Category Archives: Software

Cuteness 4.6

Software

Qt 4.6 has been released yay!

A while ago i received from Nokia a cute Dell Latitude Xt2 multitouch tablet pc, to produce some demos of a really really nice new feature of Qt 4.6: multitouch.

Qt provides two ways to acessing multitouch: one more abstract, where the type of gesture and direction of fingers movement already “parsed” so you already know if the user wants to zoom, scroll or rotate, that’s QGesture that’s useful to control for instance scrolling and zooming in a web browser.

If you want instead something more raw, the position of every finger now and on the last sampling, you have instead QTouchEvent. That’s useful if you want for instace paint with multiple fingers on a paint program or want implement some weird type of gesture not provided as stock. oh, and no It’s a rather different (and more simple) concept compared to Multi pointer X, since is a single event with multiple positions, rather than multiple simultaneous events.

So I tought that in KDE we have soe things that would make as an impressive demo with multitouch, so why not give it a try with Marble and Plasma :). So that’s the result (thanks to the trolls for the final edit):

This OGG version, unfortunately this is only a “raw” version, without music and titles, but gives the idea

It will be supported in KDE 4.4. Th only catch is that right now X11 doesn’t support it (..yet:p), so just as a tech demo will be possible to try it on the windows and mac builds of KDE

A brief notification

Software

Brrr! the trunk is frozen

The bug hunting and stabilization period is starting to pay off. Those days I’ve taken the systemtray and the notification system as a target and started hammering on it…

The target were mosty two

  • Slash the count of bugs related to notifications… and 13 were closed, other 13 remains, most of them can be probably be closed as well, just need to wait and see how the last patches behave in the various situations.
  • Refine and take into shape a neat little feature entred just 2 days before te freeze, that by itself closes several bugs too.

So, what it is? sometimes notifications pop up when the pc is unattended, sometimes is something not important at all and if it gets lost in oblivion who cares, sometimes it could be quite important, for instace somebody on IM attempted to contact you and now he is offline, maybe it’s the case to write him/her an email uh?

Now notifications, while they behave exactly as before, being displayed for a short time and then disappearing, they are also “archived” for a short time (varying depending if the pc is used or not) and they are separed by application, so it’s easy to look inside all the old notifications of kopete for instace.

new notifications

This screenshot shows the notifications popup of the systemtray opened: the user asked to see all the kopete notifications, so only them are visible, even tough there were some from kmail too.

Is not the first time the user switches to the kopete notifications: the oldest two were already present the time before, so now they appear “collapsed”, while the newest ones are open.

Multitouch, a preview

Software

Since I saw Plasma for the first time, I immediately imagined it as something really organic, where you can manipulate the objects on the canvas like one would do with real objects, just grab them with one or two hands and move them, rotate them, stretch them to make them fit as you like.

Now Qt 4.6 among a ton of new features has really qute multitouch capabilities, and made this possible, here is a sneak peek:

Won’t say more for now, more on that later :p

I did the first part of the video, than the trolls put some pepper into it (love the epic music :p)

Subtle moving

Software

another quick micro thing that will be in Plasma for KDE 4.4: until now, the taskbar items appeared and disappeared “magically” and when a task disappeared between other two, every task immediately disappeared from where it was, appearing in the proper place. That is sooo computer behaviour, one of the little things that makes computer to look innatural and scary…

Until now 🙂

OGG version

This is made really easy by the new Qt 4.6 animations framework, and for now there will be just a little taste of things like that, then with Qt 4.7 this will become almost automagic, since it’ll support animated layouts natively

Another Plasma netbook screencast

Software

Another screencast of yours truly: this shows the Plasma netbook shell running on a bog standard Asus EeePc 1005Ha.

It can be seen the new neat animations of the search and launch interface when results are loaded. What’s neat is that it seems to run quite well on this pretty basic hardware and animations are just as smooth as they should be 🙂

OGG version

Flicking around

Software

For KDE 4.4, we’re giving a bit of touchscreen friendliness around Plasma, a thing common on touchscreen based uis is the so called flick lists and scroll views. They can be web browsers, simle item views, image explorers and so on.

You just touch (or drag with the mouse, it’s not limited to touchscreens of course) a random point of the view, drag it a bit, release and the contents will be launched with a neat animaton effect, with a resembrance of something real.

In Plasma, if you use the ScrollView widget you’ll get that for free, and if the item view contains some sub widget that wants to listend to mouse clicks as well, is sufficient to call the function ScrollView::registerAsDragHandle(QGraphicsWidget *), with some eventfilter magic, the element registered will still react to mouse click, but will pass them to the view as well. An example of this is the icon view of the Plasma netbook shell: if you click on an application icon it will launch the application, but if you press the mouse over one, move it and release, the application pointed from that icon won’t be launched, instead all the icon view will scroll and will still scroll for a while if the mouse moved over a certain speed.

There is a small video that show this behaviour over several plasmoids: the web browser, the microblog, the OpenDesktop knowledge base client and the Search and Launch interface of the netbook shell.


Ogg version

The WebView widget will behave like that as well, and if you implement a custom one and you want that behaviour -for free-, you just have to call Plasma::Animator::self()->registerScrollingManager(yourwidget), and provided you gave the proper Q_PROPERTY to your widget, all the magic will be done behind the scenes. The properties you’ll need are:

  • scrollPosition: the position in pixels of the contents relative to the viewport
  • contentsSize: the size of the contents: for instance an image could be 1680×1050 pixels big, even if the widget that is vieweing it is just 200×200
  • viewportGeometry: the actual viewport of the contents could be the bounfingRect() of the main widget or could even be something smaller: for instance excluding the area taken up by the scrollbars, if present.

Search and Launch improvements

Software

I’ve already talked about the search and launch activity for the netbook shell, so this video rather than explaining again what this is it just gives a brief description of what is changed on it and where the work is heading:

Some work has been done on keyboard navigation, on always giving the expected thing the keyboard focus.

A pretty iconview class has been written to be used in both the results and on the favourite icons on top, making it possible to scroll by “flicking” with the mouse or with the finger in both places, with many cute animations.

And of course tons and tons of fixes.

OGG version.

Random bits

Software

*Arthur makes remote widgets work on the new Nokia N900: this has really awesome implications. Rob’s work on remote widgets is really cool by itself, and if you add the possibility of exporting widgets on a small device like that it opens the doors to really cool applications, think about a really rich remote controller for your mediacenter, a way for a conference speaker to publish his slides or something related to the attendees regardless the device they’re using, a way for a teacher to control what is available in a computer lab room desktops and stuff we still did not tought about.

*KDE depends on Qt 4.6. This opens the door for us to the use of all the cool new features of this release, a thing we were drooling about since quite some time is the new animation framework. A summer of code project was done to make a really easy to use API to access it from Plasma, to have a library of stock effects that will be coherent across all the widgets. It has been merged into trunk now and when it will be put really in use expect to see fireworks 😀

*Work on the netbook interface continues, we got a pretty nice workflow model for using the newspaper activity, plus the Search and launch activity changed quite a lot since the last screencast. I should reeeally do a couple of new ones, so stay tuned 😀

Trying the netbook project made easy

Software

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

Software

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:)