A remote notification

Software

In KDE SC 4.4, thanks to a very successful Summer of code project, is now possible to share your running widgets to the local area network. This opens a whole lot of new possibilities, but as every brand new thing, it still did not come to full potential, but is something that developers will have to play with to start to have really interesting applications.

In 4.4, is possible to remote control your media player by publishing the nowplaying applet. Is probably the most obvious application but it’s just a start.

Since I’m refactoring the notifications and jobs for 4.5, it came obvious that it would have been a pretty good use case.

Imagine you started a pretty important file transfer on your main pc and you want wo know when is done, but now you just want to go watch tv on the couch, you can just bring to the other room your netbook or your mobile device, so your options are:

Going polling the other room every 3 seconds (naaah:), use a somewhat overkill tool like vnc, or just share the notifications applet on your main computer 🙂

This video shows both notifications (KMail complaining about misconfigured mail acounts) ahd a short ftp upload job: on the remote pc is exported both the progress and the notification when the job is done (to answer ti the more obvious question, nothing is shared unless you tell to). Had to switch quickly between the two screens, so looks a bit Blair Witch eheh

OGG version

This is not available under KDE SC 4.4, because the notifications system had to be refactored a bit to support that (and there were also some important bugfix that will be in 4.4.1)

As an advices for who does the Javascript jam, provided that you use the last bugfix version, is: use dataengines as much as possible, then you will be able to do really interesting things combined with this feature.

On a different note, tomorrow I’m leaving for Tokamak 4. this will be a really interesting week where I’m sure something cool will come out of, I’ll keep you updated 😉

13 thoughts on “A remote notification

  1. Debian User

    This is awesome.
    You must ensure some security constraints.
    E.g. authentication between the computers.
    When you take your laptop somewhere, you don’t want that someone else can read your notifications.

    And a filtering option would be cool.
    E.g. you want to share only mail notifications or notifications containing a specific text.

    The notification system should use avahi/zeroconf or something. I hate entering ip addresses.

  2. Marco Martin

    yes, access can be password protected, with encrypted connection.
    and yes, it uses avahi/zeroconf.
    for filtering, this could appear in the future in the notification widget, still have to decide.

  3. Raul

    This is amazing. What kind of widgets can your share? Can you share your panel? Can you share your taskbar or systray?

  4. Marco Martin

    You can share everything except containments at the moment.
    but to really reflect the “remote” situation, plasmoids must have to be somewhat “ready” pulling all their data from things called dataengines” so a shared taskbar at the moment will just show local tasks

  5. KDS

    Really nice, now I think this is very useful, before I thought why would I share a widget? Now I know why 🙂

  6. johnny

    Hi,
    sounds great, but can you also share widgets over the internet, so multiple users can e.g. write into a notes widget/blackboard? Would be great for brainstorming sessions…
    Cheers

  7. Ian Monroe

    So will the refactor of notifications allow plasmoids to do notifications easily? Currently it’s somewhat unfeasible since you have to install special files in a particular location. I’m guessing that’s probably a big point of the refactor, but I just wanted to make sure. 🙂

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