Author Archives: Marco Martin

Trying the netbook project made easy

Since two days there is a new module in systemsettings: workspace under the Desktop category.

Here is possible to switch between the Plasma desktop shell and the netbook shell. the switch will be done on the fly (no need to restart KDE) and it will be remembered the next KDE start.

Plasma desktop will close, Plasma netbook will start and some different settings on KWin will be applied: windows will start as maximized and there will be no border for maximized windows.

The other section is Dashboard: is now possible to configure from here if you want the dashboard with the same content of your desktop or if you want it to show an independent set of widgets.

In the same way, in the Multiple desktops section, is now possible to decide if you want a different plasma activity for each desktop, so the quite hidden config dialog reachable from the zoom interface for those two options has been removed.

New features in the newspaper activity

Another update on the Plasma netbook project: in this little video i’ll show the last improvements of the so called newspaper activity, little things that however have all their own place in the big picture:

Slightly different look, the wallpaper is more visible and there are less margins
Widgets have titlebars, that shows the widget name as well 3 buttons: the close button, configure and the new associated application launcher i presented the last time (it has been designed with the netbook shell in mind)
Some days ago, Adenilson and Igor came up with a really nice patch to animate the scrolling widgets used by Plasma: now everything that uses it, from the newspaper activity to the microblogging plasmoid automatically got a way more smooth and organic look and feel, hats off to them
Is now possible to create and delete newspaper activities, to have as much “pages” as one likes, selectable by the top toolbar

In this video it’s also possible to see more changes, both in the panel and in the Search and Lauch activity, but this is for the next time! (i love teasing people 🙂

OGG version

As usual, the screencasting appliation has a pretty poor refresh rate and pretty bad refresh problems, to this does not actually reflect 100% the real thing:)

Dropping in, dropping out

I love when an idea starts to taking form and suddenly starts to make sense in an unexpected way… some days ago Aaron blogged about dropping remote contents inside Plasma: now is possible to drop in several types of content, even from the network and the proper plasmoid capable of doing a little preview of that content will pop up, like the picture frame for an image or the web browser for an html page.

The idea of Plasma as a canvas for some kind of smart bookmarks with live preview of your content and work is taking shape, now what was the logical step was to ask.. what about the other way around?

We now have a quite simple way in the plasma api to associate an application, or an url (with the proper application detected from the mime type) to a Plasma widget. A new button will appear in the applet handle (and a new entry in the context menu) and that application will be launched. The idea is to have a full view of what you have in the widget, as a tiny preview.

OGG version

Netbook shell after Tokamak 3

Here we go with the long promised screencast about the progress of the Plasma Netbook shell after Tokamak. This time I’ve tried to record an audio track as well: the process is still not very well streamlined so the quality is still so so (composite+screencast still seems a big nono these days) and yeah, bear with my english, it’s what it is, like a certain Nintendo character :p

Aaanyways the stuff I talk about in this video is:

How to try it if you have a svn trunk build
Keyboard and touch screen navigation
New background dialog
Integration with the new widgets explorer

Where the last two are true for the Plasma desktop in general, thanks to the work of Davide and Ana respectively at Tokamak 3.

OGG version

Looking back at Tokamak 3

I’m starting this entry on the train on the way home from Tokamak (and finishing it at home). Looking back it was probably the best KDE event I ever been. I’m already missing each one on every person that was there.
>Fisrt of all I want to thank Mario Fux forhosting the event. It was a really big job for him and everything was gone perfectly smootly.
The place was of breathtaking beauty, I didn’t brought a camera myself but you can see from other blog entries on planetkde photos of this beautiful place. Last day we gone at the bottom of the Motterhorn mountain with the cablecar. This mountain is beautiful because it’s an huge block of rock of the exact shape you would expect from a mountain, really makes you remember how tiny human being are on this planet (yeah, sounds clich

Say something Tokamak

Didn’t really find much time to blog at tokamak. Anyways, what I’ve been doing?

The netbook shell has found a new home in kdebase, so now if you build trunk it will be here and will definitely be here for the release of KDE 4.4. This is realy important because it makes easier for people to try it right now without having to compile components from playground. Another important reason for the move is the reuse of the existing coomponents, in particular the new widgets explorer that has been merged from the Gsoc project of Ana, that makes the experience of both plasma-desktop and plasma-netbook much more pleasant. Not much to add right now but stay tuned for a screencast in the next few days.

The KnotificationItem library, that is the client of the new systemtray specification has been merged in the KDEUI module. This means is no more experimental and all applications can start to use it without fears of binary incompatibilities. At this point the start of a Freedesktop standardization seems much more realistic.

Ad oh well, we are all been busy in refactoring and moving aroundstuff, so while there could be some instabilities in trunk right now, the plasma library will become much more clean and robust in the future.

Anyways, many props goes to Rob and Ana that have gone trough the endeavour of merging their pretty big Gsoc projects, this did mean work and work and work, but i’m speechless about the quality of the projects. Ana’s widget explorer makes plasmamuch more usable and pleasant to use, Rob’s remore widgets are well, revolutionary, can’t find other words, but i’m not gonna to explain them here, they can do a much better job.

Tokamak netbook talk

This post is an attempt to make a little synopsis of the stuff i talked in my tiny presentation about the Plasma Netbook project, nothing new but a nice recall.

The plasma netbook shell idea was born during Akademy 2008 in Belgium on a blackboard (yeah, real old blackboard with dusty chalk :p) and remained mostly on the blackboard for quite some time.

However the first pieces were put in place shortly after by Aaron doing a first implementation of the plasma shell, that languished there for a while.

Fast forward until some months ago, me and Arthur decided to put some time in it, so let’s see the results so far.

As plasma being really modular, we now have a collection of stuff pretty much independent suff.

A plasma app: we don’t use the plasmadesktop executable but something that is lighter, simpler and allows us to experiment very un-desktop things

We have some own containments too:

We don’t use the normal desktop and panel in plasma-desktop since it has too many things not really useful there: logics for autohide panels panel alignment and things like that

Newspaper containment. A free layout is not adapt in a constrained size, let’s put a bit of order.

Search and launch. Let’s have an easy and intuitive way to launch applications and do searches, without monopolizing the whole ui.

Just two applets right now:

A search box separate from the sal, to be positioned in the panel

a simple titlebar/semi-taskbar, since we won’t have neither of those

We can ask ourselves since we have a really good desktop: why we do a different thing?
A traditional desktop has some characteristics that makes it really good on big screen resolutions since we can tile multiple windows in the same screen or leave a big emty area to access the desktop.

However on a small screen the very concept of havin windows become annoying, because the space is barely enough and sometimes even too scarce for the actual application data. This Should drive us to a radical rethinking of how the shell should look like and behave and is also an occasion for us to have new ideas and touch things that in a desktop we really can’t.

So what we have that is so odd? We don’t have a desktop containment, we don’t have a taskbar, a titlebar of the windows or resizable windows.

A peculiarity of the shell is that the main view, what usually would be a “desktop” is a normal window like the others, so is possible to put it in front and choose it in the “taskbar” (that is just the present windows effect) and in alt+tab, also all the panel configuration machinery is not present in the shell.

What is really interesting of the project are the two new containments.

The newspaper: the idea is to make look like a newspaper, act like a newspaper, so it’s a duck..

This is what you see as soon as the system start: a two column layout of widgets that are network-oriented, so they gives you a quick overview of what happens in the interwebs and on what your friends are up to.

The Search and Launch interface: from personal experience i see that new users are simply amazed by krunner when you show it to them, but they rarely use it, because it’s really well-hidden under a shortcut and there is nothing advertising it. On the other hand the SAL interface brings krunner up as the first and only way to launch applications (or execute any other kind of search and action supported by krunner, from evaluating numerical expressions to searching wikipedia)
the search box is in the panel, so it’s reachable even when the sal containment is hidden by windows or is not in the main view.

There were interesting reactions so far. The comments about the newspaper and the sal were overwhelmingly positive, way more tat i expected, that says we have to be doing something right :p. Not so positive are the comments about the panel, i think tere are some valid points and i am not really happy about too, there is certainly room for improvement.

Now, the work still to is still huuuge (everyone willing to give an hand is of course more than welcome):

Refine the applets and containments: better fallback in the case desktop composite is not available.
Improve panel behavior

Friendliness to keyboard navigation

Integration with kwin: how to do and behaviour of the fullscreen applications

Seamless switch between a plasma-desktop and a plasma-netbook session

Make really smooth to use certain plasmoids as stand alone applications

Progress on the netbook ui

A while since last blog, so it seems nice to give some updates on the progress on the Plasma netbook shell, since in the past weeks i did some visual changes.

Now the widgets in the newspaper activity shows their background, to achieve more opacity (and readability), and the scroll area have a neat shadow effect to make the clipped edges to look better. The widget in the newspaper containment now should also keep their aspect ratio in a better way.

Also the search and launch interface has some fixes in its layout, and when no query is entered in the search field it spots some icons that do default queries, like all programs of a given category, all contacts and all bookmarks.

To maximize the space given to applications in those tiny screen resolutions now the panel is auto-hide, with the same sliding animation present in the main plasma desktop autohide panels (from KDE 4.4 done by my first Kwin effect, yay :D)

Here comes the usual video (the flickering of the panel is just a problem of the screencast), in the usual YouTube or OGG-o-vision, enjoy 😀

Update on this netbook thinghie

At GCDS we did several shiny things, and talked about even more shiny still to come stuff, like the better integration with kwin and new crazy ideas on the ZUI.

A thing that received a good amount of work is the Plasma on netbook project, in the form of several little components. What is really good about plasma is exactly that is done by many little components, quite easy to code, mantain and reuse.

So what we have now is in playground and can be tried right now on http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/plasma/netbook. Here is a video of the current progress of the project, as appeared on the dot.

It’s also a little experiment on the html5 video tag, it should use an ogg file on things like new webkit based stuff (in qtwebkit it works, yay!) or firefox 3.5 and fall back to youtube otherwise, anyways the ogg file is there.

A plasma shell (the actual executable), if you were using it previously pay attention that now has been renamed from plasma-mid to plasma-netbook, that’s the form factor it’s targetted in the near future anyways 🙂
A panel, simpler than the one in the desktop, that contains several widgets a “current window control”, an activity bar, a systray usual clock and a search widget (more on that later).
the two main activities: newspaper and Sal

So, the “current window control” is a thing that shows the title and the icon of the current open window, plus a close button, this because there won’t be a titlebar for windows, just fullscreen stuff, and clicking on it it triggers the present windows effect, because there won’t be a taskbar either.

The newspaper activity now looks like tthis, and compared to the state of te previous post is now possible to scroll, adding applets (yes, it needs a brand new add widgets dialog, but that’s coming from a gsoc, yay!) and rearrange them by drag and drop.

The thinghie that is called SAL, meand Search and Launch, and will basically an interface for krunner: in the desktop the alt+f2 dialog is something that is not very prominent so is not really used by the mythical creature called “joe user”, but when you show the thing to them, they love it

So in the netbook, a thing like a menu is not really up to the job (in fact most of previous projects starting from the original eeepc shell to ubuntu netbook remix to moblin all have some different idea about how a small screen proof menu should look like). We have instead opted for a full screen prominent krunner interface, driven by the search box that pops up by clicking on the top right icon on the panel. Compared to the “normal” krunner there is a group of bookmarks in the top area and there will probably be some way to access saved searches (since the first time one uses it it won’t be so obvious what to search for)

Aaand, for really putting the “net” in the netbook, there will be web based runners too, like the wikipedia runner that is already in playground (sebas and rich, you’re great :p), the idea is giving access to network resources like that via runners, plasma widgets and libraries, even without always the need a browser, that is a great thing but not always the best ui possible.

Stay tuned for the next updates 😀

Pretty system tray: not just about icon themes

It’s good to see other parts of the OSS community looking at the current state of the X system tray and not be satisfied at all, it’s good because as you can see from this blog, i think the current approach is really really limited in many ways, as it was explained several times…

This time is about look… now, the idea of having monochrome systray icons is actually quite good, but is quite a pita with the current protocol and actually a good use case for the new one.. why?

Let’s say we have a black panel (as the mockup of jono’s blog), so it’s reasonable to expect we want white icons, but what about if we suddenly change our color scheme to a light colored one? (or plasma theme in case of KDE)
Of course the icons will become invisible, so we could need to change all of them to another theme on the fly, and this could mean also that those icons can’t belong to the system wide icon theme, or we could have to change the global theme just for the systray, that’s no good, right? 🙂

Now, the current systray protocol requires that is the application itself draws its own icon, and this theme-dependent icon color switching is kinda possible (just open the configuration of the panel… by every application) but it’s really clumsy and not cross desktop at all.

The dbus based systray protocol we’re working on requires instead that is the systray the one who paints all the icons, and being part of the panel of course it knows well what the color scheme is.
The icons can be sent in Dbus by data, passing all the icon bytes themselves and in this case of course we can’t do much more than painting what it arrives, but the recomended way is to just pass the icon name (following the icon name freedesktop spec of course) and in this way we can decide where to pick this icon, we could have systray-specific icon themes dependent from the color scheme (falling back to the system wide one of course)

Now, I don’t know if we’ll actually implement a thing like that and if it’s worth the effort, but it’s a while we are talking about that thing and i think soon or later I’ll give this idea a spin 😀