In KDE SC 4.4, thanks to a very successful Summer of code project, is now possible to share your running widgets to the local area network. This opens a whole lot of new possibilities, but as every brand new thing, it still did not come to full potential, but is something that developers will have to play with to start to have really interesting applications.
In 4.4, is possible to remote control your media player by publishing the nowplaying applet. Is probably the most obvious application but it’s just a start.
Since I’m refactoring the notifications and jobs for 4.5, it came obvious that it would have been a pretty good use case.
Imagine you started a pretty important file transfer on your main pc and you want wo know when is done, but now you just want to go watch tv on the couch, you can just bring to the other room your netbook or your mobile device, so your options are:
Going polling the other room every 3 seconds (naaah:), use a somewhat overkill tool like vnc, or just share the notifications applet on your main computer 🙂
This video shows both notifications (KMail complaining about misconfigured mail acounts) ahd a short ftp upload job: on the remote pc is exported both the progress and the notification when the job is done (to answer ti the more obvious question, nothing is shared unless you tell to). Had to switch quickly between the two screens, so looks a bit Blair Witch eheh
This is not available under KDE SC 4.4, because the notifications system had to be refactored a bit to support that (and there were also some important bugfix that will be in 4.4.1)
As an advices for who does the Javascript jam, provided that you use the last bugfix version, is: use dataengines as much as possible, then you will be able to do really interesting things combined with this feature.
On a different note, tomorrow I’m leaving for Tokamak 4. this will be a really interesting week where I’m sure something cool will come out of, I’ll keep you updated 😉