Just a small update – Lancelot’s library received a great improvement – support for dropping the items into the lists. Although this doesn’t seem much, since L’s widgets are all totally custom-made and generally speaking implemented from scratch, trust me, it is

The first improvement noticeable to the outside world, that is, to you beloved users is that the Favourites list can now be reordered by simple drag and drop. And that you can add items to the Favourites by drag and drop.

(just imagine a mouse cursor dragging the Kontact item…)

p.s. This has reminded me, I’ve really got to make a new Lancelot screencast soon…

Just as a note, since Air is now the default theme for Plasma (and what’s worse, it is even called “default” instead of “air”), you’ll see that the Lancelot themes in 4.3 RC are screwed up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fix this before 4.3 RC tagging today (I was too late to discover the issue in the first place).

It is fixed both in the trunk and in the 4.3 branch, but, as I said, not on the time. So, just that you know, it is already fixed and all will be well in final 4.3.

I am rather excited to announce that Lancelot is one of the finalists in the SourceForge community choice awards for the present year, and that it is a finalist in no more and no less than two categories – “Best Visual Design” and “Most Likely To Change The Way You Do Everything”.

I want to thank all supporters, and I’d like to invite you yet again to join the click-fest called the ‘voting’. By clicking the image above, you’ll get a small questionnaire where you can choose your favourite projects. Lancelot will be automatically selected in its respective categories. Naturally, you can choose another project for those, but I strongly encourage you not to do that

Apart from Lancelot, I do suggest you to vote for Avogadro (”Best Project for Academia” category) and Audacity (if you find it as good as I do). For the other categories, I’ll leave the suggestions to other people and you.

Cheerio, and one big THANK YOU!

the small print: * last time as far as the SourceForge community choice awards of this year is concerned

It is the time to announce the new version of Lancelot that will be shipping with KDE 4.3.

Most software has code-names for different releases. Lancelot doesn’t, but I’ve decided to dedicate a new tagline to this version – “I just get carried away…”. It is still from the same motion picture as the last one (”In my own idiom” – for Lancelot 1.0).

The news of a new version can never be as grand as the introduction to a new program (especially when a lot of hype preceded it like it was the case for L1.0), so I’ll not bother to make it more grandiose than it is.

Themes

The first thing you’ll notice is that the themes have changed. All themes but Aya which kept its Spartan look.

You can see the Air theme in the main picture above, Slim Glow in the first screenshot and Aya in the second. The other “dark” themes such as Heron and Elegance look similar to S-G.

I’m aware that there will be complaints, so I’ll prepare a “classic” theme pack for the complainers.

Features

There are no ground-braking new features – most of them are related to configuration options. So, if you want to see what’s new in that area, just open the configuration dialogue.

A lot of small improvements have been made – finished keyboard support, some usability improvements, some fixes, better Kopete and KRunner integration, better Parts applet (ok, this one can be considered a grand improvement since the Parts applet has become useful yet again), sorting of the applications in the list according to the XDG specifications…

And, as a topping on a cake, the Contacts section now supports plugins, so you can write them for your favourite mail/chat application. This feature is hidden from the user, and will be until it stabilizes for KDE 4.4.

The continued development – for KDE 4.4

Since the known bugs are sparse (or to be exact, I have only one that I need to investigate), I have continued the real development in a branch in SVN (hard feature freeze is upon us, so I can not do that in the trunk). The liblancelot is now much lighter memory-wise – a couple of bytes per Lancelot::Widget (and that is a lot of bytes per Lancelot application), it is refactored and is a step closer to the API stability and maybe even ABI stability.

That’s all for now – I’m bored and I need to prepare for my talk about Free/Libre software and KDE that is due later today…

SF sent me an e-mail whether I’d like to nominate Lancelot for community awards.

So I did it. If you’d like to help, click the image above, and nominate L for the “most likely to change your way…” or “Best visual design” category (or even both)

I’ve had a few busy days closing Lancelot bug reports. There is only one left that is relevant for KDE 4.3, that is only one that is confirmed and not a feature request.

There are quite a few other fixes that somebody could even consider as new features. But realizing that we are in the hard feature freeze period, logically, those are only bug fixes, and not (and I repeat NOT) new features.

Kopete integration

The first one is that the Kopete integration works better than before. I’ve just submitted my first patch to Kopete’s code-base fixing a glitch in the D-Bus interface that was stopping Lancelot from accessing the online contacts. (There were some important changes in Kopete that had a side-effect of making its D-Bus interface useless) This has also fixed Lancelot bug 170437: Lancelot-Kopete integration breaks if ocntacts are sync’d with KAddressbook

The parts applet

The parts applet handles the applications:/ KIO much better, so no more wrong icons and application titles. The other great news concerning the Parts applet is that it no longer shows its ugly icon when you add it to the panel. Now, unless you have set a custom icon, it uses the icon representing the data-model in it. So, for example, if you drag the ‘[KMail] Unread messages’ to the panel, you’ll get KMail icon.

GMail

I’ve got a request to explain how to use the new GMail data engine with Lancelot.

Before that, I just need to state that it doesn’t work well, and that it is just a proof of the concept at the moment. And that is the reason behind the fact it is located in the Playground.

Step1: compile and install plasma playground

Step2: open ~/.kde/share/config/lancelotrc file

Step3: add mailPlugins=lancelot_gmail or imPlugins=lancelot_gmail to the [Main] section of the file depending on where you want to show the unread GMail messages (mailPlugins is the left column)

Step4: restart lancelot (kquitapp lancelot && lancelot)

Step5: enter the username and password (and set it to be saved in KWallet)

Step6: don’t report missing features, or bugs

That’s it.

You have heard many times that Lancelot was a superkaramba applet in the beginning, and that later I screwed it up by turning it into a menu.

In this video, which is demonstrating the developments of the /Plasma Applet Browser/ in the era of pre KDE 4.0, sometime in the middle of it, you can see the first version of Lancelot for Plasma which was generally the crude port of the SK one.

Absolutely no connection to the present one

New features in the land of Lancelot

Keep open option – Lancelot doesn’t automatically close when you click something in it, but closes only when it loses the focus. You can set this option in the configuration dialogue, or you can hold Ctrl pressed while activating items in L.

The second thing is that the GMail plasma-lancelot DataEngine is working well and I’ve placed it in playground/plasma.

As you can see in the screenshot, it behaves differently than the Kontact engine in L – it shows a list of unread mails instead of the list of directories that have unread mails in them. The reason behind that is that I use GMail’s Atom feed to get the unread messages.

I have placed it in playground not because it is unfinished/unstable or anything, but rather because it is not intended for general use, and because there is no GUI for choosing the contact engines.

Well, not GMail per-se, at least not yet, but there is now a mechanism in Lancelot that allows you to make plug-ins for the Messages and Contacts lists.

It is based on Plasma’s data engines, so you’ll not need to learn anything new in order to extend Lancelot.

Obviously, not all data engines can be used from L since not all data engines provide the list data structure. At the moment, in order to use a data engine in Lancelot, it needs to have the following structure:

• .metadata -> lancelot
  • version = 1.0
  • modelTitle = Title (optional)
  • modelIcon = someIcon (optional)
• data -> title
• data -> description
• data -> icon

As you can see above, the main data source is named “data” and it contains three string lists (QStringList) named “title”, “description” and “icon” which contain, respectively, titles, descriptions and icons of the items that should be shown in Lancelot.

The Plasma::DataEngine – Lancelot::ActionListModel bridge is not finished yet, it’ll need to use Plasma::Service in order to notify the DataEngine that the user has clicked the item. When I finish the infrastructure, I’ll make an example GMail data engine and upload it to SVN. I don’t think I’ll bother making anything else, that is your job

Air Theme

So, since Air is coming along nicely (thanks Nuno), it was the time to make the files Lancelot needs for it. Although there are a few things yet to do, I’m quite satisfied with it. I’m even using Air as my Plasma theme now.

Scroll-bars

The second thing that all theme makers that support Lancelot should know, is that Lancelot now uses Plasma’s scroll-bars. So, you don’t need to make files for scroll-bars anymore.

Keyboard support

Lancelot in KDE 4.2 introduced keyboard support. Now it is taken even further – now you can do /anything/ in L by using only the keyboard. The section and system buttons now can be accessed through standard accelerators (Alt + the underlined letter). For opening the context menu for an item in the menu, select it and press Alt+Enter.

KRunner actions

As you should already know, runners can now support various actions for results. You can access them in Lancelot via a context menu. Well, that was the good news, the bad is that I know not of any runner that provides any special actions.

Other things

There is now a logging system that remembers applications you launch, what you search for etc. Some new configuration options are also present, and the parts applet works better. There are probably other changes, but I can not remember them at the moment.

So, cheerio!