The Plasma Applet Browser is now integrated into the libplasma and it will be available in the next Beta that is going to be published on Wednesday.

I’ve replaced the old drag-and-drop with a bit fancier stuff – now (as you can see in the screenshot) when you drag the plasmoids, you will be shown only the icons (possibly will be replaced by screenshots of plasmoids) not the whole “blue bars” you saw last time.

At the moment, you can add only one applet at a time by dragging, but that will be changed soon. If you use Oxygen style, you’ll encounter a nasty bug concerning the drag-and-drop-icons – there will be no icons, only nice shades of gray… but that’s not my fault.

Last week was dedicated to returning the Kamion (Truck in English) project on the road again. The new band consists of Pedro, Andy, Toke, Ljubomir and Luca, and I’ll be a roadie.

So, now I’ll be getting back to Plasma development and moving the Applet Browser into the libplasma (finally), so that I can focus on the Lancelot development after that. In one of the last posts you have asked for mockups or screenshots, and I didn’t want to provide them. I still don’t, but here is a part of the mockup

Maybe you’ll get the idea of the extenders I mentioned last time.

UPDATE: There is a mailing list dedicated to kamion development at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kamion2-devel if you want to join the discussions…

Unfortunately, it is not joyful to work on the Kamion anymore. Mainly because of the lack of feedback from the developers community… read on:

For those who [still] do not know what Kamion is, here’s a definition from the webpage:

Simple description: Kamion is a user-friendly user state migration and backup tool created for KDE 4. Meaning – it allows even the most inexperienced user to transfer program related data such as e-mail messages, IM program history as well as the configuration of those programs from one computer to another. It can be used for backup purposes too.

The name Kamion means “The Truck” (see the logo) in my mother tongue (Serbian language).

Longer description: Kamion is a project consisted of the library named libKamion, graphical user interface for QT4/KDE4, and a few console tools. This organization is similar to the one of the Debian’s APT (Advanced Packaging Tool).

The library manages the database about the location of the application data (such as e-mail messages from KMail of Thunderbird…) for each supported application; and creates/restores the Kamion archives.

The GUI represents that database (list of applications and their resources) in a user-friendly manner allowing easy creation and restoration of the data. For those that do not have the ability to run the GUI, there are console based tools that offer the same functions as the GUI but without the user-friendliness.

Things that are finished:

• libKamion – in working state
• KDE4 GUI – in working state
• console tools – broken
• Gnome GUI – not started

Things that need to be worked on

• Program support – I have almost no marketing abilities and no will to do the marketing. Kamion itself can not know what files to archive for a specific application. The application developers need to provide Kamion XML data files. I tried to push this format to the FreeDesktop but received no feedback whatsoever (although information needed by Kamion could be used for automatic creating of AppArmor/SELinux policies as well, and possibly for more things that I can not foresee at the moment). This is the main thing that needs to be done.
• I18n support in the library – the application’s resources are not supported to have internationalized names. It could be done as a part of the GUI, or as a part of the library
• mature and move from playground

I will gladly help anyone willing to take this task – explain the program and library architecture, explain the kamion archive format, application data XML file format…

If you’re willing to take on the job, put your e-mail address in the comment (in bla AT bla DOT bla format, or similar)

Kao što već znate, imaćete za nekoliko meseci moj kod (doduše kompajliran) na svojim računarima… bar oni koji koriste KDE.

Ono šta je interesantno je to da će ‘na mala vrata’ da udje i u Amaork 2. Pošto će Amarok 2 koristiti Plazmu (ono fensi sto KDE4 koristi za desktop), koristiće i moj ljubljeni PAB koji bi trebalo da ubacim u libplasma za koji dan. Heh, vest dobrodošla za moj već prenatrpani CV.

WARNING: Contains NO spoilers!

DanaKil: “Great great

and I’m curious about your “Lancelot”… nice name btw, and smart pun for a french speaker (”lance” can be translated by “launch”) ^^”

Well, the name occurred to me when I made a superkaramba applet for myself (never have published it) for faster launching of my favorite apps. Lancelot – as launching-lot (lot as in parking-lot). And I have used the name Sir Lancelot sometimes as my alias (and yes, I’m a Monty Python fan).

Since then, Lancelot have changed. Mainly because of one of the commit-digests, due to which people thought Lancelot to be a kmenu replacement like Kickoff and Raptor. It was not intended to be anything of the sort.

The main idea that was guiding me was to create a simple application launcher (and nothing more than that) that would have a no-click (Absolutely No Click Needed At All^TM) interface.

Commit digest just gave me the wings. Things have changed – instead of making a simple Plasmoid, I started a separate application that uses libplasma for implementation (similar to what Amarok team is doing) that is going to have all needed features for an ALI.

The thing is that majority of users adore kickoff, while I hate it. I like the general idea behind it, but IMHO the layout is a bit wrong, categories too, and the non-favorite application browsing is painful. I wanted to address these issues in my own particular … (idiom sir?) … yes idiom.

Lancelot is, at the moment, only my experiment with which I want to achieve a couple of things:

• Testing area for more complex no-click user interfaces
• Development incubator for Plasma (FileBrowser, KioBrowser, BorderLayout were backported from Lancelot to Plasma)
• Possibility of having Plasmoids in an ALI – customizable ALI
• KRunner in the ALI
• Having an alternative if I don’t like the default ALI for KDE 4.0 (yes I’m being a bit selfish )

Well, that’s all clarification that I’ll give at the moment – no mockups nor screenshots yet – as I’ve said “no spoilers”.

p.s. If there are people who like when KDE applications have K in their name, you can call it Knight Lancelot

While waiting for Aaron (it’s hard to write his name properly instead of AAron, isn’t it?) to give me the instructions for merging the Applet Browser into the libplasma, I had to do something interesting to keep me warm.

The first thing is that the FileBrowser engine is moved from playground to the plasma‘s trunk. If you don’t remember, the engine gives you the ability to monitor files and directories for changes, to retrieve file meta data etc. and all of that from inside the Plasma applets.

The second thing is a new Plasma layout named BorderLayout. It is inspired by the Java’s java.awt.BorderLayout. I needed something like this for my not-yet-to-be-revealed-launcher Lancelot. It can contain up to 5 items – one for each border (left, top, right, bottom) and one for the center. Since it is easier to show it, than to describe the actual layout, here it is:

The sizes of the borders (width for left and right, and height for top and bottom) can be calculated using the sizeHint of the items (default), or can be user-specified (developer-specified).

And, finally, the last thing that is not in the SVN yet is the KioBrowser engine, which retreives list of ‘files’ at a specific KIO location (for example applications:/, system:/)

p.s. The OpenID+ plug-in has some fatal error while activating, and I don’t have the time to fix that – so no openID identification on this blog yet…

Well, first of all, I’ve moved my blog away from Blogger to my own domain powered by the all-mighty WordPress. The first step was to make it look unique an pretty – so a new WP theme was born.

Then I thought of what would be fit to celebrate the moving, and it just occurred to me – why not make a Plasma theme that will be based on this blog design? Making a Plasma theme is surprisingly easy job so I encourage you all to give it a try.

The only obstacle I had, was that the painting of the borders was done by repeating the border pattern, and I needed my borders to be stretched. So, after a small patch to the Plasma’s background painting routine, Plasma now has the ability to paint both pattern (default option) and stretched background borders. The only thing you need to do if you want your borders to be stretched is to create an object in the SVG file called “hint-stretch-borders”.

Here’s a obligatory screenshot of a couple of more prominent widgets using the new theme.

P.S. One thing more about the new blog is that for validating user comments I’ve activated the reCAPTCHA system that helps in digitalizing books by giving you (people that make the comments) words that the OCR can not understand

Za one koji ne znaju, captcha je sistem za proveravanje da li je posetilac vašeg sajta čovek ili bot. reCAPTCHA ima istu tu ideju, ali uz mali dodatak – pomaže pri digitalizaciji knjiga tako što posetiocu daje reči koje OCR program nije u stanju da prepozna.

Možete videti kako izgleda i ovde, na mom blogu – pojavljuje se pri slanju komentara.

… posle dugog trpljenja nedostatka Blogger sistema, rekoh da se preselim ovde, na moju ličnu adresu.

http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/

Prebacio sam oba bloga – ovaj na srpskom i KDE Development blog. Prebacio sam samo stare poruke iz KDE Development bloga (za sada).