Although my intention was not to make the Contacts section for 4.1 (that is to disable it) and to wait for Telepathy and Akonadi to be integrated into KDE PIM, I just couldn’t wait.

Lancelot now shows on-line contacts from Kopete, altogether with contact pictures. Unfortunately, the D-Bus interface to Kopete is underpowered so the list updating is pooling-based. Alternative would be to make a Lancelot plug-in for Kopete, but that will have to wait for post-4.1 period (if the need for that remains).

No other IM applications are going to be supported for the time being. I intend to make the IM connections pluggable… but it will not be done for 4.1.

The next step will be to populate the left side of the window with e-mail related stuff such as unread messages from KMail.

Well, I confess that I could be called lazy and all, since there is not that much visible progress in Lancelot‘s world. But I have a couple of excuses:

• Exams. Unfortunately, I have obligations beside KDE, Plasma and Lancelot. If somebody would like to pay me to do KDE work, I would gladly accept.
• Plasma breakage. As you probably know, Plasma went through API review and conversion to WoC. So, that had to be done for Lancelot as well. And it was quite painful since Lancelot is based on completely custom-made widgets (now in a separate liblancelot library).

So, enough complaining and excuses, Lancelot is now again in buildable state, and more importantly, in a screenshottable state:

(the wallpaper atm is from NetBeans projet’s website).

The news include:

• PUCK: Improvements to PUCK (Plasma UI Compiler) which now has an automatic module generator for custom classes. It parses the class definition and generates Python modules for PUCK (most Lancelot modules for PUCK are generated using this).
• libLancelot: The backgrounds for all widgets are based on SvgPanel.
• Lancelot launcher applet: The main applet is rewritten, and it has a few glitches at the moment. The configuration is now complying with the new Plasma’s configuration framework.
• Lancelot menu: Have I mentioned that it is screenshottable? Nothing more than that ATM.

That’s all for today. Cheerio!

I was a bit jealous when I saw the Raptor menu’s site, so I decided that Lancelot needed one too. While compiling the latest KDE (and Plasma) from SVN I had nothing better to do than web design. The result is available right here. It is not finished yet – documentation and screenshots are missing, but I intend to make it more comprehensive in the future – along with the new developments in the world of L. So to repeat, the address of the site is http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org

The split

The latest development before the Big Plasma Breakage (or as some call it ‘the transition to Widgets on Canvas’) was that the Lancelot is now divided into two main parts – the application and applets on one side, and the liblancelot library on the other. The library contains the base framework including advanced Plasma widgets and layouts. It is in a very experimental state at the moment, and it is not advised for anyone to use it outside of Lancelot. The API compatibility is being broken every week at the moment, but at some point it will stabilise (sometime around KDE 4.2 or 4.3).

WoC

Plasma is becoming stable enough (API-wise) and now it is Lancelot’s turn to reach the Big Breakage. Or to be more precise, it currently is in it’s Big Brekage state, but needs to get out of it. Since there are quite a few things that need to be changed, I have decided to do a bit more, so a couple of old widgets are being reimplemented from scratch to be more flexible and reusable (most notable example is that the old list widget is being split into ScrollBar, ScrollPane and List).

That’s all for now, I’ll ping you all again when the library becomes compilable in all its glory.