Category Archives: Software

Enlarge your panel

Software

Plasma for KDE 4.1 is coming along nicely, probably it won’t have everything we wanted to but i think it’s an huge improvement already compared to 4.0.x series.
A feature i did for 4.1 is to make panels really easy to configure and make exactly how you want, even an insane layout like that:

whacky panels setup

The panel configuration dialog that was in 4.0.x was killed and replaced with that strange thing that appears when you click on the little panel toolbox that spots a wordprocessor-like ruler complete with paragraph alignment buttons:

Panel controller

This would seem quite complex, but it’s the most powerful way that catches the future development of the panel even beyond 4.2. Why?
in KDE 4.1 the panels will be able to automatically grow/shrink when you add and remove applets (in the future also applets like the task manager will be able to make the panel grow or shrink, that’s 4.2 stuff), so you could want to set where the panel starts, the direction where it grows and a maximum and minimum sizes that limits the growth/shrink of the panel. so it’s like a paragraph aligned to the left, center or right of the page, so here we go with the three paragraph alignment buttons 🙂

So if the panel can enlarge/shrink itself it’a also necessary to setmaximum and minimum boundaries beyond you don’t want the panel to resize (and the default will still be both maximum and minimum witdth to 100%) and here we have the three little ruler handles, that sets respectively:
white: panel position relative to the left, center or roght anchor point
blue: maximum panel size
green minimum size

Since a video is worth more than 1024 words here it is:

And since flash sucks here it is a bigger theora file.

Cashews on a Panel

Software

In the last weeks not many “visible” things were done on Plasma, because we were all busybusybusy with the ginormous api changes and plasma breaking and unbreaking several times :D. As you can see the list has been nearly completely vanished, oh boy, can’t really believe we did it in so little time, my best congratulations to the whole team that worked so hard 🙂

So now the development of new hot features can start again, oh yeah 😀
At the moment I’m working on two little things, one involves svg theming of every aspect of the panel, like the taskbar and the systray, of course powered by Nuno 🙂 more on that in the future when it will be more ready, will keep teasing for now, eheh 🙂

The other thing is that little nifty cashew that infestates the panel since some time and didn’t do anything: with a today commit it has actually came to life 🙂

until now you can configure the panel size by right-clicking on an empty spot on the panel (that is not always present), and an ugly dialog is presented to you, were you must enter the panel size in pixels.

One of the key concept of KDE4 is to give you more control with actually LESS buttons and clumsy configuration options, and Plasma must be no different. Imagine for instance how lame would appear dolphin if for configuring the sidebar icons size you would have to right click on the sidebar and then enter the icons size in pixels? Instead you have a wonderful fluid looking
resize upon drag of the sidebar separator that looks really hot.

Getting inspiration from that (and from Aaron’s good advices eheh :D) when you click on the little cashew you’re presented to this, here with kwin composite awesomeness:

panel toolbox

There are still some necessary buttons, at the moment add widgets and remove panel, there will also be some about the “panel alignment”, that is a concept i’ll blog here in some time when i will have something more definite. To resize the panel you simply drag the upper border of the thingie that appearded, like a normal window, nothing more nothing less.

Its functionality is still incomplete, in some time it will have also a mean to resize the panel width, the position and the location (the centered panel of the screenshot can only be obtained by tweaking
configuration files by now but it’s definitely possible :D).
All of that by drag and drop. Hint: it will have something to do with wordprocessors rulers, because, i’ll explain more, deciding where the panel will go is a process totally like formatting a paragraph in a document.

Tokamak’d

Software

As I’m writting this right now I’m on the train from Milan to Turin heading back from TokamakMKI, unfortunetely i’m leaving early because an old 3vil exam (oh C.E.Shannon, you know i love you, honey:P)

It’s a shame i hadn’t found time to blog about Tokamak until now, but when you can hack all night long with an overdose of astonishing KDE people (and the even more astonishing our overlordness P-man) the internet suddenly becomes a boring useless toy 😛

In this meeting we managed to literally turn Plasma upside-down, well done his WOCiness Alexis! (light hearted readers are advised against trying to compile today’s svn) and other reeeally cool things like wastly improved javascript plasmoids support, add activities interface, start of an awesome looking krunner redesign as pretty as the new Twitter plasmoid, new applets and oh gosh, I’m too tired right now, I’m forgetting a really big bunch of cool stuff, their respective authors are officially authorized to stab
me to death 😀

I did a lot less than I was hoping but i managed to get movable resized panels (no configuration interface for you today:)) that can be seen in this reeeally crappy-looking screenshot:

center panel, oh yeah

Oh and yeah, as you can see a cashew is grown inside the panel, we’ll grow it with care and love, what’s his purpose? we will be able to configure the panel from just here instead of a losy 90’s looking right mouse button config dialog.

Did I mention that this screenshot looks like utter avariated crap? So i have a little spoiler for you: toghether with the Almighty Nuno we have defined how the panel and a new default Plasma theme (and the aspect not necessarily linked with a theme) will look like, and it will blow away pretty much everything you have seen before on any thing (well except for pink flying elephants of course…)

How it will
look like? not so easy, you’ll still have to suffer quite a bit waiting to see that 🙂

On device notifier again

Software

Another post on devicenotifier :), so let me introduce his shiny new look:
new devicenotifier
The code derives directly from the kickoff delegate (with some fixes to RTL layouts), but the interesting part is that it has been pushed in libplasma, so all listviews in plasma that works like a menu can use it and have a consistent look (At the moment kickoff is still independent but i will port it shortly)

This will make possible for third party applets that wants to have a listview/menu that is well integrated into plasma without much hassle.
To use it you must use the new Plasma::Delegate class (or a subclass of it) and either use the roles that Plasma::delegate defines or if you can’t modify the model, use its function setRole(internalrole, yourrole) to map a role of the model to a role of Plesma::Delegate

If you want to paint additional data into an item you can subclass the delegate, and in the paint function calling Plasma::Delegate::paint and then paint the additional things in the space left empty that you can retrieve with the functions rectAfterTitle, rectAfterSubTitle and emptyRect.

That’s it 😀

ways to unmount things

Software

In the planet posts i’ll mostly blog about the little things i do for Plasma, hopefully with screenshots when possible 🙂
At the moment i’m playing around the device notifier to make it more appealing and most important more intuitive. One problem was that there was not an intuitive way to unmount removable discs/eject cds, the dolphin rmb menu is well, a right mouse button menu and the drag and drop to trash is funny but i admit it a little bit silly :D.

Now there is a little eject icon in the device notifier near to all the mounted devices, clicking on that it does the proper action whether is unmount or eject. now the look is this:

devicenotifier eject

In the future multiple icons so multiple actions will be supported and will devicenotifier will support different kind of devices it will be possible to offer an intuitive way to perform common operations, like turn off a webcam, interrupt a bluetooth pairing or well, whatever 🙂

Now the appeal part… at the moment the look sucks a little bit, also because it’s totally different from how kickoff looks, but now we’re working on a way to give all the similar plasma applets (at the moment kickoff and devicenotifier, in the future who knows) a cool unified kick-ass look, stay tuned 🙂

Another tasty release

Software

Tasty Menu 1.0.6 fixes an ugly regression and features a Brazillian portoguese translation by Ewerton de A. Dutra.
As usual you can get it here🙂
I hope it could be the last kde3 release, but yeah, I hoped so for several releases now, there is always something broken 😛