developer and free/libre software enthusiast
I'm a Nokia Qt Ambassador
So, one of the first distros that contacted me related to branded Stripes was openSuse. So, this is one of the versions.
(there are ~7 in total, including the plain blue like the Debian one was)
Working on modified Stripes turned out to be rather gratifying. I didn’t expect the wallpaper to /work/ with different colours.
It even looks cool when two different colours are used for the background. (maybe I’ll do that for some other distro)
Some time ago, Nuno was talking about us (KDE) modifying/adapting artwork we have to suit distributions so that both KDE and distribution brand can be retained. (if someone has the link to the blog posts in question, I’d be much obliged)
So, without a further ado, the preview version of a Debian-specific version of the Stripes wallpaper:
get the larger version (currently only 1440×900) at deviantArt
So, if you maintain (or whatever you call it) artwork for your distro, and would like to have a distro-branded version, just send me an e-mail or find me on IRC.
p.s. Why Debian? I’m using it and the swirl looks awesome in Stripes 
p.p.s. I know marketing people will not like the idea of distorting their logos, but… it looks rather cool! 
If you haven’t noticed, KDE SC 4.5 comes with a new wallpaper named Stripes. It has replaced the old default_blue that has been our friend since 3.x days (and maybe even earlier, I don’t know).
Since it is used in KDM, it can’t be (yet) shipped with multiple resolutions, but due to its simplicity it scales rather well.
If you are not satisfied with the default resolution (strangely enough it is 1440×900), you can download the multiresolution package from my gallery at deviantArt. Unfortunately, dA doesn’t accept .tar.gz so the wallpapers are zipped.
EDIT: Note that this is not the *same* version as the one shipped with KDE SC – this one (apart from multiple resolutions) includes a gaussian-noise hack Nuno suggested to make gradients look better.
At last Tokamak (Plasma developer sprint), I’ve made a small KWrite proof-of-concept patch just to see how it will behave with the new activities framework – notifying system when it opens and closes a document. A lot of time has passed since, and activity classes were completely revamped, turned upside-down, went through one API review, and moved from the playground to kdebase/libs.
That original patch doesn’t exist anymore, and even if it did, it wouldn’t work for all the changes that were made to activities.
The uber-awesome KDE conference – aKademy – was a time for something new!
New client
Ok, after this introduction you’d expect that I’ve written another patch for KWrite. Well, you’re wrong. The first application that supports activities as a client is Vim!
The main reason I went for Vim this time was to prove that non-kde apps can work with our awesome concept of activities. Another reason is that I didn’t want to use KActivity* classes, so that I can see whether the d-bus protocol is sufficiently profound for this task. It turned out that it is, but there are some improvements to be made.
At the moment, only Vim invoked from a terminal emulator program (eg Konsole) can work with activities since I can’t find a way to retrieve the window id of a GUI-enabled Vim from vimscript, so I’m essentially using WINDOWID environment variable that terminal emulators set.
The following is a debugging output of the activity manager daemon related to Vim windows
resourceWindowRegistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/mailacc.txt
resourceWindowUnregistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/.vimrc
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///home/ivan/
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///usr/share/vim/vim72/doc/options.txt
Truly limitless possibilities!!!
^^^^ just wanted to write an awesome marketing-speak sentence for the end of the post
For those who didn’t see the notice by Tom, you should convert your password based SVN accounts (https) to SSH (svn+ssh) as a first step of migrating from SVN to GIT. For instructions, head straight to: http://www.omat.nl/2010/06/23/convert-password-based-accounts/
I’ve already converted, and I can’t be happier – the sun is shining, everyone wants to be my friend, all members of Pink Floyd are alive again, and I have 10% more girlfriends than before. Ok, I’m stopping with commercialism before somebody kicks me…
There were a lot of complaints when we decided to limit the size of icons placed on panels in plasma to 32×32 pixels.
The reasoning behind limiting the size were requests from users who use vertical panels – vertical panels are usually made wider then standard panels, and icons would grow to 300×300 pixels taking up most of the space on the panel.
Putting a maximum size for icons was a good decision generally, but the bad side of it was that the new size was hard-coded. There was an option in the system settings to change sizes of icons, but setting the size for panel icons was disabled.
Now, thanks to a patch by Mike Kasick, this option is enabled and it works. Mike is one of the best types of users – although he isn’t a Plasma contributor (as far as I know – no SVN account) he sent us a patch, and responded to all of our suggestions with revised versions.
In the end, Aaron and myself adapted the proposed patch a bit to better fit the rest of Plasma, and it entered the SVN so it is on its way to KDE SC 4.5.
In KDE SC 4.5, the option is located in System Settings -> Application Appearance -> Icons -> Advanced -> Panel
Preamble: I have no intention to start a dispute related to the new applet browser in Plasma. Some people like it, some don’t, some prefer the old one, some want something completely different…
As you don’t already know , Marco did some great work which I’m not gonna talk about – he said he’ll make a screencast of it eventually. So I’ll just mention a side-effect of that made possible by a 1-minute patch by yours truly.
KRunner (and Lancelot, naturally) as widget explorers
From KDE SC 4.5, you’ll be able to fire up KRunner or Lancelot, search for some plasma widget and drag it to the desktop.
Well, that’s all
Edit: You can also create a shortcut like Meta+P to open krunner with only this /plasma/ runner enabled via Global Shortcuts (thanks vilder for info)
First of all, I need to apologize for not doing this earlier – I was rather busy lately.
The other problem is that “remember the milk” plasmoid is ruining/spoiling me. Until I started using it, I somehow found the time to do stuff in order not to forget what I need to do. This way, when I have a reminder, I can postpone most of the items in it indefinitely. 
So, without a further ado, I present the first public release of the fantastic, greatest and uber-awesome brand-new (and did I say fantastic and awesome?) plasma theme named ASCII (it is awesome… and fantastic… and unique… and gorgeous… and uniquely fantastic… and awesome…):
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=122261
… long live the Plasma Shelf!
There were two main problems with the Lancelot Part applet.
The first was the name. The name, although it does represent what the applet is technically, it doesn’t really say what the applet is meant for and what it does.
So, it is problematic when you see it in the applet browser, and it isn’t any better to see it when you drag and drop a folder onto the desktop and get the options to show it in the “Folder View” or “Lancelot Part”.
Configuration
The second problem was that a lot of users thought that Lancelot Part does nothing (aka doesn’t work) because when you add it by using the widgets browser, it is just an empty applet. (nobody really bothers reading the instructions these days).
Now, you can use the configuration dialogue to choose what you want to be shown in the applet.
Ideas
I’m currently having some problems wording a couple of things and I would appreciate any help you can give.
The first problem is what to put as a description for the Shelf applet. “Generic list which can hold various types of items” sounds really bad
The second is the title for the section of the configuration dialogue shown in the image above – the section below “show the search box” option where you can choose which /sublists/data models/ to show in the applet.
Internals
The ‘internal’ name of the applet (as seen in plasma*rc files) hasn’t changed to keep the back-compatibility without the need for hooks in the configuration system to tell plasma about the rename. The other thing I had to watch out while redoing a few things was to keep the old applet configuration structure intact. Surprisingly, I managed it somehow.
The applet’s source code is still located in kdeplasma-addons/applets/lancelot/parts but it will be moved to kdeplasma-addons/applets/shelf soon enough.
