wayland support and the transition from X11 to Wayland. For details on what is now possible, see Martin Gräßlin's blog posts [link]".

Cool stuff.

For the screenshots, I don't have 5.3 beta installed. If anyone else does, can you take a look at the existing write up (or the proposed changes below) and make a screenshot or two? Mostly perhaps focus on the main screenshot at the top. Maybe with something other than the KinfoCenter (Dolphin, Kate or System Settings perhaps), with the default wallpaper of course and fewer plasmoids. Make sure the window is focused. If any windows and plasmoids are showing, make sure they are sized to prevent text overlaps, button cutt-offs and other layout issues.

For the other screenshots in the write up, they look relatively decent to me. Oh, the linked pic for the Bluetooth plasmoids are not full size. Maybe show the system monitor/comic plasmoid screenshots in the Plasmoids section rather than in the main screenshot at the top. If the screenshot cause inconsistently large whitespace (like for the Touchpad and Date and Time plasmoid) consider a side-by-side screenshot layout in that instance.

And since visual design is never just about the pictures, perhaps some minor tweaks to the text and typography might make the announcement a bit more scannable. Here is a suggestion:

Enhanced Power Management

• Power management settings can be configured differently for certain activities
• Laptop will not suspend when closing the lid while an external monitor is connected ('cinema mode', by default, can be turned off)
• Power management inhibitions now block lock screen too
• Screen brightness changes are now animated on most hardware
• No longer suspends when closing the lid while shutting down
• Support for keyboard button brightness controls on lock screen
• KInfoCenter Energy provides statistics about energy consumption
• Battery monitor now shows which applications are currently holding a power management inhibition ('Chrome is currently suppressing PM: Playing video')

Better Bluetooth Capabilities

• New Bluetooth applet
• Bluedevil was ported to a new library from KDE, BluezQt
• Added support for blocking and unblocking Bluetooth
• Connected devices with Browse Files (ObexFTP) support are now displayed in the file dialog's Places panel
• Many bugfixes

Additional Configuration

• Time and Date configuration has been updated to use services from your Linux distro
• A touchpad configuration module has been added

Improved Plasma Widgets

• Clipboard applet gains support for showing barcodes
• The Desktop and Folder View containment codebases were unified, and have seen performance improvements
• The Recent Documents and Recent Applications sections in Application Menu (Kicker) are now powered by KDE activities
• Comics widget returns
• System monitor plasmoids return, such as CPU Load Monitor and Hard Disk usage

Big steps toward Wayland support

• Plasma's window manager and compositor KWin is now able to start a nested XWayland server. X11 windows can connect to this server as if it were a normal X server. For KWin it looks like a Wayland window, though. This means that KWin learned to handle Wayland windows in this release, though full integration is only expected for Plasma 5.4.
• KWin gained new output modes for Wayland allowing to start a nested KWin on X11 and to start KWin directly on a framebuffer device, which will be the fallback for the case that OpenGL and/or kernel mode settings are not supported. A rendering backend on kernel mode settings is expected for Plasma 5.4. More information about these new backends and how to test them can be found in the KWin wiki pages. Please keep in mind that this is only a development preview and highly experimental new code.

Bug fixes galore

• 348 bugs were closed giving fewer crashes and greater reliability

Hope this is helpful!

*huuugs* I made the text layout changes. Waiting on someone to upload.

Thanks

Just looked at the picture
one comment on the firt screenshot: the disk-space plasmoid has a rendering bug in the sense that fonts overlap between title and first disk, so I would either fix or drop this plasmoid
Also, hope everyone noticed that the breeze decoration buttons have changed (!) to something more in line with the other icon (not that it had to be in the promo itself, just wanted to mention )

Best,

Hugo

hugo.pereira@free.fr wrote:Just looked at the picture
one comment on the firt screenshot: the disk-space plasmoid has a rendering bug in the sence that fonts overlap between title and first disk, so I would either fix or drop this plasmoid

Hm, this is a beta release announcement after all, so things do not have to be perfect yet (I mean, ironing out imperfections is what a beta is for, after all). I'd vote for mentioning in the text that the glitch will hopefully be fixed before the final release.