That original patch doesn’t exist anymore, and even if it did, it wouldn’t work for all the changes that were made to activities.

The uber-awesome KDE conference – aKademy – was a time for something new!

New client

Ok, after this introduction you’d expect that I’ve written another patch for KWrite. Well, you’re wrong. The first application that supports activities as a client is Vim!

The main reason I went for Vim this time was to prove that non-kde apps can work with our awesome concept of activities. Another reason is that I didn’t want to use KActivity* classes, so that I can see whether the d-bus protocol is sufficiently profound for this task. It turned out that it is, but there are some improvements to be made.

At the moment, only Vim invoked from a terminal emulator program (eg Konsole) can work with activities since I can’t find a way to retrieve the window id of a GUI-enabled Vim from vimscript, so I’m essentially using WINDOWID environment variable that terminal emulators set.

The following is a debugging output of the activity manager daemon related to Vim windows

resourceWindowRegistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/mailacc.txt
resourceWindowUnregistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/.vimrc
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///home/ivan/
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///usr/share/vim/vim72/doc/options.txt

Truly limitless possibilities!!!

^^^^ just wanted to write an awesome marketing-speak sentence for the end of the post

Pictures are worth a lot more than words so:

As you can see, the city was crowded, and they served weissbier and weisswurst.

I arrived to Tampere at 9PM – just in time to join the ongoing party in some fancy nightclub

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).

I’ve already converted, and I can’t be happier – the sun is shining, everyone wants to be my friend, all members of Pink Floyd are alive again, and I have 10% more girlfriends than before. Ok, I’m stopping with commercialism before somebody kicks me…

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

The reasoning behind limiting the size were requests from users who use vertical panels – vertical panels are usually made wider then standard panels, and icons would grow to 300×300 pixels taking up most of the space on the panel.

Putting a maximum size for icons was a good decision generally, but the bad side of it was that the new size was hard-coded. There was an option in the system settings to change sizes of icons, but setting the size for panel icons was disabled.

Now, thanks to a patch by Mike Kasick, this option is enabled and it works. Mike is one of the best types of users – although he isn’t a Plasma contributor (as far as I know – no SVN account) he sent us a patch, and responded to all of our suggestions with revised versions.

In the end, Aaron and myself adapted the proposed patch a bit to better fit the rest of Plasma, and it entered the SVN so it is on its way to KDE SC 4.5.

In KDE SC 4.5, the option is located in System Settings -> Application Appearance -> Icons -> Advanced -> Panel

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.

Please notify me on IRC (or mail) when that happens… cheerio

Edit: AKISMET sucks!!!!
]]> http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/2010/05/15/comment-voes-with-wp/feed/ 2 http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/2010/05/15/alternative-widgets-explorer-plasma/ http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/2010/05/15/alternative-widgets-explorer-plasma/#comments Sat, 15 May 2010 08:14:26 +0000 Ivan Čukić http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/?p=812 Preamble: I have no intention to start a dispute related to the new applet browser in Plasma. Some people like it, some don’t, some prefer the old one, some want something completely different…

As you don’t already know , Marco did some great work which I’m not gonna talk about – he said he’ll make a screencast of it eventually. So I’ll just mention a side-effect of that made possible by a 1-minute patch by yours truly.

KRunner (and Lancelot, naturally) as widget explorers

From KDE SC 4.5, you’ll be able to fire up KRunner or Lancelot, search for some plasma widget and drag it to the desktop.

Well, that’s all

Edit: You can also create a shortcut like Meta+P to open krunner with only this /plasma/ runner enabled via Global Shortcuts (thanks vilder for info)

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…