Author Archives: Marco Martin

Rotating your adult content

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.

OGG version

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

A FormFactorized Plasma Quake

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?

OGG version

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 🙂

Painless Drop

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 🙂

Ogg version

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 🙂

Tabbed plasming

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

Ogg theora version

Handle things with style

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? 🙂

Lovin’ the dialogs

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 🙂

Misc plasmoids on n810

The KDE install in my n810 is still not fully functional, but at least i’ve checked the plasmoids i was more curious and that i think are more interesting on a device like that, so here it is a little pr0n gallery of random stuff plamoids and not:

KDE4 splash screen yeeah, this photo is horrendously blurred, btw looks really nice (and good that looks nice because you will see it for a loong time :P)

Browser applet, i like the idea that on devices like this the browser would be something like an applet

Twitter applet, successfully retrieves and posts items, only two gliches: the proxywidget input bug i talked yesterday and seems to fetch only the user avatar, not the other ones

Weather applet: weell, not really much to see, aanyways works as expected, seems that

Akademy, 810 and stuffs

came back from akademy saturday by plane together with Ruphy, WindowsUninstall and Andjam, all gone smooth, unlike other people, sorry guys 🙁 apart from the fact i now have a spectacular cold (probably weather nicer than the belgian one was a too big shock :))

don’t know what to say about it in particular, apart that KDE people are really amazing, especially those people have done a really crazy job, there was a sense of world domination really fantastic, it makes feel that is actually possible (hmm, maybe not world domination, but at least market domination yeah:).

Now at home, have a couple of patches still in the laptop that should really be polished/committed or mercilessy thrown away (/me laaazy)

Most important i should really do my thesis, and i’m trying really hard to do it (now i’m in the phase of making old terrible code to look good ohyeah, funny as eating a bunch of nails:)

But really nicer things pops up, like uhm… installing KDE4 on the new shiny n810 (Sorry for everybody else, but i’m reeally happy it did come with an Italian type L power plug eheheh) 😛

These are some reeeally empirical advices i’ve got, btw the Mek’s guide should be mostly enough:

Space on main device storage it’s negligible, just compile with a prefix under /media/mmc1 or /media/mmc2, maybe even qt
If you like me are a bit autolesionist, installing on vfat does work, just copy dereferencing the links with cp -R -L, would eat way more disk space but yay, works!
internal or external memory cards are mounted with noexec flag by default, so before starting it go into root (r&d mode must be enabled) unmount and mount them again
Installing dependencies and compiling qt+kde under scratchbox eats an humongous quantity of disk space, be prepared to sacrify around 10+ gigs of hard drive space 🙂
as Mek said if you got a compilation problem good odds that is qdbuscpp2xml (qt bug?), so delete the 0 bytes generated xml file, make with VERBOSE=1 to see the exact command and generate that file again with the system’s qdbuscpp2xml outside scratchbox
maybe it’s just here, but sometimes seems to really hate make -jsomething, even if you have a garzillion of cores better you forget it when you compile kdelibs under scratchbox
most of dependencies can be downloaded with apt, except shared-mime-info that the provided one is freakin’ ancient, oh and boost (ouch!) if you want kdepimlibs, but till didn’t managed to get pimlibs compile

Random impressions:

Very nice device, love its openess (well at least of the software) and hackability, it’s nearly not marketed at all and way too expensive, otherwise would sell many times it sells(or rather not sell) now

Little roadblock between us and world conquering: QGraphicsProxyWidgets seems to not accept some keyboard input: letters don’t work, enter and control shortcuts work, it’s in this way i managed to post from twitter applet (qt or hildon input methods bug?)

Oxygen widgets on one hand looks really nice due to the really high number of dpi, on the other hand gradients looks way crippled by the 16bit color depth

Overall is slow but not so much, some applications react to the tiny screen size better than one would imagine, plasmoids are in general behaving well, apart the input problem, /me thinks having a plasma interface designed for this type of beasts won’t be too hard.

minor but nice details

These days at akademy i really couldn’t do that much in the code perhaps i’m lazy and i left the laptop turned off (and the brain too:) from quite some days.

By the way so far it’s really fantastic and insanely tiring, yaaawn (i don’t ride the bike THAT much usually) 🙂

A little thing i managed to get done it’s a graphics change in plasma widgets and applets that have a scrollbar in it.

The Oxygen scrollbar was not really suited in plasma applets, both for its style and its colors, arrow button black on black with a flashing blue handle wasn’t really it in the plasma style… so now it’s svg themed too as other widgets.

it’s not really pretty as code but was really the least worst way, it uses a qstyle that must be explicitly set for each scrollbar, but it’s totally hidden from the api, since only widgets in kdelibs uses this thing, so just use widgets/
ScrollBar or TextView and all is done (hmm, i suppose i’ll have to provide also a set of treeview/listview and stuff so…).

Plasma everywherer than qt

First post at akademy i can only say this thing is amazing at the moment non on my laptop and the ethilic grade is uhm nice…. probably i will write a more “meaningful entry” waaay later…

Actually at the moment our Plasma on mobile devices GSOC god is very busy porting Plasma to these particular soda bottles. After hours of hard labour Martijn already got a initial version running – using the nice curly backround (which blends in perfectly!!).