Since I have received so many complaints because “Lancelot doesn’t follow/obey/… Plasma theme”, and I am tired of pointing the people to the FAQ, I decided to make the necessary files needed by Lancelot for all Plasma themes that ship with plasma-addons package.

You get a three blogs in one since I’m to lazy to write them separately:

Theme

First of all, just to say that I’ve started making a new theme that would fit with the Plasma‘s default. It is inspired by the proposed new look for Kickoff (by Davide Bettio – http://www.uninstall.it/kickoff_mockup.png). It looks like this at the moment:

Lancelot Oxygen theme” width=”241″ height=”300″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-125″ />

To be honest, I don’t like it, but it fits more with the default Plasma theme. If there is anyone willing to modify it so that it looks more, well, appealing, just mail me, and you’ll get all the help you need This version will be in the SVN tomorrow (the 4.1 branch).

Categories versus one button

This comment by Beojan decided what will be the default:

I have to agree with this – by making the categories shown in the menu by default, the user gets the information of what categories exist. Later, it could be changed to my preferred behaviour.

Compilation issues and crashes.

I’m happy to announce that the compilation issues that were related to Xlibs are now gone. I was linking the Parts applet with the application, and then, it wanted to be linked to Xlibs that are not needed for the applet. Side effect is that now the applet .so file is much smaller.

In other news, the crashes that were occurring during the application browsing are history. At least, I haven’t seen one in a while (if you encounter one, please notify me)

Plasma now supports different looks for panels depending on the screen edge where the panel is located. You can find more details about how to make this kind of themes at KDE’s Techbase. Basically if you want to create a custom look for a left panel, just create all background elements for it and add prefix ‘west-’ to the name of every element. (east for right, north for top and south for bottom panel).

If you don’t want to name all the elements yourself, you could always use the Slim Glow theme as a base template since it uses this new feature of Plasma.

Reminder: Start making the Plasma themes, there is a contest going on!

This is a post from the Dot, I’m just copying the announcement here as well. So, if you would like to comment, just do it there please.

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

A great feature of Plasma is the ability to theme components of the desktop using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs). This means there is no need for you to know C++ or any other programming language to create a great looking theme.

You only need to know how to use one of many graphics tools (e.g. Krita, Inkscape, The GIMP, Karbon, etc.) and that is all. Depending on your prowess with such tools, you can create great looking plasma themes in as little as an hour.

You can find a quick guide to creating Plasma themes in the Creating a Plasma Theme in 7 Easy Steps Techbase article.

Rules:

1. Submit your work in the Plasma Themes section of KDE-Look.org website. Put a notice ‘(for theme contest)’ in the title of the theme.
2. Submissions will be accepted as a tar.gz file of the theme folder.
3. Submission deadline is 9th April, 2008 18:00 UTC. Themes submitted after the deadline will not be considered for this release.
4. Winners will be announced by 18th April, 2008.
5. All artwork must be original or otherwise meet the requirements for distribution as part of a GPL licensed project. Preferred license is LGPL.

Guidelines:

1. Consistency. All theme parts should fit nicely with each other.
2. Completeness. Although Plasma automatically loads required images from the default theme when they are not present in the active theme, it is suggested that you include SVGs for all theme elements.
3. Uniqueness. The unique always stand out in the crowd; so should your theme.

Have fun! The Plasma Team.

This is a post from the Dot, I’m just copying the announcement here as well. So, if you would like to comment, just do it there please.

There’s a new theme walking down the streets of Plasmawille. It’s called Slim Glow. For more info, go to the kde-look.org

Concerning the last theme you have seen on the blog some time ago, it vanished in a ‘rm -fR’ accident and is scheduled for reconstruction.

Well, first of all, I’ve moved my blog away from Blogger to my own domain powered by the all-mighty WordPress. The first step was to make it look unique an pretty – so a new WP theme was born.

Then I thought of what would be fit to celebrate the moving, and it just occurred to me – why not make a Plasma theme that will be based on this blog design? Making a Plasma theme is surprisingly easy job so I encourage you all to give it a try.

The only obstacle I had, was that the painting of the borders was done by repeating the border pattern, and I needed my borders to be stretched. So, after a small patch to the Plasma’s background painting routine, Plasma now has the ability to paint both pattern (default option) and stretched background borders. The only thing you need to do if you want your borders to be stretched is to create an object in the SVG file called “hint-stretch-borders”.

Here’s a obligatory screenshot of a couple of more prominent widgets using the new theme.

P.S. One thing more about the new blog is that for validating user comments I’ve activated the reCAPTCHA system that helps in digitalizing books by giving you (people that make the comments) words that the OCR can not understand