Monthly Archives: November 2009

A brief notification

Brrr! the trunk is frozen

The bug hunting and stabilization period is starting to pay off. Those days I’ve taken the systemtray and the notification system as a target and started hammering on it…

The target were mosty two

Slash the count of bugs related to notifications… and 13 were closed, other 13 remains, most of them can be probably be closed as well, just need to wait and see how the last patches behave in the various situations.
Refine and take into shape a neat little feature entred just 2 days before te freeze, that by itself closes several bugs too.

So, what it is? sometimes notifications pop up when the pc is unattended, sometimes is something not important at all and if it gets lost in oblivion who cares, sometimes it could be quite important, for instace somebody on IM attempted to contact you and now he is offline, maybe it’s the case to write him/her an email uh?

Now notifications, while they behave exactly as before, being displayed for a short time and then disappearing, they are also “archived” for a short time (varying depending if the pc is used or not) and they are separed by application, so it’s easy to look inside all the old notifications of kopete for instace.

new notifications

This screenshot shows the notifications popup of the systemtray opened: the user asked to see all the kopete notifications, so only them are visible, even tough there were some from kmail too.

Is not the first time the user switches to the kopete notifications: the oldest two were already present the time before, so now they appear “collapsed”, while the newest ones are open.

Multitouch, a preview

Since I saw Plasma for the first time, I immediately imagined it as something really organic, where you can manipulate the objects on the canvas like one would do with real objects, just grab them with one or two hands and move them, rotate them, stretch them to make them fit as you like.

Now Qt 4.6 among a ton of new features has really qute multitouch capabilities, and made this possible, here is a sneak peek:

Won’t say more for now, more on that later :p

I did the first part of the video, than the trolls put some pepper into it (love the epic music :p)

Subtle moving

another quick micro thing that will be in Plasma for KDE 4.4: until now, the taskbar items appeared and disappeared “magically” and when a task disappeared between other two, every task immediately disappeared from where it was, appearing in the proper place. That is sooo computer behaviour, one of the little things that makes computer to look innatural and scary…

Until now 🙂

OGG version

This is made really easy by the new Qt 4.6 animations framework, and for now there will be just a little taste of things like that, then with Qt 4.7 this will become almost automagic, since it’ll support animated layouts natively

Another Plasma netbook screencast

Another screencast of yours truly: this shows the Plasma netbook shell running on a bog standard Asus EeePc 1005Ha.

It can be seen the new neat animations of the search and launch interface when results are loaded. What’s neat is that it seems to run quite well on this pretty basic hardware and animations are just as smooth as they should be 🙂

OGG version

Flicking around

For KDE 4.4, we’re giving a bit of touchscreen friendliness around Plasma, a thing common on touchscreen based uis is the so called flick lists and scroll views. They can be web browsers, simle item views, image explorers and so on.

You just touch (or drag with the mouse, it’s not limited to touchscreens of course) a random point of the view, drag it a bit, release and the contents will be launched with a neat animaton effect, with a resembrance of something real.

In Plasma, if you use the ScrollView widget you’ll get that for free, and if the item view contains some sub widget that wants to listend to mouse clicks as well, is sufficient to call the function ScrollView::registerAsDragHandle(QGraphicsWidget *), with some eventfilter magic, the element registered will still react to mouse click, but will pass them to the view as well. An example of this is the icon view of the Plasma netbook shell: if you click on an application icon it will launch the application, but if you press the mouse over one, move it and release, the application pointed from that icon won’t be launched, instead all the icon view will scroll and will still scroll for a while if the mouse moved over a certain speed.

There is a small video that show this behaviour over several plasmoids: the web browser, the microblog, the OpenDesktop knowledge base client and the Search and Launch interface of the netbook shell.

Ogg version

The WebView widget will behave like that as well, and if you implement a custom one and you want that behaviour -for free-, you just have to call Plasma::Animator::self()->registerScrollingManager(yourwidget), and provided you gave the proper Q_PROPERTY to your widget, all the magic will be done behind the scenes. The properties you’ll need are:

scrollPosition: the position in pixels of the contents relative to the viewport
contentsSize: the size of the contents: for instance an image could be 1680×1050 pixels big, even if the widget that is vieweing it is just 200×200
viewportGeometry: the actual viewport of the contents could be the bounfingRect() of the main widget or could even be something smaller: for instance excluding the area taken up by the scrollbars, if present.

Easier Plasma themes creation

One pretty long task of plasma themes is to manually rename all the SVG sub elements with the proper names. Let’s say we want to theme a button, we will need a SVG file with the following elements: normal-top, normal-topleft, normal-left, normal-bottomleft, normal-bottom, normal-bottomright, normal-right, normal-topright and normal-center.

This is for the button in normal status, then you need the same thing with active-, pressed- and focus- prefixes

This makes Plasma themes quite powerful (and always looking pixel perfect) but it’s quite fainful to rename over a hundred of elements by hand

Since usually the themes are designed in inkscape and it has a pretty neat system to write plugins in python, i’ve decided to write a little extension that eases the ain a lot: if you select 9 elements it will rename them with the usual topleft, left, top etc names, with an optional prefix asked by a dialog. If you select 4 items, it will instead rename them as hint-top-margin, hint-left-margin etc.

The extension is located at this address, to use it you have to copy those 2 files in the ~/.inkscape/extensions folder.

Unfortunately it requires a recent snapshot of inkscape 0.47, since the python scripts used have some bugs.

As usual a video is worth 1024 words 🙂