Audio Volume improvements in Plasma 5.7

Plasma 5.4 introduced plasma-pa (new audio volume applet and KCM) to replace KMix, however it was missing few important features in the initial release. Unfortunately, there was no progress after that.
I myself have been using KMix instead, because changing application volumes from applet is a must have for me. But KMix system tray popup doesn't really integrate nicely into Plasma, so I finally decided to switch to plasma-pa and implement those missing features.

My goal is to achieve feature parity with KMix, so that I and all Plasma users can switch to plasma-pa without missing anything.

What's new?
First and most important thing for me is the ability to change application volumes from applet. That's actually the main thing I expect to be able to do from the applet as I manage volume of my sound card with global shortcuts.
There are now two tabs in applet, one for managing volume of devices and one for applications. Application streams will also display icons for easier navigation.

Another useful feature if you have multiple sound cards is to move streams to different devices. In the first draft it was possible to do so in both applet and KCM, but it was then decided to have this functionality only in KCM to keep the applet simple.
You can now also choose your default device which will be used for applet icon and global shortcuts.

Some laptops have microphone mute button, it will now be possible to assign this button to mute microphone global shortcut. Ideally it should work without any settings (if the button sends XF86AudioMicMute key event) and is the case on my laptop. Global shortcuts for changing microphone volume will also be available.

Microphone volume OSD (icon is not final)

And finally, you will also be able to change volume of notification sounds from KCM. There is a lot of changes that will make the audio management in Plasma better.

What's next?
One thing that users are requesting is volume overdrive - ability to increase volume over 100%. That's something I'd like to eventually have, but I'm not sure if it makes it into the new release.

That's it, I hope you'll like all the new features (and also fixes) that are coming with Plasma 5.7!

My contribution to Plasma 5.5

In this post, I'd like to quickly present everything I've been working on for the upcoming Plasma 5.5.

Quicklaunch applet is back
One applet I missed the most from KDE4 Plasma times was Quicklaunch applet. I use vertical panel and adding multiple launchers to vertical panel is not really convenient because they are placed bellow each other, and in result occupy a lot of vertical space. That's why I was using Quicklaunch that let's you have (in my case) 4 applets that occupy the same space as one big launcher.

For Plasma 5.5, I have reimplemented the old Quicklaunch in QML. It offers all features that the old applet had, except auto-columns/rows functionality, so you now need to manually specify the number you prefer to have. I had some issues implementing it, so I just decided to remove this functionality. I hope it won't be missed :)

If you can't wait and want to try it right now, you can build it yourself from scratch/drosca/quicklaunch-qml.git. It works with Plasma 5.4 and probably also with older versions.

Quicklaunch in vertical panel and on desktop

New Bluetooth Devices KCM
In Bluedevil, apart from some fixes, I've been working on new Bluetooth Devices KCM. It now shows devices from all Bluetooth adapters, looks better and also is able to setup DUN/PAN network for devices that supports it.

Bluetooth Devices KCM

There are bug reports about Bluedevil not being usable in Plasma 5, not starting automatically etc. on Kubuntu. This is because Kubuntu is still using old BlueZ 4 with very old KDE4 Bluedevil. Fortunately, this will all be fixed in Kubuntu 15.10 that finally switched to BlueZ 5 and is going to be released soon.
This is also a remainder not to report bugs for these old Bluedevil versions. They are no longer maintained, so your bug reports will simply be closed.

Keyboard layouts
I've been also trying to fix some keyboard layouts bugs, including sometimes forgetting the layouts setup in settings. From my investigation, it seems that the main issue is that the code that listens for device hotplug events only works on systems with xcb-xinput (not available in Debian and other distros), so my idea is to use udev when xcb-xinput is not available. It is still in review, but it should be ready in time for Plasma 5.5.