Tag Archives: kde

Update of Polyester 2

Published an updated version of the polyester widget style for Qt4/KDE4. Actually it was a pretty long time i didn’t touch that, but was too lazy to release the last state somewhere 🙂

Now i’m pretty happy with it, it seems to work pretty well, and is good, because i really don’t want to spend much time on it, it has a really high amount of hacks in it and i get bored quickly of things 🙂 however, how does it look? here it is:

There will still be some updates for the time being, to correct most annoying bugs etc, btw 🙂

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 🙂

Salute to an icon

Ok, it’s the new trendy thing of the planet and it’s quite funny 🙂

when the mouse left, the old icon faded away
casting a long shadow in the sunset of its way
into the autumn of the old desktop implementation
preparing the sunrise of a new sweet temptation

that’s right: a very bold way to say text with dropshadows and the background only fading in icon-based applets 🙂

4.1 times more Prettyness

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you the brand new shiny Plasma theme that will be used for KDE 4.1:

Here you can see the new applet and krunner backgrounds, the new panel, our brand-new carbon fiber clock and some items that once upon a time weren’t themed at all, like the pager and the taskbar.

This is the wonderful work of Nuno, i did some work in the code in the last month to make the theme support even more extensive, to have all your nice plasma widgets with more SVG prettiness, so let’s start thing by thing 🙂

The pager: the mini-desktops now have 3 different backgrounds, and when the mouse goes over the widget the mini desktops fades in and out with a neat animation

The panel: when composite is disabled his borders must be nice even if we don’t have antialiasing and when its width is the 100% of the screen it’s really a different beast, so a different svg it’s used, one different for each edge of the screen the panel can be

Dialogs and krunner: they have the same styleas the applets, but when composite is disabled we don’t have antialiasing for border, so it’s drawn in a nice retro-style

Taskbar: it now supports SVG backgrounds for several task states, there was some performance issues but we hope we will be able to enable the neat animations on mouse over also here 🙂

System tray: yeah even that now has a SVG background to make it look coherent with the other panel plasmoids like the taskbar (and the pager, if the size is enough)

The analog clock: KDE4 is all about analog clocks, right? 😛 so how could we neglect it? Absolutely not, so it now has cool drop shadows under each hand, that are always projected in the right position when the hands rotate

The folder view: due to its very nature it must have a more translucent background, to be easier on the eyes. Do you want to use that background on your applet? just call setBackgroundHints(TranslucentBackground) et voil

Enlarge your panel

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:

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:

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

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:

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

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:

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 🙂

A simple way to test Plasma themes

Some time ago when testing the code that draws the svg themes in Plasma (like applet backgrounds, panels and tooltips) i wrote a very simple plasmoid that its sole purpose was to test that code, its very uninspiring name was SvgPanelTest, because surprise surprise it was a test for the class named SvgPanel:P
It turns out this applet can be actually useful also for theme designers that wants to test the themes they’re doing without killing plasma all the times.

Since now there is a contest to make Plasma even more gorgeous, i’ve decided to publish it in an easily buildable source package, and i hope that it could somewhat help you (yes, YOU :P) to make a beautiful theme that will make vista and osx to look as they are coming straight from the 80’s (well even if it’s a very little help :D)

You can download it here (also a kde-look page here) or from KDE’s svn in /playground/plasma/applets/svgpaneltest

Some notes:

To build it a KDE4 developing environment is needed (see the techbase article)
at least KDE 4.0.2 is required, but a recent svn snapshot is preferred.

A plasma restart could be needed to see it listed among the plasmoids, or you can also start it with the command
plasmoidviewer svgpaneltest
or, with a very recent svn snapshot (from some minutes ago actually :P)
plasmoidviewer svgpaneltest /path/to/your/theme.svg

On device notifier again

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

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 🙂

Mart

Tale of a little pixel