There have been some good news regarding the distribution specific packages. Thanks to many of you, packages exist for most mainstream distributions – Kubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva, Slackware, Gentoo and Arch. I haven’t heard anything about Fedora and Debian yet, so any info would be appreciated. Note that I haven’t tested these packages.

Apart from that, there is now a source package for those of you that don’t like using SVN.

Most of the links to packages are available at the old address http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/download. Mandriva’s package is in cooker.

Cheerio, and thanks for all the fish (help).

p.s. Some of you have had some problems with the Parts applet. I’m not sure yet what is causing it, but will investigate it.

… I’m afraid when I’m in this idiom, I sometimes get a bit, uh, sort of carried away.

If you’ve been watching the SVN logs, you might have noticed the tagging of the Lancelot 1.0. And now it is official!

lancelot.fomentgroup.org

Introduction

Lancelot is an alternative menu, or application launcher interface, for KDE 4.x series. If Kickoff or KMenu don’t fit you, feel free to try it. Lancelot provides a quick access to the most used applications, to your devices, contacts etc. in a familiar yet refreshing way.

1.0 Release highlights

• Optional no-click interface which allows you to navigate through the menu and perform any action in it without making a single click.
• The layout of the menu adapts so that most used parts are always closer to the mouse cursor.
• Advanced search capabilities. Thanks to KRunner integration, you can search not only your applications, but also contacts, bookmarks and many more (even a calculator is included).
• You can place parts of the menu directly onto the desktop or your panel for quicker access.

Documentation/Usage manual

Although the documentation is not finished, the basic usage section is. You can reach it at lancelot.fomentgroup.org/docs

Some statistics

I thought it would be interesting to compare the sizes of Plasma and Lancelot since the later is based on the former.

The first is the line-count of all source files (only .cpp for C++ and .py for Python are included)

liblancelot 5916
lancelot    4482
puck        1470
----------------
total      11868 lines

libplasma  21903
plasma     33611
----------------
total      55514 lines

So Lancelot is one fifth of Plasma. Not bad

Thanks

I would just like to thank all of you who have tested Lancelot in the past, all of you who are making distribution packages, all of you who provided feedback and all of you I forgot to mention in the first part of this sentence.

Disclaimer

Only 3 pixels, and 5 lines of code were harmed during the making of this project.

p.s. If the popularity of this blog could be measured by the SPAM messages it receives, I have to say that approaching the 1.0 version was a real traffic drawer

Well, after today, I really will not add any features to the 4.1 branch. I know I said this before, but this time I really mean it! This is now a hard feature freeze.

What does this mean?

This means that from now on only bugfixes will be introduced, but Lancelot will look and behave the same as it does at the moment of writing. There are a couple of things in line for fixing (for example a bit more polished click-on-the-button-close-the-menu). So, you can consider it as a Release Candidate 1.

This also implies that the trunk version is now where all future and feature development will occur. (BTW, I’ve got some great news concerning Kopete’s D-Bus) So, in a sense, this marks the beginning of the era of Lancelot 2.0 development. Bugfixes will obviously be shared between the 4.1 branch and the trunk (for a specified period of time), but that will be all.

What’s new since M4?

The latest addition is the ability to drag the items from the application browser. Now you can drag the applications to the desktop to make icons of them, you can drag application categories to show them as folderviews etc.

You can drag them from the lists, but from the breadcrumb bar as well. If you drag the Favourite applications from the breadcrumb bar, it will be shown as a Lancelot part.

One side-effect of having all that is that now, if you want, you could show a folder in a Lancelot Part instead of FolderView. It is not meant to replace the FolderView, since it lacks any file manager functions, but if you just want to create a launcher with a custom set of applications, Lancelot Part is a perfect solution.

p.s. If you drag an application category to the desktop but you only see a list of directories (or subcategories) and not the applications, it’s not my fault, but a fault of applications:/ KIO service.

I’ve had a feeling that a long period of time has passed since I made a screencast of anything. It turned out that the last one was made more than a year ago.

So, I decided to make a screencast of Lancelot… it beats writing user documentation every time enjoy:

The main reason for the cast was the fact that the Parts applet is not that intuitive to use (if you don’t see what you can do with it). And if you’re asking how I know that most of you haven’t tested the Parts applet, then the answer is simple – there are no bug reports on it, while it is the most unstable part of Lancelot.

EDIT: Here you are – the direct download http://www.sendspace.com/file/52jr89 8MB

Yes, this is the last milestone before the 1.0 release of Lancelot. This means that Lancelot now has all features the final version will have.

Configuration

The first thing you’ll notice new is a small Lancelot icon in the corner of the window

This is a door to the Lancelot’s configuration (one of the doors to be precise). When that button is activated, you get a menu with a couple of options.

The alternative to this menu is to right-click the launcher applet. It now provides access to menu’s configuration as well as its own.

I decided to keep the configuration dialogue minimal in this version since there is no need to configure mail and chat programs since only kmail and kopete are supported. And the same goes for office applications which point to OpenOffice, Gimp and Inkscape, at, least until the final version of KOffice 2 arrives.

Other news

Many things got polished, for example the breadcrumb, and a couple of bugs got squashed. You can see the active Lancelot related bugs here. Obviously, I tend to keep that list minimal at all times

One-oh

The 1.0 version is planned in the first half of September. Possibly followed by 1.0.1 bugfix release somewhere after 20th of September. That will most probably be the last Lancelot release for KDE 4.1.

There are two reasons for the “half” in the release name:

• The first is that I made the requirements of M3 release (contacts section) before making the parts applet more powerful
• And the second is that the parts applet is now a very neat thingie, but not completed yet.

Contacts section

The new contacts section contains unread mail list, and the list of Kopete contacts you have seen before. The old code for Kopete integration was lost, so it had to be rewritten.

Lancelot 4.1 Contacts” width=”249″ height=”300″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-135″ />

Since Kopete’s D-Bus interface still leaves much to be desired, the list in Lancelot is not real time, but is based on polling at certain intervals of time. Also, there is no way to retrieve whether the contact is online, away or something. (fortunately there is a way to tell if it is offline)

KMail is much better because it notifies Lancelot when new mail arrives. It still has some polling, but it works much better than Kopete contacts.

Parts applet

Although you still can not add the search box and application browser to the desktop, Parts applet has been revamped. Now, you can place it in the panel – it then behaves like the Device Notification applet.

Also, now is possible to add multiple lists to one applet which you can see in the screenshot:

It somewhat resembles the currently developed (a Summer of Code project) concept of Plasma‘s Extenders (the most requested plasma feature TM), but, obviously, works only on Lancelot’s items. With the release of Extender-enabled Plasma (KDE 4.2 probably), you’ll see more Lancelot Parts improvements.

Bug squashing

The last, but not the least important part is that a couple of bugs were fixed. A few crashes related to KRunner integration (reported by Sergey Sedlovsky) and a couple of wishlist/behaviour glitches are gone. I have to thank Josh Rickmar for posting a couple of very pedantic bug reports at BKO.

p.s. If the trunk version looks like it is broken, it is only because of the theme – I’ll port the theme from 4.1 branch when it is finished.

Well, I’m very glad to announce the release of M1 (milestone 1) version of Lancelot. This is not a 1.0 version, but the significance is that this is the first one meant for public use. This also means that the “don’t file bugs, this is pre-alpha software” era is now over. So from now on, bugs.kde.org is your friend.

M1 (the revision number 843716)

The menu is in a good shape, and is quite usable. The main feature highlights are:

• No-click application browser
• Integrated KRunner
• Parts of Lancelot on the desktop – drag a list section (Places, Devices…) right onto the desktop

M*

Milestone releases regard only the KDE 4.1 branch of Lancelot (although the trunk is developed in parallel). I’ve decided to make a couple of them before 1.0:

• M2: More powerful Parts applet. Ability to add the application browser and search box to the desktop
• M3: Contacts section. I have hoped that KDE 4.1 will bring full switch to Akonadi and Decibel, but, since it didn’t happen, I’ll have to use the d-bus interface to KMail and Kopete.
• M4: The configuration interface for the menu (now only the launcher applet can be configured)
• 1.0 (M5): The final polished version

The “one-oh” version will be the final version for KDE 4.1. After that, only the trunk will be developed, and the versioning will return to normal 1.x, 2.x… (most probably in sync with KDE releases)

I know that I’m being a bit boring, but I just had to write another post. While everyone is writing about Akademy, unfortunately I am not going this year and I have to focus my mind on something else (to avoid jealousy). That is the main reason Lancelot has been improved this much in the past week or so.

Today’s topic is the great return of the Parts applet. As you can see in the screenshot, my desktop has two different lists from the Lancelot menu – favourite applications and storage media.

There isn’t a pleasant way of adding those to desktop yet (you would need to edit the plasma-appletsrc file to get them), but soon it will be a matter of Drag and Drop, or right click -> “Add to desktop”.

You get a three blogs in one since I’m to lazy to write them separately:

Theme

First of all, just to say that I’ve started making a new theme that would fit with the Plasma‘s default. It is inspired by the proposed new look for Kickoff (by Davide Bettio – http://www.uninstall.it/kickoff_mockup.png). It looks like this at the moment:

Lancelot Oxygen theme” width=”241″ height=”300″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-125″ />

To be honest, I don’t like it, but it fits more with the default Plasma theme. If there is anyone willing to modify it so that it looks more, well, appealing, just mail me, and you’ll get all the help you need This version will be in the SVN tomorrow (the 4.1 branch).

Categories versus one button

This comment by Beojan decided what will be the default:

I have to agree with this – by making the categories shown in the menu by default, the user gets the information of what categories exist. Later, it could be changed to my preferred behaviour.

Compilation issues and crashes.

I’m happy to announce that the compilation issues that were related to Xlibs are now gone. I was linking the Parts applet with the application, and then, it wanted to be linked to Xlibs that are not needed for the applet. Side effect is that now the applet .so file is much smaller.

In other news, the crashes that were occurring during the application browsing are history. At least, I haven’t seen one in a while (if you encounter one, please notify me)

Edit: The latest download and installation instructions are located at http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/download

Since there were a couple of reported problems related to L installation, I decided to write a small how-to. The most peculiar thing was that ‘make install’ didn’t install any binaries. Thanks to the help of Jone Marius Vignes, the problem was hunted down and killed

Prerequisites

• Subversion client
• Python >=2.5 (needed only at compile time)
• Qt4 and KDE 4.1 or trunk development libraries (kdelibs and libplasma)
• cmake

Download

If you have the KDE 4.1.x, do the following:

And if you use the trunk

Compile and install

Enter the directory that contains the source code (cd lancelot), and do the following:

  $ mkdir build
  $ cd build
  $ cmake ..
       -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix`
       -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
  $ make && make install

If you plan to send me backtraces of crashes, install the KDElibs, libplasma and Qt with debugging symbols, and replace ‘release’ in above script with ‘debugfull’.

Alternatively, if you have the KDE development environment set up according to the article on the Techbase, just enter the source directory and type cmakekde

Almost there

Now just restart Plasma and add the Lancelot applet to the panel or desktop, or wherever. If the menu doesn’t show up when you click the applet, visit this link Lancelot FAQ: Troubleshooting

Have fun!