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…