We are pleased to announce a new stable release of MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps!
Stable release
This version of Maui brings new features and bug fixes to Maui’s applications and the frameworks they rely on. The changes introduced in this release will make your experience with Maui Apps much more enjoyable and feature rich across different devices and form factors.
Read on to find out how Maui’s software has improved and what new features to look out for:
MauiKit Frameworks 2.1.1
MauiKit is a group of frameworks used to craft Maui applications. It comes with common widgets ready to work well on small phone screens and bigger desktop computer monitors. But that’s not all: MauiKit also comes with a set of utilities that help developers build applications more quickly with more complex and ready-made widgets. These include a text editor, an image viewer, or a file explorer, among others.
In this updated version, the graphical components have been polished. New widgets have been added to the MauiKit Core library, making navigation easier on phones, desktop computers, and other devices.
Before continuing, just a quick reminder: you can check the previous Maui Reports leading up to this new stable release at:
Maui Report 17
MauiKit
Once again, the framework has been cleaned up, and many bugs have been solved, resulting in better performance and optimizations. A few new controls have also been added, this is a quick overview of what’s new:
Core
- Animations were added to different controls, such as TabBar, SelectionBar, and AbstractSideBar.
- New custom TextFields and derivatives SearchField and PasswordField, following Maui HIG.
- Tweaks to implementation of the ToolBar layout and BasicToolButton; The GridView browser issue causing to trigger delegates when scrolling has been fixed.
- Fixes to AbstractSidebar bug causing overlaps with toolbars. Uniform size of checkboxes on checkable delegates from ListBrowserDelegate.
- The AppView viewport buttons can now have badges to add notifications, with the attached property Maui.AppView.badgeText.
- Fixes to rounded elements using masking layers.
- Correctly make use of the attached property Window.window to get to the application root window, so the lookup from Mauikit controls for the window size is more direct.
- Holder messages alignment has been shifted to the left.
- The ImageViewer control zooming behavior has been fixed.
- Added custom ScrollView control to better handle the padding of the view.
- For horizontally scrolling with a mouse wheel, now you need to use the Alt key modifier, that’s for scrollable toolbars for example.
FileBrowsing
- FileDialog now uses the quick places toggle-style from Index.
- Uses new TextFields from MauiKit.
TextEditor
- The TextArea is now no longer shadowed by the Plasma styling implementation adding extra components resulting in two popup menus. Now the TextEditor is in full control of it.
ImageTools & Accounts
- Update the controls to use the latest updates from MauiKit core controls.
Maui Apps 2.1.1
The Maui Project provides a set of applications to cover your phone, tablet, or desktop needs. The Maui line of apps currently includes a file manager (Index), a music player (Vvave), an image viewer (Pix), a text editor (Nota), an app for note-taking (Buho), a terminal emulator (Station), an app to manage your contacts (Communicator), a document viewer (Shelf), a video player (Clip), a camera app (Booth), and a web browser (Sol).
You can grab the APKs, AppImages and TAR packages from KDE downloads page:
https://download.kde.org/stable/maui/
Index & Station
Highlights:
- The overview page on Index, listing recent and favorite files, has been improved with bigger previews.
- The Index file previewer popup has now a cleaner UI.
- The Station quick access buttons are now bolder.
Vvave & Pix
Highlights:
- Moving around tracks on the main playlist is now smoother. And the current track index is re-assigned correctly.
- Added an equalizer indicator to Vvave’s main playlist currently playing track.
- When playing music Vvave now inhibits the machine’s sleep state.
- Pix and Vvave now use the latest MauiKit controls.
Nota & Clip
Highlights:
- Updated to use latest MauiKit TextEditor fixes.
- Both now use the updated and new MauiKit Core controls
- Fixes to Clip MPV backend implementation.
- Clip now can play more video formats.
Buho & Shelf
Highlights:
- Updated both to use the new MauiKit Core controls
- Custom file sources can now be added and removed from Shelf.
Sol & Communicator
Highlights:
- Updated both to use the updated and new MauiKit Core controls
Distribution
If you are interested in using the Maui Apps, there are different ways you can do so:
MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps are packaged by different distros, like Arch, and derived distros, such as Manjaro; KDE Neon on unstable repositories, postmarketOS, and Nitrux OS.
Maui Apps are shipped by default on Nitrux OS, and Manjaro for Plasma Mobile. So you can wait a few days for the distributions to update the packages for you.
For using Maui Apps on Android, we provide APK packages. The links to the packages will be listed here, and can also be found on the Maui official webpage under each app section.
There is an active task to start publishing the apps to the platforms respective stores, you can follow up the progress at: https://invent.kde.org/maui/mauikit/-/issues/32
AppImage packages are also available for AMD64 and ARM, so you can also grab one of them, also linked in this blog post.
Remember to open a ticket at Invent if you find bugs, issues, or have a feature request.
To follow the Maui Project’s development or say hi, you can join us on Telegram: https://t.me/mauiproject.
We are present on Twitter and Mastodon:
| Release date | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| February | 1.2.1 | 2.1.1 | 2.2.2 |
| May | 1.2.2 | 2.1.2 | 3.0.0 |
| August | 2.0.0 | 2.2.0 | 3.1.0 |
| November | 2.1.0 | 2.2.1 | 3.1.1 |
A quick reminder of the project’s near future goals:
- More feature-rich applications. [In Progress]
- Migrate to Qt 6
- Improve data synchronization using NextCloud. [Pending]
- Improve performance. [In progress]
- Move beta apps to stable. [In Progress]
- Sol, Booth, Strike, Bonsai
Ike says:
great job everyone