Just a small reminder – in KDE SC 4.5, Lancelot shows Plasma‘s widgets/viewitem.svgz as a background for the items in the lists. So, you should remove the files that match lancelot/action-list-view-* except action-list-view-headers.svgz from your themes.

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).

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)

First of all, I need to apologize for not doing this earlier – I was rather busy lately.

The other problem is that “remember the milk” plasmoid is ruining/spoiling me. Until I started using it, I somehow found the time to do stuff in order not to forget what I need to do. This way, when I have a reminder, I can postpone most of the items in it indefinitely.

So, without a further ado, I present the first public release of the fantastic, greatest and uber-awesome brand-new (and did I say fantastic and awesome?) plasma theme named ASCII (it is awesome… and fantastic… and unique… and gorgeous… and uniquely fantastic… and awesome…):

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=122261

… long live the Plasma Shelf!

There were two main problems with the Lancelot Part applet.

The first was the name. The name, although it does represent what the applet is technically, it doesn’t really say what the applet is meant for and what it does.

So, it is problematic when you see it in the applet browser, and it isn’t any better to see it when you drag and drop a folder onto the desktop and get the options to show it in the “Folder View” or “Lancelot Part”.

Configuration

The second problem was that a lot of users thought that Lancelot Part does nothing (aka doesn’t work) because when you add it by using the widgets browser, it is just an empty applet. (nobody really bothers reading the instructions these days).

Now, you can use the configuration dialogue to choose what you want to be shown in the applet.

Ideas

I’m currently having some problems wording a couple of things and I would appreciate any help you can give.

The first problem is what to put as a description for the Shelf applet. “Generic list which can hold various types of items” sounds really bad

The second is the title for the section of the configuration dialogue shown in the image above – the section below “show the search box” option where you can choose which /sublists/data models/ to show in the applet.

Internals

The ‘internal’ name of the applet (as seen in plasma*rc files) hasn’t changed to keep the back-compatibility without the need for hooks in the configuration system to tell plasma about the rename. The other thing I had to watch out while redoing a few things was to keep the old applet configuration structure intact. Surprisingly, I managed it somehow.

The applet’s source code is still located in kdeplasma-addons/applets/lancelot/parts but it will be moved to kdeplasma-addons/applets/shelf soon enough.

If anybody tells you that KDE SC 4 is too fancy and not configurable enough, just show them this:

A product of a temporary idle mind – ASCII theme for Plasma…

edit: It’s is creating a wallpaper to fit this…

Until now, drag and drop and some other things in krunner based launchers (lancelot, kickoff, and maybe SAL?) are based on a small hack – manual detection whether the result is in fact a .desktop file of an application provided by the service runner, and if it is, then we can use it.

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…

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!

Unfortunately, the activities service didn’t make it into 4.4 because there wasn’t enough time for it to pass on from kdereview into kdebase. This means that it was returned to playground for further processing.

The service has grown a bit and now it exposes a few more methods like linking activities to other nepomuk resources (documents, places…).

KIO

Since the service is not really useful by itself (from the user’s point of view), it will need some kind of UI. The main UI will be Plasma and the ZUI replacement which will be one of the Tokamak4′s main topics.

For the time being, I made a KIO slave shown in the picture above. It lists the defined activities and the resources linked to it. At the moment, the resources are limited to Applications, Documents, Places and Contacts (I’ve just realized that those are the same sections that are in Lancelot – completely by accident).

The data shown in the picture is a garbage data I put into nepomuk for the sake of testing (no sane person would put Thumbs.db in the work-related documents.

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 aware that I could write more often from Tokamak 3, but I’m too lazy. I’m now recompiling KDE, so I have the time.

First, the most important things – we are having a great time, both fun and productive, and I just can’t wait to see all the ideas mentioned here implemented.

I’m gonna mention only the things I’ll be doing soon (and that I’m doing right now).

Plasma + Nepomuk activities

So, you know, the plasma activities? Those don’t make so much sense at the moment, but the idea is to make the whole environment aware of them. And to make the rest of the environment able to control and manage them.

I’ve already written a Nepomuk service that manages activities, and a library that gives the applications access to this service without the need to deal with d-bus and nepomuk. The library is almost finished – the only thing left to do is some pretty way to deal with the /offline/ mode (when the nepomuk is disabled).

The next step is to connect/synchronize the plasma’s activities to this service. Mind that this is only the beginning – the future will bring applications that will be able to adapt to the running activity… (and it will bring a nice and fancy interface for all of that)

Imagine Kickoff, Lancelot, Raptor with favourite applications that depend on the task you’re dealing with at that moment… the file dialog’s and dolphin’s places…

Kickoff + KRunner

The second thing that should have a large impact is something nobody really expected me to do – to replace the current search mechanism in Kickoff (yes, the KICKOFF!!!) with KRunner, just like Lancelot does.

It really is weird that I should improve a /competing/ program, but Sebas asked to do it, so… why not. (he, he, even with that Kickoff will suck compared to Lancelot and Raptor )

OK, enough for tonight, see you later…