Author Archives: Marco Martin

Gran Canaria

It really doesn’t seem true GCDS is almost over (just a day remainig, how sad :/), and I’m kinda realizing just now that the internets actually exists, so I didn’t blogged at all while here, that happens when I can actually talk in person to most of the internet I care :p

What I can say, the location is fantastic, met some old faces and some new (hello, gnomies :p) and the whole thing has been quite productive, maybe not much on the code side but definitely on the design and the planning part.

We have got some crazy ideas about the ZUI and there is a new plan of collaboration with Kwin that will make the workspace even more integrated.

I’m also veryvery happy with the progress so far by our gsoc students (unfortunately only Chani and Ana are here, this period of the year kinda sucks for students unfortunately), most of their work will probaly be in KDE4.4 (being tired at late night made me write KDE 4.2, DOH!:P)

But what I’m more excited is the Plasma on Netbook project, if the implementation will go straightforward enough, it looks like we something usable is not too far ™, stay tuned :). WEll, actually don’t try to use it now because me and Arthur are turning the thing upside down at the moment, so it will eat your children 🙂

And oh, besides
that on the coding side I’ve continued the work on the embedding of plasmoid into the system tray, continuing our plan to show only what you need, when you need it, screencasts about it to follow in the next days (probably when i will get back home).

A system tray even more Plasma

In KDE 4.3 there is the beginning of the support of the new systemtray protcol with some applications that supports it already, and as said, we hope to get a good percentage of our apps supporting it for 4.4.

But there will be an even more crazy thing, as seen in this picture.

I'm going to gcds

Plasma widgets can now be embedded into the system tray (here the battery icon), there is no config ui at the moment (soon to come, i think will be possible to put here only a tiny subset of them anyways)

If you have trunk and want to try it right now you can do the following. Open ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletrc, look for the systray entry and if for instance its entry is [Containments][3][Applets][63] add a new entry that looks like:

[Containments][3][Applets][63][Configuration][Applets][137]
geometry=24,2,22,22
immutability=1
plugin=battery
zvalue=0

Oh, and by the way: I'm going to gcds

AIR: it’s official

This is not a shocking news since the Air Plasma theme was developed all in the open, so there are literally months that screenshots of it are around the interwebs, but since today it’s official: the Air theme is the default plasma theme 🙂

It has been moved today into kdebase alongside Oxygen and made the default (Oxigen is of course still available)

Nearly all elements of this theme are redone from scratch, the idea of the look is of couse by Nuno Pinheiro, it’s amazing how he can make something that looks great out of nothing, I was just the mere executor of the elements (the fun activity of the “rename party” that who has done plasma themes knows :P)

The look of the theme is done to look really light an unobtrusive, let’s say that the target demographic of it should be wider: unfortunately Oxygen seemed to polarize people between love and hate, too bad, because i ireally love it eheh 🙂

There is a thing in this theme that is new in KDE 4.3 (besides the usual element additions here and there) tose circles that apear over the applets: they are really transparent, just a filigrane, and their position is random (well, actually highly predictabe pseudo-random, but that is what we need here), and that becomes useful to quicly tell apart one widget from the other (since the position of the overlay in an applet is the same across different sessions, until the widget gets removed). This can be useful also in the idea of common branding (with subtle differences across distributions, instead of total difference)

Spread your knowledge

As Frank said yesterday in KDE 4.3 there will be the beginning to the support of the OpenSocial API, this is still fairly limited and at an experimental stage, but we did roll out something, to test the libraries and get people use it, bot users and programmers.

So now we have basically 3 things:

A client library (lib Attica) that connects to the opendesktop.org API, supporting a part of the specification.
A Plasma dataengine that use said library
An Opendesktop Plasma widget that displays the user profile, lists friends and geographically near users (and if you are in a foreign city with your laptop that’s beyond cool :D)

For this work many props to Sebas and Cornelius that did most of the work 😀

What i did was the support for the knowledge base into the library and into the dataengine, and this luckily made into KDE 4.3

Now a plasma widget is in progress, that is in playground as usual, and will be in KDE 4.4. (probably i will make a standalone release on kde-look before, if it won’t use too much 4.4-specific code, but i always tend to make uber bleeding-edge code, soo we’ll see :p), you can see the result here:

OGG version

Entries of Opendesktop items, (so kde-look and gnome-look themes, kde-apps and so forth) have a knowledge base associated to them where users can ask (and of course answer) question about them, with this plasma widget you can search and browse the questions and answers about all items on opendesktop.org, where another interesting application of the concept is to search into the knowledgebase for instance of a particular kde application… directly in the application itself. and since a general purpose library is getting in shape, that will be quite easy actually.

Aaand hopefully with this competition we can find new contributors to the project (we poor plasma developers can only do so much, right? :P), so if you are interested in doing something for the KDE integration, make sure to check out the ocs dataengine with the Attica lib (in kdeplasma-addons) and look at it both as and user of them (i.e. to do cool widgets or other apps) or to contribute to the library itself 🙂

Plasmanetbook breaths

With the usual disclaimer that is a very early barely working prototype that will be probably massively different from anything final, it’s nice to show the screenshot of the other day in action.

So now I did some arrangements in the playground netbook stuff to give a thing that mostly works without too much hassle in the initial configuration and that it’s kinda possible to use it as the main shell instead of the desktop.

Ogg version.

Here is possible to see the newspaper activity used for weather and to read feeds (will be able to scroll its contents in the future) and the one used to launch applications, in this video that is nothing else than a folderview, but the final launcher interface will be more like a crossover between a menu and something like krunner

In this video is also possible to see some things that strongly suggest the departure from the “desktop” concept, because when those kinds of devices are treated just like small notebooks they are just not up to the job, since te way desktop guis are designed simply don’t work at those screen resolutions (and inches of screen). Of course we can’t rewrite all of KDE applications (neither would be so smart to do so), but i’m pretty confident that KDE and Qt apps in genereal are quite easy to adapt to smaller screens 🙂

Anyways back on track, here can be seen that the thing usually called desktop is not a desktop for two reasons: we don’t have that free layout for icons and widgets that we’re accustomed to see, and it’s not something to be seen as a background: is a window like the others (that by the are always maximized and borderless) that can be chosen and switchd to, so available in the “taskbar” (that here is the kwin present-windows effect, since netbooks harware appears to be a bit more standardized than regular systems, we can more realistically relay on desktop effects being on)

Also clicking anywhere in the panel brings the main plasma interface to front, since is the main interface between the user and the system and it’s here where the user starts the apps, switches between apps and sees the quick updates of the favourite internet places, via the newspaper activity.

Put a net in your book

Ok MoRpHeUz, i’ll show it :p, so here we go:

What’s that screen? it shows the embryo of our idea of user interface for a netbook. the actua plasma executable is another one that is way simpler that the full fledged plasma-desktop one, and it features just a panel (final layout still to be defined) and a main view (don’t call it desktop eh:p) that will display one of the two main activities we will ll come up for this project that are: SAL, a fullscreen application launcher/search interface/document browser/whatever (MoRpHeUz will talk more on that in the future:p) and the Newspaper activity, that’s where i spent the last 2 days of development, besides making the mini plasma shell work a bit better.

The idea is the following:
It’s an activity that displays a big scrollable view of widgets in two columns (with all backgrounds melted in only one to look less crowded and to save space), so it’s designed to look just like a newspaper, the idea is to put many net oriended widgets in here, like a rss feed browser, weather, opensocial widget, microblogging and stuff like that, to give a central overview pointon what’s going on in the online stuff you’re interested in, kinda like scrolling trough an actual newspaper (with the difference that here you build it as you please) and from each one of the widgets you will be able to open a more detailed view of the item displayed in the widget. With a more detailed view i mean opening the proper application to view it, that could be a browser, could be akregator, gwenview, whatever.

For now there isn’t much more than that, so i can just say stay tuned! 🙂

Systray finally in action

As Aaron noted, the client library for the new system tray specification has finally landed in kdelibs, as “experimental” (i.e. it will probably still see some refactoring for 4.4, assuring is as good as possible)

And is important also from the user perspective because another cool thing happened: some applications that will be shipped alongside KDE 4.3 have already been ported to the new protocol (thanks to Davide and Aaron for that :). They are: Kmix, Krandrtray (quick screen resolution changer),Kwallet (save the passwords) and korgac (appointments reminder for Korganizer)

Of course the quickest way to show what is the difference between the old and the new is with a quick video:

Ogg version

It shows the main charateristics: the pretty plasma tooltips and mouseover effects (you would get and those things even with say a gtk app that is using this protocol). Also the ability to show an icon in more than one system tray (think about multiple monitors) or having multiple system trays that shows different categories (or to hide some of them if you don’t care about them)

Dissecting a tray

This is another pretty long post on the new system tray. Since the last post things have cleared up a bit (and i hope the api it’s a liiiittle bit more stable too) so i think times are ready for a slightly more technical description of all the machinery there is in place.

So, what are the parts of the system tray spec and more important how to use it and port existing applications?

First of all, the protocol is totally based upon dbus, so examining what are the registered services let’s see what are the (three) actors involved (yes, eventually some day those org.kde.* will become org.freedesktop.* :D):

org.kde.NotificationItem

every application that wants to use the systray has to expose this service, that will be called org.kde.NotificationItem-pid-index, where pid is the application pid and index is an unique thing that ensures no duplicate names, so an application can even register more item it it wants.

This thing is what defines everything that a system tray icon was and a bit of information more: it exposes the icon, a tool tip, the category of the item (status of a generic application, communication related, system service or hardware info) and the status: is it idle? is important that is visible? or is it really important to require user intervention?

It offers also some actions to interact with: activate, secondary activate, context menu and scroll. Notice how it doesn’t talk about left or right buttons, because right now we are providing a thing that looks like a system tray, to have a smooth transition, but we are not anymore forced to use that, we can have for instance some of the items embedded in the taskbar or have different representations, maybe interacted with the keyboard or who knows…

org.kde.NotificationItemWatcher

A system tray can come and go, for instance in Plasma the applet can be added or remove or the plasma process can be restarted, moreover the application can run in an environment that doesn’t (still:) support the protocol, so it’s needed something that keeps track of registered items and registered hosts for items (there can be more), all the system tray instances will register themselves here and take from here the list of items registered (NotificationItem implementations must register here too)

When the org.kde.NotificationItemWatcher is not up and running or it does not have instances of org.kde.NotificationHost registered all the items must automatically fall back to the traditional xembed type of icons

org.kde.NotificationHost

This service is registered by the system tray itself, it doesn’t offer properties or functions, it’s just used by the system tray (or whatever thing that can display an org.kde.NotificationItem) to announce its existence to the watcher to make possible to be automatically unregistered when the systray is closed (even if it crashes)

There can be an arbitrary number of hosts registered, to make possible both more simple things like having a system tray for each monitor in a multi monitor setup or more interesting stuff, like offering a different representation for different items category, for instance:

Putting the hardware status items and system services in a traditional tray, and we will be sure only that low level stuff will be displayed here
Integrating the application status items with the taskbar, we could perhaps display the minimized tasks without text in this case, or collapsing them in a popup menu, or whatever a brilliant idea will come 🙂
Collapsing all communications related items in a single item into the panel, that would be a “messaging center”, where i don’t care if messages are arriving from kopete, kmail or konversation, i only want to know what people are saying to me…

Those are just abstract ideas for now, it’s not said that they will be implemented in this way or that this description is necessarily the best way to go, it’s just a little scenario to provoke some thinking on what is the best way to go and to not take as a given that the current way is indeed the current one, time will tell, what counts for now is that we are no more forced to display this stuff in a pre determined way.

Last but not least, where is the code?

System tray plasmoid and kded

The system tray plasmoid is basically the org.kde.NotificationHost part that does all the interaction with org.kde.NotificationItem and includes full support to the spec for KDE 4.3, it can also be configured to show only certain categories of items, giving a first implementation of the ideas i talked before (i.e. one systray for hardware info, one for application status etc.)

The plasmoid ships also a kded that implements the org.kde.NotificationItemWatcher part, if the daemon goes down, or all systray plasmoids go away, all the items becomes traditional system tray icons on the fly.

KNotificationItem library

This is the client library to be used in place of KSystemtrayIcon (with a very similar api) it takes care of all the dbus talking and is quite simple to use, it just offers some functions to set properties like icons and tooltips and some signals to notify about the various types of activation from the user.

This will go into extragear on the next few days, so applications can start to experiment with it, keeping in mind that is still experimental. After 4.3, it will head into kdelibs for KDE 4.4, at that date and time it will be completely api stable.

Make some space

Sometimes little details gives a way greater feeling of power and customizability, without actually adding much and more importnant without adding tons of new buttons and configuration options.

Plasma panel can arrange widgets in an ordered linear layout, one after another, but what about if you have a panel where you want to distinguish between different groups of applets and want to put a space between them to make the look more clear?
Since a couple of days in the plasma configuration dialog a new single button appeared: “Add spacer”:

panel spacer

Clicking on it it adds that little widget at the end of the panel, it’s just a space and you can drag it around as with every other widget or resize it as you wish by dragging the borders of it (that in this screenshot are a little darker) just like any window or resizable stuff in general.

panel spacer

Of course a space is not something that you should see: it’s empty right?
So you close the panel edit mode and the empty space ecomes well, empty, until you open again the panel configuration mode.

panel spacer

Dashboards, activities and desktops

That’s a tiny feature that apparently makes several people happy:
Now the plasma dashboard is a way to quick access your desktop widgets whente desktop is covered by windows, and i really like this feature as it works.

But since KDE 4.2 it’s possible too with a little bit of digging trigh the config files to set a different activity for the dashboard, that is a similar behaviour to what some other operating system i can exactly remember the name does (it has something to do with fruit and groceries iirc :p)

But this was sooo well hidden that people kept asking if some day that feature will be available, so here we go:

dashboard config

In KDE 4.3, just zoom out and you will see a new controls box that has the actions that don’t belong to single activities (yeah, no more silly add activity on each activity:) and two options: click on “use a separate dashboard” and then you’ll have an activity just for the dashboard (not visible in the zoom out view) so here you have different plasmoids on desktop and dashboard:

Oh, and there is also the other checkbox, “use a different activity for each desktop” this was availale in 4.2 as an hidden config option too, if you check it it’s what you get: