Lancelot (the menu) was not really designed to run on mobile devices (although it could be used on such devices as a full screen application quite well), but the Lancelot Part applet proved to be a rather good fit.

I wasn’t involved in any mobile-related developments at Tokamak 4 (I had too much to work on krunner and activities) but I found some time to test the KDE/Plasma enabled Jax 10 devices.

Placing a Lancelot Part inside the newspaper activity that showed favourite applications and a search box was a breeze and it worked quite well. Marco did a really good job of adapting the plasma-netbook edition to mobile (touch screen) devices so the Parts applet required no changes at all to fit in the new environment.

Here is an obligatory blurred screenshot:

I’m planning to make a screencast about using Lancelot in Plasma Netbook, but I’m not finding the time. I hope I’ll be able to make it soon.

Cheerio!

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…

This one will be short, I don’t really have the will for writing – it is half past midnight here.

The activities infrastructure is mostly finished – now only polishing is left to be done.

The new organization goes like this:

The core activity-related features are placed into a kded module which doesn’t depend on anything but Qt and the core kde libraries. The class for writing the clients of this service (any program that wants to be able to react to activity changes etc.) will be in kdelibs. The API is minimal and very easy to use – it took me only a couple of minutes to patch KWrite to be able to use activities.

The second part is the revamped Nepomuk Activities service (I already blogged about it – the changes made at T4 were mainly related to make it fit the new arhitecture). If it is running, the above class passes all the info to it. Running the service enables the access to extra meta-data regarding documents and activities.

The third, and last part is the manager class which will be in kdebase/workspace (most probably) because it is only intended to be used by kwin and plasma. Normal programs shouldn’t use it.

The next step is the UI – kwin and plasma

Cheerio.

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…