So, the first thing I decided to make is some way of allowing serialization of the search results. I decided that the best way is to allow the results to have mime data assigned to them. Naturally, since most of the time you don’t need the mime data, it doesn’t load by default – it is loaded only when requested and only for the specific search result.

That is all for now from T4… I’m sleepy and I can’t really write more…

All kudos go to Mario, the father of our big Takamak family, and all in all a swell guy. We taught the Brazilians (Ana and Artur) what snow is, and I think they will remember it for a long time

Ok, enough about the fun parts. You were/are able to read about many things that were done during T3, so I’ll not bother you with the others’ work. I’m just going to write an update to the last post.

KRunner + Kickoff

Kickoff in trunk now uses KRunner as its search engine. There are a few bugs and a few concerns about functionality that will be resolved soon.

At the moment, all runners in KRunner are active in Kickoff as well, but that will change since we’ll need to make a whitelist of approved runners to avoid Kickoff crashing the plasma-desktop process on an error in KRunner. This means that Kickoff’s search will be less powerful than the KRunner and Lancelot, but that’s the price of running in the plasma-desktop process.

Plasma + Nepomuk

The service for activities runs well and is located in the playground, and so is the testing client.
The current work is to completely integrate it into Plasma which has proven to be more complicated than I expected at first. The thing that makes it hard is the need of libplasma to stay API and ABI compatible. The Plasma::Context class has been introduced some time ago, but it did nothing and some methods defined in it weren’t sufficiently granular.

At first I tried to implement everything with no API changes, but I’ve hit a wall very soon and had to deprecate a few methods, and introduce a new class named GlobalContext. It seems to work, so I’ve now switched on to implement the handlers in the plasma-desktop. I hope to have it working till the end of the week so that I could post it all for an API review.

Favourite applications

I was hoping to have more time to talk to Ruphy about making a library for handling the usage data and favourite applications handling (to be used in Raptor and Lancelot… and possibly in other menus) but Ruphy could stay for only a few days. I’ll have to start the discussion about this on plasma-devel when I finish the activity stuff and when I look the relevant parts of Raptor’s code.

Photos…

Photos will come later… hopefully from other guys and gals aswell (torrent comes to mind)

The KDE 4.2 has been released today. Although in the image below, and in this post’s title it says “Breathe”, the official code name is “The Answer” since it is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything [link]

The release announcement can be found here, but for more information you should head straight to the visual guide which was nicely prepared for all of us by the KDE Promo team.

Introducing Lancelot

It is a peculiar feeling, although most of you who read my blog know what Lancelot is, and possibly using it already, KDE 4.2 is the first version that ships it. So, it is like Lancelot didn’t exist before, it is a new KDE application. Therefore, I’ll post here a small introduction of what it is.

Lancelot is an application launcher menu (or ALI) for KDE 4 designed to provide a place from which all your jobs begin. It provides quick access to applications, places, documents, contacts and system information.

For detailed info and documentation, visit the website.

For those of you who know what Lancelot is, here are the improvements since the 1.0 version:

• Full keyboard support
• New lists with scrollbars
• Themes that match Plasma themes from kdeplasma-addons kdeartwork module
• Even less bugs

KRunner integration

The most elusive feature in Lancelot is its KRunner integration. There are two reasons for that, the other menus (I speak mostly of Kickoff, as it is the default menu) tend to search only through the applications they navigate. The second reason is that the users are so accustomed to Alt+F2 to start commands, that they can’t be bothered to try something new.

As you probably know, KRunner now comes with two different interfaces which you can set in its configuration dialogue. Lancelot is the third. It integrates the menu and the usual application (and whatnot) browsing with the power of the /Run/ dialogue. Everything that you can do with the default KRunner interface, you can with Lancelot also (yes, the calculator also works ).

It is not my intention to say that you should ditch KRunner, it is an awesome application, but if you are really accustomed to L’s interface, you don’t need to use two different applications for basically the same task – starting applications. Before KDE 4.2, this was a bit tricky since you had to click on the search result in order to start it, but now, you can just press “Enter” to start the first match, or you could navigate with your arrow keys. The keyboard is a wonder, I say!

Dot

One of the great things that followed 4.2 is the new Dot (dot.kde.org). It looks fantastic! (I’m even thinking of changing the theme of my blog to something like the new dot interface).

In the other news, there were a couple of KDE bashing news lately which I really don’t care for. So, here’s just one quote for them (when I say “them”, I don’t think of poor Linus who doesn’t enjoy the bliss of KDE anymore, but of all others who made it a big deal, and started flames all over the net):

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.