You have heard many times that Lancelot was a superkaramba applet in the beginning, and that later I screwed it up by turning it into a menu.

In this video, which is demonstrating the developments of the /Plasma Applet Browser/ in the era of pre KDE 4.0, sometime in the middle of it, you can see the first version of Lancelot for Plasma which was generally the crude port of the SK one.

Absolutely no connection to the present one

Make your word count – new Plasma Widget Explorer in development: http://www.wouwlabs.com/blogs/anniec/?p=37

New features in the land of Lancelot

Keep open option – Lancelot doesn’t automatically close when you click something in it, but closes only when it loses the focus. You can set this option in the configuration dialogue, or you can hold Ctrl pressed while activating items in L.

The second thing is that the GMail plasma-lancelot DataEngine is working well and I’ve placed it in playground/plasma.

As you can see in the screenshot, it behaves differently than the Kontact engine in L – it shows a list of unread mails instead of the list of directories that have unread mails in them. The reason behind that is that I use GMail’s Atom feed to get the unread messages.

I have placed it in playground not because it is unfinished/unstable or anything, but rather because it is not intended for general use, and because there is no GUI for choosing the contact engines.

Well, not GMail per-se, at least not yet, but there is now a mechanism in Lancelot that allows you to make plug-ins for the Messages and Contacts lists.

It is based on Plasma‘s data engines, so you’ll not need to learn anything new in order to extend Lancelot.

Obviously, not all data engines can be used from L since not all data engines provide the list data structure. At the moment, in order to use a data engine in Lancelot, it needs to have the following structure:

• .metadata -> lancelot
  • version = 1.0
  • modelTitle = Title (optional)
  • modelIcon = someIcon (optional)
• data -> title
• data -> description
• data -> icon

As you can see above, the main data source is named “data” and it contains three string lists (QStringList) named “title”, “description” and “icon” which contain, respectively, titles, descriptions and icons of the items that should be shown in Lancelot.

The Plasma::DataEngine – Lancelot::ActionListModel bridge is not finished yet, it’ll need to use Plasma::Service in order to notify the DataEngine that the user has clicked the item. When I finish the infrastructure, I’ll make an example GMail data engine and upload it to SVN. I don’t think I’ll bother making anything else, that is your job

Air Theme

So, since Air is coming along nicely (thanks Nuno), it was the time to make the files Lancelot needs for it. Although there are a few things yet to do, I’m quite satisfied with it. I’m even using Air as my Plasma theme now.

Scroll-bars

The second thing that all theme makers that support Lancelot should know, is that Lancelot now uses Plasma’s scroll-bars. So, you don’t need to make files for scroll-bars anymore.

Keyboard support

Lancelot in KDE 4.2 introduced keyboard support. Now it is taken even further – now you can do /anything/ in L by using only the keyboard. The section and system buttons now can be accessed through standard accelerators (Alt + the underlined letter). For opening the context menu for an item in the menu, select it and press Alt+Enter.

KRunner actions

As you should already know, runners can now support various actions for results. You can access them in Lancelot via a context menu. Well, that was the good news, the bad is that I know not of any runner that provides any special actions.

Other things

There is now a logging system that remembers applications you launch, what you search for etc. Some new configuration options are also present, and the parts applet works better. There are probably other changes, but I can not remember them at the moment.

So, cheerio!

OK, it is now safe to write this post. The April 1st has passed, and now all of us (except the Onion news authors, obviously) are returning to the every-day reality.

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time lately to do anything serious, so I’ve tackled the multi-process web browser that I have mentioned last time.

It received some standard web-browsing features such as loading a page when you type the address in the address bar, and similar

But that’s not the reason behind writing this this post. You know how Firefox and Konqueror ask you whether you want to restore your last session after a crash? Well, it is a good feature, but I’ve got one even better.

When a site makes an illegal move, and induces a crash in QtWebKit, instead of crashing the whole application (like in most other browsers), it only closes the tab it belongs to. OK, that’s not new. The new thing is that I’ve ported a notification system that I made some time ago for another application, so that when a tab is lost, it can be recovered very easily – just click ‘Reopen’ (see the screenshot).

I haven’t used KDE‘s system wide notifications since I wanted to make them local (there’s no point in bogging the system notifications with things like these).

The next step will be to implement more advanced, but still standard browsing features. The smart address bar will be one of the first. It could probably end up in Konqueror and Rekonq eventually. (Nepomuk tags for bookmarks…)

Since Raptor is coming slower than we are hoping, I decided to give you all a preview of what it will behave like.

Starting with the revision r945664, you’ll be able to see all the glory of the Raptor mode for Lancelot.

This is probably the last feature that will be introduced in Lancelot for KDE 4.3. I’m not sure about the category buttons on top, because they don’t really have a purpose now, and the no-click paradigm doesn’t really work in Raptor mode, but it is still retained as an option.

There are some layout problems, but those will be fixed in time for 4.3.

I hope you’ll like it. If you want to test it before 4.3, just compile the SVN trunk.