Me again. I haven’t been online for a week – went on some pub crawls in Dublin : ) – so I haven’t been able to reply to the comments to my last post which showed some nice things coming to Plasma.

BSmith1012: I love the simplicity and extra effort you put into making it flexible. I know how much you hate icon views, and yet still made it possible to use in your example, so I appreciate that.

I posted this in the kde Brainstorm ages ago. If you release something like the screenshot that can include all of my favorite applications as Icons, I’d prolly be happy with that and I feel like many others will appreciate it as well. Thanks for all of the hard work!

Answer: True, I’m not a fan of icon views, but there were a lot of requests to have those in both lancelot and kickoff. This didn’t take much effort now that we have QML. When this is finished, it will be rather easy to recreate kickoff, kickoff with icon view, or any other launcher you are used to. I do intend to create a few different layouts that will be shipped by default with the main launcher.

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Fitzcarraldo: Lancelot (currently 1.9.5) is my launcher of choice, so I am interested to read about Lancelot 2. Can you give us a rough idea when Lancelot 2 might be released?

Answer: I’m not sure when it will be released. I don’t really expect it for the next version of KDE Plasma. I might publish a preview version out-of-kde-sc-schedule for testing purposes.

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sir_herrbatka: Where the code is hosted? I would like to test it.

Answer: The code is currently at kde:scratch/ivan/lancelot-qml. The main applet is mostly for testing the infrastructure I’m making. In terms of features, it is nothing close to the current version of Lancelot, though it does look similar.

The important thing is that it will not screw up your regular installation – the applet is differently named.

There are some news in the Plasma, Lancelot, Shelf, QML components, blah blah whoop whoop land. As some of the people have noticed from the previous screenshots, I’ve begun working on a QML port of Lancelot.

The Launcher building toolkit

In Lancelot 1, I decided that it would be awesome to allow people to put parts of it on the desktop or panel or wherever even without using the Lancelot menu. Those were implemented as the Shelf (formerly known as Lancelot Parts) applet.

This time, for what will be known as Lancelot 2 I decided to go one step further – to break everything into QML components, be it data models or UI elements.

Now, you need only a few lines of QML to replicate the same functionality of the Shelf applet (the first column in the screenshot). The second is essentially the same, but uses the IconView.

LancelotComponents.ListView {
    modelsList: [
        LancelotModels.FavoriteApplications {},
        LancelotModels.ContactsTelepathy {},
        LancelotModels.Devices {}
    ]
}

You don’t need to stop there – you can create custom widgets and pass custom delegates (third column), custom item views (all the models have the same API) etc.

Lancelot specific

The menu itself is also going to be as changeable as possible – now that the UI is based on QML, the users will be able to create different layouts, and share them on the kde-look.org. So, for anyone who desired a simpler menu, a menu that shows the items in a grid of icons, and not in a list, for anyone who … I can only say – it will be possible.

It will even be possible to create a telepathy quick-send-message applet if you want to.

Maybe even the April 1st joke from a few years ago will be a fair game.

With a title of a great Jethro Tull song, and a teaser screenshot, I’m ending this post.

Good day everyone. I need a brave soul (or two) who have the guts to add a long-standing missing feature to the Activities system …

THE UNIT TESTING FRAMEWORK

… I know, I know. It is far from being a thrilling work, but everyone would benefit from it.

I’ve started introducing asserts all over the code to make it more predictable and tested at runtime, but that is not enough. Asserts are there to check whether somebody is abusing kactivitymanagerd, while unit testing will be for when we (whoever works on kamd) are using some methods in a wrong fashion.

Marco announced a new version (rework) of the Air theme for Plasma.

That reminded me of the fact I forgot to blog about the new version of Slim Glow that will be in 4.10.

The most noticeable change is that the system tray icons, share-like-connect icons, and others are now based on the awesome Font Awesome by Dave Gandy (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome)

The second is that it is now even slimmer. The desktop widgets have smaller border, especially those like the folder view.

The theme is now again a regular citizen of kde-look.org. Since the non-default themes were moved from standard installations into kdegraphics module, I started receiving requests to make the theme available through the Get Hot New Stuff since rarely anyone wants to install kdegraphics kdeartwork. I understood the desire for this, so I complied.

Hi all.

While we all love and cherish our KDE browsers (Konq and rekonq) there are many users of Firefox and Chromium. And they can not use share-like-connect, they can not have their web-pages linked to activities, they can not …

Is there a brave soul in our community (or a few brave souls) that are willing to write a small addon for any of the aforementioned programs that will

• know when a URL is loaded in a tab
• know when the user switches between tabs
• know the windowID of the window in which the tab resides, and
• and report those events to the activity manager?

Talking to the activity manager is the easiest part of it all, it has C bindings, it is a d-bus service, so take your pick.

If you’re interested, please write to us on plasma-devel at kde.org

I don’t know whether it is revolution, or evolution, but my favourite ideas that the Plasma team thought of a long time ago are finally getting to the users.

It is quite nice to see the positive experiences with the activities system in Plasma 4.9 all around the web. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There are a few nice things coming to the following release.

The top feature for me is going to be the Share-Like-Connect applet, and the document scoring based on the usage. Lately, I’ve been on a patching spree to increase the number of applications that support activities and the number has increased substantially. Currently, these are the supported applications:

• Dolphin
• Gwenview
• Kate and KWrite
• Okular
• Words, Stage and the rest of the Calligra family (except for Kexi which will be patched soon)
• GVim

I plan to add a few applications to this list before the hard feature freeze slaps me in the face.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in this endeavour. (Edit: added the link for the following text) Tomaz Canabrava’s army of students are going through KDE’s extragear and doing the same thing I’m doing in integral parts of KDE SC. This really offloads a lot of work off my shoulders so big kudos to them!

Well, it is not really KDE‘s birthday today, but it isn’t far off.

You can read the announcement or go directly to the site of the new version of Active.

You can also see a short video demo directed and performed by Marco:

OGG version

I haven’t been much involved with this release apart from under the hood stuff that Active and desktop versions share, and the new website design. So, when testing the new image, I experienced the thrill the regular users do. It is a good feeling

From the “Soon to be in master” files, comes a screenshot depicting two new QML data components from the org.kde.activities.models package – ActivityModel and ResourceModel

Both are available as standard C++ and QML models. The ActivityModel does just what the name says – lists activities, while ResourceModel is more fun – it lists the resources opened by a specific application, or those tied to a specific activity, … and it can order by the score, recentness …

Just something I wanted to share. Today, I caught myself using two different naming conventions in the same code.

One is the camel-case style like Qt uses, and the other is the underscore style that STL and boost use.

It turned out that I use camel-case for everything except for when writing generic stuff like algorithms (to follow things like std::for_each, std::find_if) or special helper template classes.

For example kamd::util::for_each_assoc, model_insert (class that does RAII equivalent of beginInsertRows/endInsertRows).

Strangely enough, it feels natural. More natural than having names like qLowerBound, qBinaryFind…