The last few days were dedicated to Lancelot and the bugs assigned to me by our friendly Bugzilla system at bugs.kde.org. Most important bugs have been crushed.

But, it is no fun to talk only about bug fixes.

Item reordering

It all started with reordering of the favourites and a bug report about the documents and computer sections not being sorted correctly. The item reordering is now finished and works smoothly.

The perk with the reordering and drag and drop is that now it only works when Plasma is unlocked. So, Lancelot feels more like a part of Plasma than it did before – before this change, you could try to drag items from L, just to find out that you can’t drop it anywhere since Plasma is locked.

Search box in Lancelot Parts

Well, the title says it all. Right-click the parts applet -> Lancelot Part Settings -> Show the search box

… well, that’s all for today.

First of all, let me just say that Tokamak 3 experience was more fun than riding on a carrousel under the influence of LSD (or so I heard) and more strange than some of the episodes of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus (which was, by the way, quoted many times – mostly by Aaron and me).

All kudos go to Mario, the father of our big Takamak family, and all in all a swell guy. We taught the Brazilians (Ana and Artur) what snow is, and I think they will remember it for a long time

Ok, enough about the fun parts. You were/are able to read about many things that were done during T3, so I’ll not bother you with the others’ work. I’m just going to write an update to the last post.

KRunner + Kickoff

Kickoff in trunk now uses KRunner as its search engine. There are a few bugs and a few concerns about functionality that will be resolved soon.

At the moment, all runners in KRunner are active in Kickoff as well, but that will change since we’ll need to make a whitelist of approved runners to avoid Kickoff crashing the plasma-desktop process on an error in KRunner. This means that Kickoff’s search will be less powerful than the KRunner and Lancelot, but that’s the price of running in the plasma-desktop process.

Plasma + Nepomuk

The service for activities runs well and is located in the playground, and so is the testing client.
The current work is to completely integrate it into Plasma which has proven to be more complicated than I expected at first. The thing that makes it hard is the need of libplasma to stay API and ABI compatible. The Plasma::Context class has been introduced some time ago, but it did nothing and some methods defined in it weren’t sufficiently granular.

At first I tried to implement everything with no API changes, but I’ve hit a wall very soon and had to deprecate a few methods, and introduce a new class named GlobalContext. It seems to work, so I’ve now switched on to implement the handlers in the plasma-desktop. I hope to have it working till the end of the week so that I could post it all for an API review.

Favourite applications

I was hoping to have more time to talk to Ruphy about making a library for handling the usage data and favourite applications handling (to be used in Raptor and Lancelot… and possibly in other menus) but Ruphy could stay for only a few days. I’ll have to start the discussion about this on plasma-devel when I finish the activity stuff and when I look the relevant parts of Raptor’s code.

Photos…

Photos will come later… hopefully from other guys and gals aswell (torrent comes to mind)

I’m aware that I could write more often from Tokamak 3, but I’m too lazy. I’m now recompiling KDE, so I have the time.

First, the most important things – we are having a great time, both fun and productive, and I just can’t wait to see all the ideas mentioned here implemented.

I’m gonna mention only the things I’ll be doing soon (and that I’m doing right now).

Plasma + Nepomuk activities

So, you know, the plasma activities? Those don’t make so much sense at the moment, but the idea is to make the whole environment aware of them. And to make the rest of the environment able to control and manage them.

I’ve already written a Nepomuk service that manages activities, and a library that gives the applications access to this service without the need to deal with d-bus and nepomuk. The library is almost finished – the only thing left to do is some pretty way to deal with the /offline/ mode (when the nepomuk is disabled).

The next step is to connect/synchronize the plasma’s activities to this service. Mind that this is only the beginning – the future will bring applications that will be able to adapt to the running activity… (and it will bring a nice and fancy interface for all of that)

Imagine Kickoff, Lancelot, Raptor with favourite applications that depend on the task you’re dealing with at that moment… the file dialog’s and dolphin’s places…

Kickoff + KRunner

The second thing that should have a large impact is something nobody really expected me to do – to replace the current search mechanism in Kickoff (yes, the KICKOFF!!!) with KRunner, just like Lancelot does.

It really is weird that I should improve a /competing/ program, but Sebas asked to do it, so… why not. (he, he, even with that Kickoff will suck compared to Lancelot and Raptor )

OK, enough for tonight, see you later…