It is the time to announce the new version of Lancelot that will be shipping with KDE 4.3.

Most software has code-names for different releases. Lancelot doesn’t, but I’ve decided to dedicate a new tagline to this version – “I just get carried away…”. It is still from the same motion picture as the last one (“In my own idiom” – for Lancelot 1.0).

The news of a new version can never be as grand as the introduction to a new program (especially when a lot of hype preceded it like it was the case for L1.0), so I’ll not bother to make it more grandiose than it is.

Themes

The first thing you’ll notice is that the themes have changed. All themes but Aya which kept its Spartan look.

You can see the Air theme in the main picture above, Slim Glow in the first screenshot and Aya in the second. The other “dark” themes such as Heron and Elegance look similar to S-G.

I’m aware that there will be complaints, so I’ll prepare a “classic” theme pack for the complainers.

Features

There are no ground-braking new features – most of them are related to configuration options. So, if you want to see what’s new in that area, just open the configuration dialogue.

A lot of small improvements have been made – finished keyboard support, some usability improvements, some fixes, better Kopete and KRunner integration, better Parts applet (ok, this one can be considered a grand improvement since the Parts applet has become useful yet again), sorting of the applications in the list according to the XDG specifications…

And, as a topping on a cake, the Contacts section now supports plugins, so you can write them for your favourite mail/chat application. This feature is hidden from the user, and will be until it stabilizes for KDE 4.4.

The continued development – for KDE 4.4

Since the known bugs are sparse (or to be exact, I have only one that I need to investigate), I have continued the real development in a branch in SVN (hard feature freeze is upon us, so I can not do that in the trunk). The liblancelot is now much lighter memory-wise – a couple of bytes per Lancelot::Widget (and that is a lot of bytes per Lancelot application), it is refactored and is a step closer to the API stability and maybe even ABI stability.

That’s all for now – I’m bored and I need to prepare for my talk about Free/Libre software and KDE that is due later today…

SF sent me an e-mail whether I’d like to nominate Lancelot for community awards.

So I did it. If you’d like to help, click the image above, and nominate L for the “most likely to change your way…” or “Best visual design” category (or even both)

You may have seen that, according to NetApps Linux is used by 1% (or in words – one percent) of online users. There’s one thing to note, and that is the fact that not all Linux users are using it to surf, and that some are changing their user agent strings to mimic IE on Windows. The other, probably more important thing is that NetApps base their studies mostly on surfers from US of A.

As you can see in the chart above, the blue is 14%, red 33.5% and the yellow is the staggering 52.5%. This means that blue represents 14% of all computer users. And in this case it is not only 14% of the surfers, but of all computer users in the world. In the chart below, you can see that 14% separated from the red and blue parts, which represent 100 – 14 = 86% of the whole e-world’s population.

Trends

Obviously, the current statistics are not as important as the trends. In the following few charts, you can see the trends over the past few years. Naturally the data for the current year had to be extrapolated since 2009 is not yet over.

You can see that, although the blue had the largest share in 2006 with 1250 tested users (which was almost 70%), and the yellow had only 128 users, the yellow grew exponentially, and the blue grew insignificantly. Yellow had 512 in 2007, 1024 in 2008, and 2048 is predicted for 2009.

You can see the percentage chart during the past few years, which I think speaks for itself.

I’ve had a few busy days closing Lancelot bug reports. There is only one left that is relevant for KDE 4.3, that is only one that is confirmed and not a feature request.

There are quite a few other fixes that somebody could even consider as new features. But realizing that we are in the hard feature freeze period, logically, those are only bug fixes, and not (and I repeat NOT) new features.

Kopete integration

The first one is that the Kopete integration works better than before. I’ve just submitted my first patch to Kopete’s code-base fixing a glitch in the D-Bus interface that was stopping Lancelot from accessing the online contacts. (There were some important changes in Kopete that had a side-effect of making its D-Bus interface useless) This has also fixed Lancelot bug 170437: Lancelot-Kopete integration breaks if ocntacts are sync’d with KAddressbook

The parts applet

The parts applet handles the applications:/ KIO much better, so no more wrong icons and application titles. The other great news concerning the Parts applet is that it no longer shows its ugly icon when you add it to the panel. Now, unless you have set a custom icon, it uses the icon representing the data-model in it. So, for example, if you drag the ‘[KMail] Unread messages’ to the panel, you’ll get KMail icon.

GMail

I’ve got a request to explain how to use the new GMail data engine with Lancelot.

Before that, I just need to state that it doesn’t work well, and that it is just a proof of the concept at the moment. And that is the reason behind the fact it is located in the Playground.

Step1: compile and install plasma playground

Step2: open ~/.kde/share/config/lancelotrc file

Step3: add mailPlugins=lancelot_gmail or imPlugins=lancelot_gmail to the [Main] section of the file depending on where you want to show the unread GMail messages (mailPlugins is the left column)

Step4: restart lancelot (kquitapp lancelot && lancelot)

Step5: enter the username and password (and set it to be saved in KWallet)

Step6: don’t report missing features, or bugs

That’s it.