Category Archives: BlaBla

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? 🙂

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!!).

Waiter, there is a web browser in my Plasma!

Long time that i didn’t felt like to blog, in the past days of storm others have sait way more insightful things that i would have been able to say. I can only say i felt really bad for Aaron and that sometimes the intertubes really can expose the very worst of people, bleach 🙁 (ok, not really an original thing, but still…)

Aaaanyways, this time i wanted to blog on a very embrional plasmoid that i have started some weeks ago just for fun…
a web browser. A what? yes, a web browser.

At the moment it has a basic addressbar and toolbar buttons that works pretty much as expected, the browser window pretty much works apart some qt issues and there is a very embrional support for bookmarks.

It won’t be something much more complex than that, i want to keep it simple (stupid:) as much as possible.

It definitely can have its utility also in a today desktop, since it automatically restores the last url visited when plasma starts it could be useful for instance for a quick check on some website for updates that either don’t have a rss form for updates or the html view is somehow preferred for whatever reasons…

But this thing is more as a research thing on what plasma can do beside the desktop, like, it will be possible to build full blown applications with plasma?

Or, how it should look and what functionalities must offer on devices that potentially could have only plasma as their main interface and for all their functionalities? (yes, the idea comes from the amazing progress of the Marijn’s gsoc about plasma on mobile devices)

Sooo, if you want to check it out it’s in playground as usual (plasma/applets/webbrowser), all the disclaimers about alpha quality of the thing of course do apply (you know, like blowing out the pc or running away after marrying your dog…)

Oh, and btw:
Edit: yes, Pinheiro striked again 🙂

rain rain rain

It’s some days that it doesn’t happen anything but rain, rain and also well, rain. Starting to get pissed off and the rivers are starting to get hmm, “interesting”…

Another exam

Today passed another exam, now i am at -3 to the end, yeaaaah 😀

Hello Planet!

Hello ~~world~~ planet!
First of all thanks Clee for adding me so fast! For those who don’t know me (well, the mayority of you i suppose) i am sometimes a programmer of some kde-related things.
At the moment i am doing some work with Plasma (yes, i’m the one of the infamous click, drag… eject:P)

Other thing i’ve done for kde are the Polye ster kde3/kde4 widget style and Tastymenu, a kmenu replacement for kde3.

I don’t blog very often and my english is very “all your base are belong to us” but well, sometimes i will be here 😀

nokia+trolltech?

Hmmm, don’t know how to feel about this, i only hope the developement of the desktop version of qt (especially the unix one) doesn’t slow down, they’re a mobile company after all.
I hope it’s a good news (nokia: hint hint, lgpl :P) but every time a big corp buys someone else i always fell a certain smell…

Mart

Tale of a little pixel