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!

I have been really lazy to write anything here for quite some time now. I enjoyed the simple life away from the blogocube (it’s actually a dodecahedron, but blogododecahedron is a mouthful) but now I’m back.

I’ve realized that I’ve made more commits to Kickoff since Tokamak 3 (mostly related to krunner integration) than to Lancelot, which is just plain wrong. So, I decided to change that and do something I was planning for quite some time now – a huge refactoring.

Puck

The first thing I noticed is that the Puck (Plasma UI compiler used in Lancelot) modules are rather outdated and reflect Lancelot widgets from the old liblancelot and not the new liblancelot2 so it got updated. It was rather cool to see that despite that, Puck still worked and didn’t break the build.

Puck will eventually (read: when Qt Declarative UI becomes stable and Plasma-integrated) be abandoned and left to rust, but ATM it seems a not so near future.

libLancelot and libLancelot-datamodels

The next step was the /fork/ from the title. The data models (aka every item list you see in Lancelot) are moved into a separate library called liblancelot-datamodels. Both libraries (liblancelot and liblancelot-datamodels) now reside in kdeplasma-addons/libs so that they can be used by any other plasmoid (or any other program for that matter).

This is a way of saying “liblancelot is now considered stable enough to be used even outside of Lancelot”.

It wasn’t only a simple move from one place in SVN to another – both libs received some beautifying, fixing, got pretty meta-includes just like all KDE libs have, so you can now do a #include <Lancelot/ExtenderButton> instead of writing the full path of the header file…

…

Ok, I got bored writing, so this is all for this post now, expect a couple more soon – there are two top-secret projects that need revealing. Cheerio!

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.

I’m getting reports that Lancelot has a black border on some distributions – like in this picture: http://imagebin.ca/view/h1oGpJ.html.

If you have this problem, please file a bug report for the distribution you’re using. I’ve already sent a mail [1] to kde-packager mailing list, but it looks like some distributions’ packagers don’t really follow that list.

I don’t get why the kdeplasma-addons is compiled on a separate system (or virtual machine) compared to libplasma and plasma and with a different set of installed libraries.

[1]

Hi all,

It have come to my attention that in
some distributions (no need to specify
which) Lancelot is compiled without the
support for compositing while the
plasma is composite-enabled.

While compiling Lancelot, you should
ensure the presence of libXcomposite,
libXrender and libXdamage development files.

Cheers and thanks in advance,
Ivan

Just a note – if you get larger than normal CPU usage when using Kopete and Lancelot at the same time in KDE 4.3, visit the BUG:196809

This should be fixed in 4.3.1. In the meanwhile you can disable the Kopete integration by doing the following:

open lancelotrc file (~/.kde/share/config/lancelotrc) with your favourite text editor and add the following line to the [Main] section

imPlugins=disabled