Lancelot, Plasma theme, Compiling, Crashes…
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 object to making “sections in panel” the default.
I think GNOME works with that method because they have a textual description. If all you have are Icons, a new user would find it hard to understand what each of the icons mean, so they would find a single icon, where it is obvious that it launches the menu, with sections inside,which have textual descriptions, easier than having seperate icons for each section.
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)
when you talk about making a theme for lancelot which fits the default plasma theme, does that mean that plasma does not obey the global plasma theming?
Comment by maninalift — 7 August 2008 @ 20:36
You mean ‘Lancelot does not obey the…’?
Plasma themes provide a very small set of images – mostly just backgrounds (applet, panel, dialog…), clocks, progress bars and similar.
Lancelot needs much more graphic elements than that – system buttons, section buttons, main background, panel background, list items, breadcrumb bar…
It is based on the same code, so if you know how to make a Plasma theme, then you would know to modify Lancelot’s as you wish. Lancelot has, on the other side, a couple of more advanced options for theme makers, but knowledge of that is not required to make a theme.
Comment by Ivan Čukić — 8 August 2008 @ 00:09
Perhaps having a chat with Kickoff developers and then agreeing to have the same basic theme support would be nice.
IIRC there was some talking on kde(-core)-devel about having Kickoff themeable, I’m sure that Lancelot could also use the same, right?
Comment by teprrr — 8 August 2008 @ 00:19
thanks, it’s very nice
i will try this black lancelot with my colour scheme: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Krog+Black?content=85814
Comment by Dass — 8 August 2008 @ 07:16
yes, I was writing in a rush. Thanks. BTW I love Lancelot, the trouble is I’m also starting to appreciate Kickoff and krunner now does everything that Katapult and Alt-F2 did and more. I just can’t decide how to launch my app any more ;#)
I’m sure there must be a reasonable and cheap way of including in plasma themes some hints to help items that do not use the standard frames fit in. (colours, line-properties for borders etc). Is that a dumb idea?
Comment by maninalift — 8 August 2008 @ 08:06
The main difference between Kickoff and Lancelot is that K uses QWidgets (like standard Qt/KDE applications), and L uses QGraphicsWidgets (all-Plasma).
If K started using Plasma to paint it’s widgets, then I suppose that L’s and K’s themes could share many items, if not all.
@Dass
Nice
@maninalift
Well, Lancelot includes KRunner search in itself
Not a dumb idea at all, but not really possible right now. We are hoping that Qt’s Svg renderer will include some easier way of replacing colours in a SVG (Now it supports only). The only possible way (ATM) to replace a colour with one from, for example system palette, is to parse the SVG file, do a search and replace, and then load it and render it. This is a bit too much, and not cheap at all.
Comment by Ivan Čukić — 8 August 2008 @ 09:10