Lancelot’s near future…
There are a couple of things under way in the world of the Knights of Kamelot
Instead of doing the application browsing (which I should really start doing soon) I did something that was more fun (just like the last time with composite…).
Well, at least it seamed more fun before I started doing it – it was a real pain to do.
Lancelot‘s parts on the desktop
Aaron expressed a wish about having the Lancelot itself embeddable into desktop as an applet (not only the launching button, but the whole Lancelot). At first I said no because I have made a couple of strange decisions while doing the low-level Lancelot stuff with purpose of overcoming a couple of strange decisions in Plasma‘s design and in QGraphicsView. (I relied heavily on having just one instance of Lancelot at a time and made more than a couple of things to be static/singleton…)
So after painful and slow reorganization, all of that is moved to Lancelot::Instance… and now it works… when you know how to use it. Fortunately, I made it so I [still] know how to use it… The result of that can be seen on the left part of the screenshot. It is the Places list from Lancelot’s window placed onto the Plasma’s desktop. The aim is to be able to drag-n-drop parts of the Lancelot UI onto the desktop.
Alternative, smaller UI
The second thing that started to appear is alternative UI for the menu. You remember the old one where you had a button that invokes the menu, and inside the menu, there were section buttons?
Well, this is similar except that if you have enough space on your panel (or in the case of the screenshot, on the desktop) you can configure the applet to show the section buttons, and then they are not shown inside the menu.
The old UI will be the default one.
Slowing down the pace
I’m aware that I’m drifting away from the main things that need to be done. The things are going to get even worse because my exams are coming closer 
… So don’t expect this pace of updates in the following few weeks…
p.s. I’m very sleepy right now, so the post is… well… boring?… sorry for that…
Looks good so far! Low level stuff can be pretty damn boring, but unless the basics are in place extending functionality later on can be a pain
Good luck on the exams!
Comment by Askrates — 7 November 2007 @ 00:43
Lancelot looks so cool! I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Comment by kwilliam — 7 November 2007 @ 02:37
Wow its look very nice, and look beautiful using black background color.
Nice work and i will waiting to see it.
Comment by Teddy — 7 November 2007 @ 04:26
It looks good? It looks great!!! Really! Its a damn nice GUI now, maybe because of the ‘absence’ of the places bar … don’t know.
Maybe it would be an idea to implement an option to configure the placesbar as an slider, you know like the old mac os x ones, that slides out at the left side at mouse over.
However, exams should have priority, good hunting
and thank you for that great app 
Comment by industrie13 — 7 November 2007 @ 09:09
Looks awesome. Great work. Is Lancelot going to be default menu? I wish that, beacuse Kickoff presents rather poorly now
Comment by Mkbart — 7 November 2007 @ 09:53
@Askrates
Strangely enough, I like doing low-level stuff – but not reorganizing it
@Teddy
I forgot to mention that. Black theme is now the default one to fit into the default Plasma’s theme. (although there is no obligation to use the same theme for both Plasma and Lancelot)
@industrie13
Well, i don’t know how MacOS looked, so I have no clue what are you talking about
@Mkbart
I don’t think that it will be the default. For 4.0 it is certain that it will not be. The Kickoff was in the “do something, and do it NOW” area, whilst the Lancelot and Raptor were (and still are) in “do whatever you want, and take your time…”
Comment by admin — 7 November 2007 @ 10:06
> you can configure the applet to show the section buttons, and then they are not shown inside the menu.
Yeep ! It’s THE thing I’dd like kickoff to have had for the last year(s). I never liked this all in one tabed thing.
On the other hand, Lancelot looks great. Good job guy !
Comment by kollum — 7 November 2007 @ 10:27
Hi Ivan,
I am not sure if you are the right person for my question but maybe you know the answer. It is great to have all this start menu choices. In which menu or settings dialog would a normal user select his preferred menu?
Comment by DITC — 7 November 2007 @ 10:28
At the moment situation is this – you open the Plasma Applet Browser, and add the desired menu (the way it was in KDE3 also).
(it doesn’t work for the panel at the moment, but it will)
Comment by admin — 7 November 2007 @ 10:33
i don’t like these lancelot – it is because i think everybody should have some weakness somewhere: but can code, you make great art and design – and you do not even have a problem width Usability…
Comment by ramin — 8 November 2007 @ 09:26
Sorry, but I don’t get it. You don’t like it because it “should have some weakness”, and because I can code and make art?
Comment by admin — 9 November 2007 @ 06:08
yes – it is to good… so i ‘m green with envy
r
Comment by ramin — 9 November 2007 @ 07:37
Comment by admin — 9 November 2007 @ 08:29
Lancelot depends on plasma/dataengines to work properly? I use a kdesvn install and after adding lancelot to desktop, I can’t see any menu… Sorry to ask here..
Comment by Sergio — 11 November 2007 @ 19:52
Lancelot depends on libplasma. Not on the data engines.
One of the possible solutions is that it installs the D-Bus service file in the wrong place (for example if D-Bus searches for files in /usr/share/… and lancelot’s is installed in /home/kde-devel/kde/share/…)
Do you get the Lancelot button(s) on the desktop at all?
Comment by admin — 11 November 2007 @ 21:04
Yes, I can see the button. And the problem could be dbus. I installed it on /usr and kde is in my home directory. I’ll reinstall dbus on my kde home/test directory.
Thanks for the info.
Sérgio
Comment by Sergio — 11 November 2007 @ 21:07
No need to reinstall the dbus to another location. Just copy org.kde.lancelot.service file to /usr/share/dbus-1/services
Comment by admin — 11 November 2007 @ 21:11
Thank you Ivan.
It’s working now.
Keep up the good work, and sorry to take your time at this hour
Sérgio
Comment by Sergio — 11 November 2007 @ 21:20
Don’t sweat about it… I’m always glad to be of some assistance.
Cheers!
Comment by admin — 11 November 2007 @ 21:22
Lancelot is a big improvement on the step back KickOff. It would be even better if scrolling from menu’s was abolished as a bad idea, when some one is looking at Lancelot that is the only thing they are concentrating on and it is a very temporary in that it isn’t taking any screen real estate when it isn’t being used so it can be as large as is needed without having any negative impacts. With this in mind Lancelot shouldn’t have a set size and should scale with the amount of entries it has to display purely because as some many have objected to KickOff it is just easier to scan a list by moving your eye than scan a list then scroll then scan again. When Suse did their group studies they must have tested on a group that didn’t work like me and many others.
Comment by Dave Taylor — 2 December 2007 @ 13:55
[...] – Lancelot oraz Raptor są na razie na zbyt wczesnym etapie rozwoju, chociaż Ivan Čukić pokazał już nieco działającego kodu. Wyszukiwanie aplikacji działa całkiem sprawnie. Pozostaje tylko [...]
Pingback by oort » Blog Archive » kde 4 - rewizja 745219 — 5 December 2007 @ 21:37
I’m trying to compile lancelot using kdesvn-build extragear/plasma, but at the end i can’t see the button in “Add Widgets”. What can i do?
Comment by mad — 2 April 2008 @ 14:34
Lancelot is excluded from the build ATM since I have to make some
pretty big bound-to-fail-building changes. And there shouldn’t be
anything in SVN that would make the packages (in this case the
extragear) to fail to build.
I’m not sure when it’ll be over (since Plasma itself is going to
go through some big changes soon), but it will be announced on the
blog.
Comment by admin — 2 April 2008 @ 14:44
Thanks for your answer. I tried to compile it using cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull ../../lancelot, but when i launch make (after some other errors,for example: ../../../applets/lancelot/tools/puck/puck.py: not found) i’m not able to resolve this one:
undefined reference to `typeinfo for Plasma::BorderLayout’ (or something like that).
Sorry for my long post but i’m very interested finally to try your menu…
Comment by mad — 3 April 2008 @ 08:28
Well, the only thing I can say is that you should wait.
You /could/ enable building L with the plasma’s extragear by uncommenting the
add_subdirectory(lancelot)
line in applets/CMakeLists.txt
(puck not found would disappear when building along with the rest of plasma’s extragear – I haven’t had the time to write a proper FindPuck cmake script)
But, as I said, it is not advisable yet. When L is near completion, I will ring all the bells
It /is/ usable now, but probably usable only by me
Comment by admin — 3 April 2008 @ 08:41