Lancelot (the menu) was not really designed to run on mobile devices (although it could be used on such devices as a full screen application quite well), but the Lancelot Part applet proved to be a rather good fit.

I wasn’t involved in any mobile-related developments at Tokamak 4 (I had too much to work on krunner and activities) but I found some time to test the KDE/Plasma enabled Jax 10 devices.

Placing a Lancelot Part inside the newspaper activity that showed favourite applications and a search box was a breeze and it worked quite well. Marco did a really good job of adapting the plasma-netbook edition to mobile (touch screen) devices so the Parts applet required no changes at all to fit in the new environment.

Here is an obligatory blurred screenshot:

I’m planning to make a screencast about using Lancelot in Plasma Netbook, but I’m not finding the time. I hope I’ll be able to make it soon.

Cheerio!

If anybody tells you that KDE SC 4 is too fancy and not configurable enough, just show them this:

A product of a temporary idle mind – ASCII theme for Plasma…

edit: It’s is creating a wallpaper to fit this…

This one will be short, I don’t really have the will for writing – it is half past midnight here.

The activities infrastructure is mostly finished – now only polishing is left to be done.

The new organization goes like this:

The core activity-related features are placed into a kded module which doesn’t depend on anything but Qt and the core kde libraries. The class for writing the clients of this service (any program that wants to be able to react to activity changes etc.) will be in kdelibs. The API is minimal and very easy to use – it took me only a couple of minutes to patch KWrite to be able to use activities.

The second part is the revamped Nepomuk Activities service (I already blogged about it – the changes made at T4 were mainly related to make it fit the new arhitecture). If it is running, the above class passes all the info to it. Running the service enables the access to extra meta-data regarding documents and activities.

The third, and last part is the manager class which will be in kdebase/workspace (most probably) because it is only intended to be used by kwin and plasma. Normal programs shouldn’t use it.

The next step is the UI – kwin and plasma

Cheerio.

Until now, drag and drop and some other things in krunner based launchers (lancelot, kickoff, and maybe SAL?) are based on a small hack – manual detection whether the result is in fact a .desktop file of an application provided by the service runner, and if it is, then we can use it.

So, the first thing I decided to make is some way of allowing serialization of the search results. I decided that the best way is to allow the results to have mime data assigned to them. Naturally, since most of the time you don’t need the mime data, it doesn’t load by default – it is loaded only when requested and only for the specific search result.

That is all for now from T4… I’m sleepy and I can’t really write more…

A small visual update of Lancelot’s pies:

Concerning bars instead of pies:

1. Bars below the text (like in dolphin) will not be implemented:
   

   I’m trying to keep everything in Lancelot generic enough with a complete model-view separation, so introducing a widget just for a specific model is not an option.
   Comment by Ivan Čukić — 7 February 2010

2. Bars as a part of the icon

This one would be allowed when concerning the above statement. But I don’t really see the point in doing it.

When the usability is concerned, bars are more desired when comparing multiple statistical variables (national growth per year), while when percentages are concerned, pies are the way to go (and to increase the usability even more – these are color coded – from blue, through yellow to red).

Introducing a new feature just for the sake of it is not something I’m willing to do. If you can convince me that bars* are better** than pies, I’m ready to listen.

* bars that can fit into the icon itself like the current pies do.
** better as in “should replace the pies” – having a configuration option for something this insignificant would be a waste of space.

Just one image of a new Lancelot feature:

The original Lancelot icon is usually considered weird-looking when seen on a panel (or desktop). Even I have had Lancelot set up not to use it.

I like the old icon very much, and I’m still proud I succeed in making something like that with a vector-graphics program (Inkscape) so it still is, and will be until the end of time, the main icon of the Lancelot project. But from now on, it will not be used for the applet button.

Now, the default icon is the standard KDE icon – the same one other launchers use.

For those of you who want to have a normal-looking icon but still want others to see that you are using Lancelot and not something else, you can use the following one:

The new icon can be set through the applet configuration dialogue.

There was a wish once upon a time to make the section buttons in Lancelot smaller, that is narrower, because people thought that they waste too much space.

At first, I was reluctant since I didn’t see the point in doing it, but I changed my mind recently – Lancelot is pretty much feature-complete as it is (at least from my point of use/view), so I decided to implement something that I absolutely have no use for, but somebody else will. The fact that I’m missing the vertical tabs in Amarok could be another reason in making this

So, if you want to have the buttons as shown in the following image, just right-click them and choose the appropriate* option. (mind that this is available in trunk, not in the KDE SC 4.4).

*It says ‘toggle collapsed sections’ at the moment, but I’ll change it as soon as I think of a better name.

Just to notify you of a big recent (committed today to trunk) change in Lancelot’s theming.

The items in the lists (ActionListView widget) now shouldn’t have a background – the standard background from Plasma (widgets/viewitem.svgz – the one you see in krunner, folder view, SAL…) is being used.

The only item that is excluded from this rule is the [Group-ActionListView-Categories] which is used for sublist headers (like ‘Recent documents’ inside the Documents section).

If you don’t remove the backgrounds, both backgrounds will be shown on mouse hover.

In order to adapt your theme to the new change, edit all sections in theme.config file that match [Group-ActionListView-*] and replace:

background.type=svg
background.svg=...something...

with:

background.type=none

That’s all.

This change will become active in KDE 4.5 so you have a lot of time to adapt. Cheerio!

Another zsh-related post. This one is about defining a function that will allow you to define aliases for directories so that you don’t need to type something like ‘cd /this/is/a/very/long/path/in/the/filesystem’, but only ‘cdb some-alias’ (cdb – Change Directory with Bookmarks)

You can copy the script to your .zshrc, or create a zsh module as described in my previous post

# Module: Change directory with bookmarks
# path: bin/zsh-modules-available/cdbookmarks

function cdb_edit() {
  vim ~/.cdbookmarks
}

function cdb() {
  NewDir=`egrep "^$1<TAB_KEY>" ~/.cdbookmarks \
     | sed 's/^.*<TAB_KEY>//'`;
  echo cd $NewDir
  cd $NewDir
}

function _cdb() {
  reply=(`cat ~/.cdbookmarks | sed 's/<TAB_KEY>.*$//'`);
}

compctl -K _cdb cdb

That’s it. To define the bookmarks, create a file named ~/.cdbookmarks and the bookmarks in the following format:

<alias><TAB_KEY><path>

(no spaces)

Cheerio!