The code below creates a KWin effect that fades and zooms in the windows when a user switches the activities.

Edit: Fixed a small bug. Now it works quite well!

# Martin G. likes defining variables in a namespace,
# so we are not going to make him angry - 
# we are creating a namespace that has only one
# variable in it - the duration

activitySwitchEffect =
    duration: animationTime(250)

# We don't really need anything else in the namespace
# for this simple example since we are about to abuse
# lambdas (aka anonymous functions) all over the place.

# We are connecting our function to the
# currentActivityChanged signal, and processing
# all the main windows we can find

effects.currentActivityChanged.connect (activity) ->
    effects.stackingOrder.map (client) ->
        if (activity in client.activities && client.visible)

            # If the client should be shown in
            # the current activity, we are starting
            # the animations - one to fade the window in
            # and another to scale it.

            animate(
                window: client
                animations: [
                    type:     Effect.Opacity
                    duration: activitySwitchEffect.duration
                    from:     0
                    to:       1
                ]
            )

            animate(
                window: client
                animations: [
                    type:     Effect.Scale
                    duration: activitySwitchEffect.duration
                    curve:    QEasingCurve.OutCubic
                    from:     0
                ]
            )

# And that's it!

Mind that this is only for demonstration – it has a few bugs in it

My laptop is now dedicated to the new plasma developments, while my main system remains on the 4.x branch.

The problem is that the laptop is much slower than my main machine, has a small screen and keyboard which makes writing code on it painful. That is why I don’t use it directly – I work on my main system, while everything executes on the little guy. Everything, but compilation. Thankfully, the icecream distributed compilation system works without a glitch on any distribution although it was created by opensuse KDE people (kudos!).

I have to say that this is perfect – I can crash anything ranging from kded to kwin and plasma without interrupting my workflow, and can test plasma on a slower device so that I don’t introduce some big performance issues that I wouldn’t even notice on a real computer.

This post is aimed to 3rd party developers that might have been using the RSC in their software or relying on file/document/resource scoring related to activities in any manner.

If you are one of those, contact me, and we’ll see whether we can do something about it that will satisfy both you and Vishesh

BSmith1012: I love the simplicity and extra effort you put into making it flexible. I know how much you hate icon views, and yet still made it possible to use in your example, so I appreciate that.

I posted this in the kde Brainstorm ages ago. If you release something like the screenshot that can include all of my favorite applications as Icons, I’d prolly be happy with that and I feel like many others will appreciate it as well. Thanks for all of the hard work!

Answer: True, I’m not a fan of icon views, but there were a lot of requests to have those in both lancelot and kickoff. This didn’t take much effort now that we have QML. When this is finished, it will be rather easy to recreate kickoff, kickoff with icon view, or any other launcher you are used to. I do intend to create a few different layouts that will be shipped by default with the main launcher.

—

Fitzcarraldo: Lancelot (currently 1.9.5) is my launcher of choice, so I am interested to read about Lancelot 2. Can you give us a rough idea when Lancelot 2 might be released?

Answer: I’m not sure when it will be released. I don’t really expect it for the next version of KDE Plasma. I might publish a preview version out-of-kde-sc-schedule for testing purposes.

—

sir_herrbatka: Where the code is hosted? I would like to test it.

Answer: The code is currently at kde:scratch/ivan/lancelot-qml. The main applet is mostly for testing the infrastructure I’m making. In terms of features, it is nothing close to the current version of Lancelot, though it does look similar.

The important thing is that it will not screw up your regular installation – the applet is differently named.

The Launcher building toolkit

In Lancelot 1, I decided that it would be awesome to allow people to put parts of it on the desktop or panel or wherever even without using the Lancelot menu. Those were implemented as the Shelf (formerly known as Lancelot Parts) applet.

This time, for what will be known as Lancelot 2 I decided to go one step further – to break everything into QML components, be it data models or UI elements.

Now, you need only a few lines of QML to replicate the same functionality of the Shelf applet (the first column in the screenshot). The second is essentially the same, but uses the IconView.

LancelotComponents.ListView {
    modelsList: [
        LancelotModels.FavoriteApplications {},
        LancelotModels.ContactsTelepathy {},
        LancelotModels.Devices {}
    ]
}

You don’t need to stop there – you can create custom widgets and pass custom delegates (third column), custom item views (all the models have the same API) etc.

Lancelot specific

The menu itself is also going to be as changeable as possible – now that the UI is based on QML, the users will be able to create different layouts, and share them on the kde-look.org. So, for anyone who desired a simpler menu, a menu that shows the items in a grid of icons, and not in a list, for anyone who … I can only say – it will be possible.

It will even be possible to create a telepathy quick-send-message applet if you want to.

Maybe even the April 1st joke from a few years ago will be a fair game.

THE UNIT TESTING FRAMEWORK

… I know, I know. It is far from being a thrilling work, but everyone would benefit from it.

I’ve started introducing asserts all over the code to make it more predictable and tested at runtime, but that is not enough. Asserts are there to check whether somebody is abusing kactivitymanagerd, while unit testing will be for when we (whoever works on kamd) are using some methods in a wrong fashion.

That reminded me of the fact I forgot to blog about the new version of Slim Glow that will be in 4.10.

The most noticeable change is that the system tray icons, share-like-connect icons, and others are now based on the awesome Font Awesome by Dave Gandy (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome)

The second is that it is now even slimmer. The desktop widgets have smaller border, especially those like the folder view.

The theme is now again a regular citizen of kde-look.org. Since the non-default themes were moved from standard installations into kdegraphics module, I started receiving requests to make the theme available through the Get Hot New Stuff since rarely anyone wants to install kdegraphics kdeartwork. I understood the desire for this, so I complied.

While we all love and cherish our KDE browsers (Konq and rekonq) there are many users of Firefox and Chromium. And they can not use share-like-connect, they can not have their web-pages linked to activities, they can not …

Is there a brave soul in our community (or a few brave souls) that are willing to write a small addon for any of the aforementioned programs that will

• know when a URL is loaded in a tab
• know when the user switches between tabs
• know the windowID of the window in which the tab resides, and
• and report those events to the activity manager?

Talking to the activity manager is the easiest part of it all, it has C bindings, it is a d-bus service, so take your pick.

If you’re interested, please write to us on plasma-devel at kde.org

I don’t know whether it is revolution, or evolution, but my favourite ideas that the Plasma team thought of a long time ago are finally getting to the users.

It is quite nice to see the positive experiences with the activities system in Plasma 4.9 all around the web. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There are a few nice things coming to the following release.

The top feature for me is going to be the Share-Like-Connect applet, and the document scoring based on the usage. Lately, I’ve been on a patching spree to increase the number of applications that support activities and the number has increased substantially. Currently, these are the supported applications:

• Dolphin
• Gwenview
• Kate and KWrite
• Okular
• Words, Stage and the rest of the Calligra family (except for Kexi which will be patched soon)
• GVim

I plan to add a few applications to this list before the hard feature freeze slaps me in the face.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in this endeavour. (Edit: added the link for the following text) Tomaz Canabrava’s army of students are going through KDE’s extragear and doing the same thing I’m doing in integral parts of KDE SC. This really offloads a lot of work off my shoulders so big kudos to them!