Tag Archives: kde4

Kubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10

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So today Kubuntu 9.10 was released. I wish to the whole team my congratulations for the release 😀

I want to sped two words about a new additin in the Ubuntu fleet: Kubuntu Netbook Remix. This particular version of Kubuntu ships (and uses as the default user interface) an early preview of what will be the Plasma Netbook project.

We (as both upstream KDE people and Kubuntu people) wanted to quickly put something out of the door, to give people an easy way to test it, and make it a bit more known before the final release, and requiring people to run trunk is not really reasonable, while a livecd poses a way lower entry barrier.

While you are testing it, please keep in mind is software in a really early stage of development.Kubuntu Karmic Koala of course uses KDE 4.3, because it’s what is out at the moment :). Since some months ago the Netbook project uses some important new features that will be in the Plasma library for KDE 4.4, so the version shipped in Kubuntu is a snapshot a bit older that what is in svn now (plus some backports of more recent fixes), that’s why it looks pretty different to the last screencasts i did.

So keep in mind that the “real deal” on Kubuntu will come just with 10.04 (or as soon as KDE 4.4 packages will be released), but I’m confident that what is shipped now is something already quite fun to use, and gives an idea how it will be, so try it, have fun 🙂

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:)

Dropping in, dropping out

Software

I love when an idea starts to taking form and suddenly starts to make sense in an unexpected way… some days ago Aaron blogged about dropping remote contents inside Plasma: now is possible to drop in several types of content, even from the network and the proper plasmoid capable of doing a little preview of that content will pop up, like the picture frame for an image or the web browser for an html page.

The idea of Plasma as a canvas for some kind of smart bookmarks with live preview of your content and work is taking shape, now what was the logical step was to ask.. what about the other way around?

We now have a quite simple way in the plasma api to associate an application, or an url (with the proper application detected from the mime type) to a Plasma widget. A new button will appear in the applet handle (and a new entry in the context menu) and that application will be launched. The idea is to have a full view of what you have in the widget, as a tiny preview.


OGG version

Netbook shell after Tokamak 3

Software

Here we go with the long promised screencast about the progress of the Plasma Netbook shell after Tokamak. This time I’ve tried to record an audio track as well: the process is still not very well streamlined so the quality is still so so (composite+screencast still seems a big nono these days) and yeah, bear with my english, it’s what it is, like a certain Nintendo character :p

Aaanyways the stuff I talk about in this video is:

  • How to try it if you have a svn trunk build
  • Keyboard and touch screen navigation
  • New background dialog
  • Integration with the new widgets explorer

Where the last two are true for the Plasma desktop in general, thanks to the work of Davide and Ana respectively at Tokamak 3.


OGG version

Looking back at Tokamak 3

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I’m starting this entry on the train on the way home from Tokamak (and finishing it at home). Looking back it was probably the best KDE event I ever been. I’m already missing each one on every person that was there.
>Fisrt of all I want to thank Mario Fux forhosting the event. It was a really big job for him and everything was gone perfectly smootly.
The place was of breathtaking beauty, I didn’t brought a camera myself but you can see from other blog entries on planetkde photos of this beautiful place. Last day we gone at the bottom of the Motterhorn mountain with the cablecar. This mountain is beautiful because it’s an huge block of rock of the exact shape you would expect from a mountain, really makes you remember how tiny human being are on this planet (yeah, sounds clich

Say something Tokamak

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Didn’t really find much time to blog at tokamak. Anyways, what I’ve been doing?

  • The netbook shell has found a new home in kdebase, so now if you build trunk it will be here and will definitely be here for the release of KDE 4.4. This is realy important because it makes easier for people to try it right now without having to compile components from playground. Another important reason for the move is the reuse of the existing coomponents, in particular the new widgets explorer that has been merged from the Gsoc project of Ana, that makes the experience of both plasma-desktop and plasma-netbook much more pleasant. Not much to add right now but stay tuned for a screencast in the next few days.

  • The KnotificationItem library, that is the client of the new systemtray specification has been merged in the KDEUI module. This means is no more experimental and all applications can start to use it without fears of binary incompatibilities. At this point the start of a Freedesktop standardization seems much more realistic.

  • Ad oh well, we are all been busy in refactoring and moving aroundstuff, so while there could be some instabilities in trunk right now, the plasma library will become much more clean and robust in the future.

  • Anyways, many props goes to Rob and Ana that have gone trough the endeavour of merging their pretty big Gsoc projects, this did mean work and work and work, but i’m speechless about the quality of the projects. Ana’s widget explorer makes plasmamuch more usable and pleasant to use, Rob’s remore widgets are well, revolutionary, can’t find other words, but i’m not gonna to explain them here, they can do a much better job.

Tokamak netbook talk

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This post is an attempt to make a little synopsis of the stuff i talked in my tiny presentation about the Plasma Netbook project, nothing new but a nice recall.

The plasma netbook shell idea was born during Akademy 2008 in Belgium on a blackboard (yeah, real old blackboard with dusty chalk :p) and remained mostly on the blackboard for quite some time.

However the first pieces were put in place shortly after by Aaron doing a first implementation of the plasma shell, that languished there for a while.

Fast forward until some months ago, me and Arthur decided to put some time in it, so let’s see the results so far.

As plasma being really modular, we now have a collection of stuff pretty much independent suff.

  • A plasma app: we don’t use the plasmadesktop executable but something that is lighter, simpler and allows us to experiment very un-desktop things

We have some own containments too:

  • We don’t use the normal desktop and panel in plasma-desktop since it has too many things not really useful there: logics for autohide panels panel alignment and things like that

  • Newspaper containment. A free layout is not adapt in a constrained size, let’s put a bit of order.

  • Search and launch. Let’s have an easy and intuitive way to launch applications and do searches, without monopolizing the whole ui.

Just two applets right now:

  • A search box separate from the sal, to be positioned in the panel

  • a simple titlebar/semi-taskbar, since we won’t have neither of those

We can ask ourselves since we have a really good desktop: why we do a different thing?
A traditional desktop has some characteristics that makes it really good on big screen resolutions since we can tile multiple windows in the same screen or leave a big emty area to access the desktop.

However on a small screen the very concept of havin windows become annoying, because the space is barely enough and sometimes even too scarce for the actual application data. This Should drive us to a radical rethinking of how the shell should look like and behave and is also an occasion for us to have new ideas and touch things that in a desktop we really can’t.

So what we have that is so odd? We don’t have a desktop containment, we don’t have a taskbar, a titlebar of the windows or resizable windows.

A peculiarity of the shell is that the main view, what usually would be a “desktop” is a normal window like the others, so is possible to put it in front and choose it in the “taskbar” (that is just the present windows effect) and in alt+tab, also all the panel configuration machinery is not present in the shell.

What is really interesting of the project are the two new containments.

The newspaper: the idea is to make look like a newspaper, act like a newspaper, so it’s a duck..

This is what you see as soon as the system start: a two column layout of widgets that are network-oriented, so they gives you a quick overview of what happens in the interwebs and on what your friends are up to.

The Search and Launch interface: from personal experience i see that new users are simply amazed by krunner when you show it to them, but they rarely use it, because it’s really well-hidden under a shortcut and there is nothing advertising it. On the other hand the SAL interface brings krunner up as the first and only way to launch applications (or execute any other kind of search and action supported by krunner, from evaluating numerical expressions to searching wikipedia)
the search box is in the panel, so it’s reachable even when the sal containment is hidden by windows or is not in the main view.

There were interesting reactions so far. The comments about the newspaper and the sal were overwhelmingly positive, way more tat i expected, that says we have to be doing something right :p. Not so positive are the comments about the panel, i think tere are some valid points and i am not really happy about too, there is certainly room for improvement.

Now, the work still to is still huuuge (everyone willing to give an hand is of course more than welcome):

  • Refine the applets and containments: better fallback in the case desktop composite is not available.
    Improve panel behavior

  • Friendliness to keyboard navigation

  • Integration with kwin: how to do and behaviour of the fullscreen applications

  • Seamless switch between a plasma-desktop and a plasma-netbook session

  • Make really smooth to use certain plasmoids as stand alone applications