Just a small reminder – in KDE SC 4.5, Lancelot shows Plasma‘s widgets/viewitem.svgz as a background for the items in the lists. So, you should remove the files that match lancelot/action-list-view-* except action-list-view-headers.svgz from your themes.

If you don’t, the list items will have two backgrounds and will look *ugly*.

The reason why I didn’t disable the old backgrounds directly in the code is that someone could possibly want to have the two backgrounds (an example where it looks OK are the list headers).

Every once in a while I write a post related to relations between lancelot and kmail or kopete.

This time it is only to notify you that until KMail2 arrives*, the ‘unread mail’ section in Lancelot will not work since L in SC 4.5 switched to Akonadi.

* if PIM devs don’t miss the initial plan, it will be for 4.5.1

It is a well known fact that devs hate writing the user documentation (we are not even fond of writing devel documentation), so it was the same case for me and Lancelot‘s manual.

But from time to time our conscience tells us that we should do something about it. In this case, the role of my conscience was played by annma

In preparation for KDE SC 4.5, I’ve updated the main userbase page for Lancelot and added two more detailed articles – one to contain the basic instructions and one that compares Lancelot to other launchers.

The comparison is most probably biased (although I tried hard for it not to be), so any help in that department is appreciated. (any help in any department is more than appreciated)

Now, the article that is yet left to be written is the introduction to the Shelf applet (ex Lancelot Part) and I’ll be able to rest on my laurels with the shiny new Lancelot that will be published with the KDE SC 4.5.

I’m not going to make a detailed post, just a screen-shot based overview of the new features you can expect in KDE 4.5.

Cascading popups

There was a lot of talk in the beginning about why Kickoff and Lancelot are not like the classic menu – and don’t have popups. Although I still don’t consider cascading popups to be good, liblancelot supports them. After a large amount of polishing, the feature is ready to be exposed in the menu itself. It is considered experimental, but it works quite well.

How to activate: Configure Lancelot Menu > Applications > Open popups for subcategories

This feature is not yet enabled for the Shelf applet (ex Lancelot Parts) but it still may find its way into it for 4.5.

Smaller section buttons.

vs.

How to activate: Right-click any of the section buttons and choose “Make buttons narrower”

Search history

Lancelot now remembers what you have typed in the search box, and auto-completes your query.

How to activate: Start typing – the closest match will already be in the search box, grayed out a bit. To use the whole completion, press End key. For completing smaller parts, press right arrow key.

Search engines (runners) configuration

Now, you can choose which runners to enable and which ones to disable. You can disable the slow or crashy ones, …

How to activate: Configure Lancelot Menu > Search

Other stuff

• Nice animations and better Plasma-feel.
• New icon
• Akonadi based unread messages
• Disk usage pie-charts
• Reduced memory footprint
• A lot of fixes…

That’s all for now…

Lancelot (the menu) was not really designed to run on mobile devices (although it could be used on such devices as a full screen application quite well), but the Lancelot Part applet proved to be a rather good fit.

I wasn’t involved in any mobile-related developments at Tokamak 4 (I had too much to work on krunner and activities) but I found some time to test the KDE/Plasma enabled Jax 10 devices.

Placing a Lancelot Part inside the newspaper activity that showed favourite applications and a search box was a breeze and it worked quite well. Marco did a really good job of adapting the plasma-netbook edition to mobile (touch screen) devices so the Parts applet required no changes at all to fit in the new environment.

Here is an obligatory blurred screenshot:

I’m planning to make a screencast about using Lancelot in Plasma Netbook, but I’m not finding the time. I hope I’ll be able to make it soon.

Cheerio!

A small visual update of Lancelot‘s pies:

Concerning bars instead of pies:

1. Bars below the text (like in dolphin) will not be implemented:
   

   I’m trying to keep everything in Lancelot generic enough with a complete model-view separation, so introducing a widget just for a specific model is not an option.
   Comment by Ivan Čukić — 7 February 2010

2. Bars as a part of the icon

This one would be allowed when concerning the above statement. But I don’t really see the point in doing it.

When the usability is concerned, bars are more desired when comparing multiple statistical variables (national growth per year), while when percentages are concerned, pies are the way to go (and to increase the usability even more – these are color coded – from blue, through yellow to red).

Introducing a new feature just for the sake of it is not something I’m willing to do. If you can convince me that bars* are better** than pies, I’m ready to listen.

* bars that can fit into the icon itself like the current pies do.
** better as in “should replace the pies” – having a configuration option for something this insignificant would be a waste of space.

Just one image of a new Lancelot feature:

The original Lancelot icon is usually considered weird-looking when seen on a panel (or desktop). Even I have had Lancelot set up not to use it.

I like the old icon very much, and I’m still proud I succeed in making something like that with a vector-graphics program (Inkscape) so it still is, and will be until the end of time, the main icon of the Lancelot project. But from now on, it will not be used for the applet button.

Now, the default icon is the standard KDE icon – the same one other launchers use.

For those of you who want to have a normal-looking icon but still want others to see that you are using Lancelot and not something else, you can use the following one:

The new icon can be set through the applet configuration dialogue.

There was a wish once upon a time to make the section buttons in Lancelot smaller, that is narrower, because people thought that they waste too much space.

At first, I was reluctant since I didn’t see the point in doing it, but I changed my mind recently – Lancelot is pretty much feature-complete as it is (at least from my point of use/view), so I decided to implement something that I absolutely have no use for, but somebody else will. The fact that I’m missing the vertical tabs in Amarok could be another reason in making this

So, if you want to have the buttons as shown in the following image, just right-click them and choose the appropriate* option. (mind that this is available in trunk, not in the KDE SC 4.4).

*It says ‘toggle collapsed sections’ at the moment, but I’ll change it as soon as I think of a better name.

Just to notify you of a big recent (committed today to trunk) change in Lancelot‘s theming.

The items in the lists (ActionListView widget) now shouldn’t have a background – the standard background from Plasma (widgets/viewitem.svgz – the one you see in krunner, folder view, SAL…) is being used.

The only item that is excluded from this rule is the [Group-ActionListView-Categories] which is used for sublist headers (like ‘Recent documents’ inside the Documents section).

If you don’t remove the backgrounds, both backgrounds will be shown on mouse hover.

In order to adapt your theme to the new change, edit all sections in theme.config file that match [Group-ActionListView-*] and replace:

background.type=svg
background.svg=...something...

with:

background.type=none

That’s all.

This change will become active in KDE 4.5 so you have a lot of time to adapt. Cheerio!