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…

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

Make your word count – new Plasma Widget Explorer in development: http://www.wouwlabs.com/blogs/anniec/?p=37

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.

Hi all!

First I would like to point out that there are two new Plasma themes on kde-look. Well, at least two *my* new themes. Or to be even more precise, there is one new theme and one old that is new. Or new that is old. Or one theme… OK, I’ll stop now.

One of the themes is Spoons, which is now named Spoons Original, and is currently the oldest Plasma theme in existence (that’s why I couldn’t really say that there is a new theme on kde-look).

The other one is a sibling, possibly the younger sister of the aforementioned. The reason I have never used Spoons as my theme (as my Plasma theme, that is – it serves perfectly as the theme for my blog) is that it is too bold and eye-poking. So, the slimmer one was born. This is the first theme that I think could replace Slim Glow on my computer.

The main difference between Slim Glow and Spoons Lite is that the former helps the widgets on the desktop to be placed on the sidelines – not to draw attention, while the later helps them to be in focus, but still not to be too invasive.

Qt 4.5 and Lancelot

There have been issues when running Lancelot on systems with Qt 4.5 (or 4.4.4 snapshots) installed. Mainly, the Applications section was empty. Or, rather not empty, just appeared as it is – you could use the keyboard to /blindly/ browse the applications. It is now a thing of the past (at least when 4.5 is concerned – haven’t tested 4.4.4). It is now fixed in trunk and it works for all testers at bugs.kde.org.

The interesting thing is that L behaved differently when compiled against 4.4 and ran under 4.5 than when compiled under 4.5.

Qt bug

Fortunately enough, while fixing this, I’ve found a hack that I made a long time ago to bypass a Qt bug that I forgot to report when I initially encountered it (before KDE 4.1 was released). So, I’ve sent the report to the Trolls and I hope it will not go in the ‘we intended it this way’ pile.

Lancelot news

Apart from fixing bugs related to the Qt 4.5, there are some new cool things in Lancelot and its theming mechanism. I will leave it for some other time since this post is already a long one. And I need to make screenshots first.

So, stay tuned.

p.s. And merry new Lenny