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.

Well, the first feature for 4.3 is finished even before the final 4.2 is in your favourite distro’s repositories.

Before today, when you clicked ‘Switch User’ in Lancelot, it would use KRunner and query it with the magic word ‘SESSIONS’. That would show the KRunner results inside Lancelot.

There were a couple of problems with that approach:

• The first was that it induced a bug when you try to invoke the ‘Switch User’ a couple of times in a row.
• The second is that although ‘SESSIONS’ is a magic keyword, it doesn’t get only the responses from the session runner, but also from Strigi [for example], so it produced rather unpleasant results.

Why those two bugs weren’t fixed? Because I planned something a bit different for the ‘Switch User’ button, and, for that matter, the rest of the buttons. So the first step towards the goal has been done. Now, instead of loading the sessions inside the main list, you get a pop-up menu, as shown in the screenshot.

Next steps

Now, the next thing to do is to make a menu for the ‘Log Out’ button, and to make the buttons configurable. So, if you don’t have the use for ‘Lock Session’ or ‘Switch User’, you will be able to replace them with something different.

…

Enough for this time, cheerio!

KDE 4.1: Don’t look back” align=”right” />

Vijay Patil asked me to explain the application browsing component, so here it is:

At first, you get a panel with two columns – Favourites on the left, and application categories on the right.

When you choose a category, the Favourites column is replaced by the application categories, and the currently selected category is opened in the right column. (can anyone guess what is the ratio between left and right columns here, but without looking at the code?) As you can see, you get a breadcrumb bar above the list.

Now, there are two options for ‘what should happen when a subcategory is chosen’. One would be to hide the left column again like in the previous step, and the other is just to shrink the leftmost column like in the screenshot:

Later (the one in the screenshot) way is uglier, but more useful (for me, that is). Since I can not make up my mind about it, it will be configurable.