(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)

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!

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.

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

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…

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

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)

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

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.

A product of a temporary idle mind – ASCII theme for Plasma…

edit: It’s is creating a wallpaper to fit this…