Over the second week of March I’ve been at the sprint at CERN.
It has been an amazing experience seeing those very big toys, where the cutting edge research is done (noted with satisfaction the presence of Plasma desktops in the CMS control room)
On my side, some interesting little things happened:
All new systemtray finished and merged
During the sprint I’ve merged a thing i was working since a while: the system tray of Plasma was one of the most complicated plasmoids out there due to the very peculiar things it does.
Its code was really showing its age (it surviced at least 3 portings across different technologies) and even tough the old Xembed-based systray icon protocol was dropped, its architecture was still decidedly all
It has now been completely rewritten, its code is now way simpler, using less layers of proxymodels and went from ~2000 locs of C++ to ~300
While completely new, the users shouldn’t even notice any UI change, the only noticeable change should be less bugs and working better 😉
Kirigami
During the sprint, a new repository was born.
What was Plasma Mobile components is now residing in a separate git repository:
https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kirigami.git
Kirigami (The names comes from a Japanese paper folding craft similar to Origami, but unlike Origami cutting the paper is allowed) is a set of QtQuick components at the moment targeted for mobile use (in the future desktop as well) targeting both Plasma Mobile and Android. It’s not a whole set of components, all the “Primitive” ones like buttons and textboxes are a job for QtQuickControls (soon QtQuickContrls2) but it’s a set of high level components to make as easy as possible making applications that look gorgeous on mobile devices that follow the Visual Design Group UI guidelines.
The target of those components is anybody that wants to do an application using QtQuick as its main UI, especially if targeting a mobile platform, without adding many dependencies. They work both in Plasma Mobile and Android.
It will eventually become a Tier-1 KDE Framework.
Subsurface
While I was refining the components, it turns out a piece of desktop software just has its first release of its Android port, it is already using a tech preview of the Kirigami components: it’s Subsurface a dive log software started some years ago by Linus Torvalds (in GTK+) and recently ported over Qt (here a talk by one of its main developers Dirk Hohndel about the porting process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0)
It’s awesome having already an early adopter (which has been a pleasure to work with) for the components and also means we are getting a ton of feedback on it.