KDE 4.2 has just been released, after many months of hard work by many people.
In this release the huge potentiality of the 4.0 platform is finally going to show up in the end user visible apps, so it’s where the good plans are starting to come together.
/me did just a tiny part, but nevertheless i like considering myself part of that wonderful community, they are wonderful people, congratulations to each one 😀
This is a tiny plasmoid hacked on a boring sunday afternoon in about 20 mins, perhaps a too silly name but i think the effect is kinda fun 🙂
It’s an on-screen magnifying glass with the difference from the usual ones that it doesn’t actually grab the screen, but it just views the Plasma canvas (just another view on the scene, that is), that gives some peculiarities, shown in this video:
All the windows are totally transparent to it, so while is useful to view/magnify just what there is on desktop it can give a quick access on it, when you need both your windows and stuff on desktop (think about a non-fullscreen dashboard, and then think about drag and drop between dolphin and folderview even when you have a maximized window :P)
And the more cute thing is due to the vector nature of the QGraphicsView, you see all the proper vector-based elements like the text to be smoothly scaled and still looking like text, not that usual pixelated/blurry mess that kinda hinders the utility of screen magnifiers as accessibility applications.
It’s amazing what it’s possible to do in plasma with a really limited amount of lines of code (here about 100, perhaps 20 or so could even still be saved:)
The thing now lives in playground and is still really rough, so not definitely 4.2 material, but who feels like can give it a try anyways:)
This looks more like a tweet, but just Merry Christmas people 😀
After many many years, way more of what i would have liked to, today i finished the university, with the defense on my thesis (a weirdo thing about ontologies describing European directives, a PHP+postgresql monster i’m quite proud about after all).
Now even if i will probably continue working in the uni for a (hope not too long) while, it’s really a weeeird sensation knowing that something that took over a quite big chunk of my life it’s actually over.
I hope to be able to continue to hang around and hack on plasma as much as i can, as i feel in the last year KDE became a quite positive part of my life that i’m very happy about 🙂
As long as I will still work for the university it won’t change that much, since i will continue to do pretty much the same thing, and after that, bah, who knows, but for now i don’t want to think about that, just be happy for a bit :p
After seeing total coolness like this and this, i of course decided that Plasma couldn’t lag behind that total ratio of awesomeness.
This is an idea from right the begin of Plasma (we always had the MediaCenter formfactor impatiently waiting to be actually used after all:)
At the begin a thing like what I did today was not possible for two reasons: throwing qwidgets on canvas is possible only from Qt 4.4 and before Phonon was not able to render over widgets. In fact the first version of the Amarok video applet had to embed a window in the applet with the video in, so no correct z ordering, no transforms etc.. but now the good plan come together and is possible to render video even on the walls of a wolfenstein 3d maze (hats off to Matthias Kretz) 😀
The cutie in this video is a plasma applet that embeds a video, it uses the X-Plasma-DropMimeTypes directive in its desktop file, so it’s sufficient to drop a video file on the desktop and the applet is automagically created.
This applet that lives in playground is highly experimental: no config options, no audio, no seeking, just bare working.
But it’s just the beginning, for 4.3 there will be a generic widget usable with few lines of code (even scripted of course) and a basic applet. Yeah i know, 4.2 is still far and the 4.3 teasing is started already, we are soo evil :p
Plasma always had this really cute concept of “formfactor”: in brief different areas where plasmoids can reside have different behaviours, for instance a desktop is planar, i.e. the applets can grow anywhere they want.
The panel on the other hand can have a vertical or horizontal form factor, it means the applets in it can grow only in the vertical or horizontal direction, so an applet with a high quantity of content can’t display everything it would want…
In past releases of KDE4 the right behaviour of applets was still not really finished, so some applets like the device notifier were more kind to the panel, displaying the whole device list on the desktop and an icon+popup on the panel, other applets like the twitter applet hmm not soo good 🙂
Now with KDE 4.2 every standard applet distributed with kdewill fully use the form factor concept, so far we have 3 different classes of applets:
Applets that are just the same or with very little differences in different form factors, like simple icons or the taskbar.
Applets that diminishes their information quantity in horizontal or vertical form factors, here are two examples:
when in the panel the now playing applet just displays the control buttons, and the leave note applet switches to an horizontal layout, so it makes enough room for an horizontal panel.
Some other applets, like the device notifier or kickoff wouldn’t mean that much without some of its contents, so in the panel will be an icon+popup and in the desktop the whole plasmoid will be shown. but what about very big panels, so big that the whole plasmoid could fit and a ginormous icon wouldn’t make so much sense?
When the applet knows that it would fit into the panel, the icon goes away and the whole applet content is displayed, and goes back to an icon when the panel is shrinked again.
Now, since Plasma in KDE 4.2 supports also panels not always on top and autohide panels, you could have for instance a thing that looks like a Quake console with plasmoids in it, just like Konsole for terminals 🙂
Just a little thing, but it looked to me it kinda deserved a really short screencast 🙂
Adding applets to the panel with drag and drop in plasma was a bit of a pita, because you had to hit exactly that 4 pixels between an item and the other, so painful that wasn’t really obvious it was possible at all…
so here is how the current trunk behaves 🙂
In other news some days ago something like 7 applets (did i forgot some others?:) were merged for 4.2 release counting what is in the workspace module and in the addons module, so there will be a ton more stuff to play with :).
That’s the reason for the kabooms we are fixing right now, but no fear 🙂
Quick video: this is a proof of concept plasmoid i wrote quite some time ago and then forgotten to talk about 🙂
Is a little tabbar meant to be put in a panel that lists all your desktop activities and lets you switch them in a quick way, as seen in the video it also keeps itself syncronized if something changes, so if you switch with the zoom user interface it switches accordingly, it creates and remove tabs when desktops are created or removed.
The name of the tab is the name of the activity you can set in the desktop wallpaper/theme/etc configuration dialog.
The name it’s just the beginning of the activity concept, in the future the desktops and the applets in it will be aware and will react to their context, like what time is it, is the network attached or not, heck even what is our geographic coordinate…
But that’s another and more exciting story that just a teeeny tab bar :p
Did some work on the code of that little tiny things that lets you move and configure the Plasma applets, the poor ol’applet handles that really needed some visual love(tm) and some speedups, so the result is the following:
It’s started from a Nuno mockup he did quite some time ago, and while the graphics will probably be a lot more refined than they are now (i.e. become closer to the mockup), i think code wise we are definitely here 🙂
First of all the old icons were so-so, partly because we didn’t have the exactly right metaphore partly because they eren’t designed for that kind of background, so now they are Plasma-theme specific, the default is a set of very simple monocrome shapes but more recognizable. In the future these little thingies will be used all across Plasma, so more power to theme creators, yay 🙂
Now the handle also uses a svg background from the plasma theme, it behaves differently (so always in the right way i hope:) for different types and sizes of applets and has a new cute sliding animation that makes the thing to feel more “attached” to the applet itself.
And now in youtube-o-vision:
But you prefer Ogg-o-vision, don’tyou? 🙂
Long time no blog as usual, so let’s do some Plasma Quickies:
I’ve decided to do some love to two configuration dialogs, the wallpaper one and my loved ultrascary panel configuration “Thing”.
A while ago the configuration dialog had some problems.
The monitor preview looked ugly and deformed on widescreens, but most annoying thing it wasn’t possible to chose the desired cropping or scaling method when in slideshow mode, so you had to chose between a single image or a series of horribly distorted images 🙂
now the thing looks like this:
Desktop activity and theme before the wallpaper section, because wallpaper configuration will be just one aspect, even secondary behind the concept of activity (oh and now there is a textbox t give them a name), explayned way better by aaron.
the monitor preview looks always good, not important what weird ratio your actual monitor has 🙂
All the controls are better aligned conforming the HIG and making less visual noise.
The folder list in the slideshow mode grows and shrinks when adding/removing folders, so there is no more a big white empty spot when it’s empty 🙂
Now, my favourite configuration little monster, the panel configuration:
The size handles have little arrows that should be a bit more intuitive what is the min and what is the max and
now the move and resize actions are buttons with a label, so should be more obvious how to do to move it and change the height, while the less frequent actions (or dangerous as in the case of remove panel) are moved in a submenu, so it gives a less crowded look.
And oh, now there is a config ui for the quite recent panel autohide too 🙂 you can chose between normal panel always visible as is now, autohide or a panel not always on top, that can go under other windows.
It still looks a bit ugly but will be given a way more plasmalove(tm) look in the next days, stay tuned 🙂