Tag Archives: linux

Kdenlive

BlaBla

For the last screencasts I had to do, I needed some tool were it’s easy to cut little pieces of various short movie files and that could have let me to assemble them togeher, maybe with some simple not too heavy transition effects.

I have tried some apps that promised that, but in the past i never had much luck. Cinelerra and Blender uis are simply painful, kino is just linear, pitivi doesn’t have any transition effect, lives insists to convert each movie frame in a separate png…

Now Kdenlive… in the past i never had much luck with that either, it was way too crashy to actually be able to get some work done with it… but some days ago I tried to compile Kdenlive from subversion…

And oh boy, everything is sooo right. I could do all the work in really short time, not a single crash, seeking frame by frame is really fast and using it is really easy.

Kdenlive is the exact balance between an easy to use app and one powerful enough (the interface could look a bit busy at a first glance, but is really simple and trivial compared to tools like Premiere, Vegas or Final cut)

I think it’s an application that really shows what the KDE development platform can do, because is something that is really unmatched in the Linux desktop, if you think the current version is still unstable and a bit impractical give a shoot at the next one as soon as will be out, it will shine!

Since it seems nowdays I can’t finish an entry without a screencast, here it is s quick and dirty “making of” of the Plasma multitouch video, well not actually that one, but shows how fast is possible to create a simple montage.

OGG version

A brief notification

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Brrr! the trunk is frozen

The bug hunting and stabilization period is starting to pay off. Those days I’ve taken the systemtray and the notification system as a target and started hammering on it…

The target were mosty two

  • Slash the count of bugs related to notifications… and 13 were closed, other 13 remains, most of them can be probably be closed as well, just need to wait and see how the last patches behave in the various situations.
  • Refine and take into shape a neat little feature entred just 2 days before te freeze, that by itself closes several bugs too.

So, what it is? sometimes notifications pop up when the pc is unattended, sometimes is something not important at all and if it gets lost in oblivion who cares, sometimes it could be quite important, for instace somebody on IM attempted to contact you and now he is offline, maybe it’s the case to write him/her an email uh?

Now notifications, while they behave exactly as before, being displayed for a short time and then disappearing, they are also “archived” for a short time (varying depending if the pc is used or not) and they are separed by application, so it’s easy to look inside all the old notifications of kopete for instace.

new notifications

This screenshot shows the notifications popup of the systemtray opened: the user asked to see all the kopete notifications, so only them are visible, even tough there were some from kmail too.

Is not the first time the user switches to the kopete notifications: the oldest two were already present the time before, so now they appear “collapsed”, while the newest ones are open.

Subtle moving

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another quick micro thing that will be in Plasma for KDE 4.4: until now, the taskbar items appeared and disappeared “magically” and when a task disappeared between other two, every task immediately disappeared from where it was, appearing in the proper place. That is sooo computer behaviour, one of the little things that makes computer to look innatural and scary…

Until now 🙂

OGG version

This is made really easy by the new Qt 4.6 animations framework, and for now there will be just a little taste of things like that, then with Qt 4.7 this will become almost automagic, since it’ll support animated layouts natively

Another Plasma netbook screencast

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Another screencast of yours truly: this shows the Plasma netbook shell running on a bog standard Asus EeePc 1005Ha.

It can be seen the new neat animations of the search and launch interface when results are loaded. What’s neat is that it seems to run quite well on this pretty basic hardware and animations are just as smooth as they should be 🙂

OGG version

Flicking around

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For KDE 4.4, we’re giving a bit of touchscreen friendliness around Plasma, a thing common on touchscreen based uis is the so called flick lists and scroll views. They can be web browsers, simle item views, image explorers and so on.

You just touch (or drag with the mouse, it’s not limited to touchscreens of course) a random point of the view, drag it a bit, release and the contents will be launched with a neat animaton effect, with a resembrance of something real.

In Plasma, if you use the ScrollView widget you’ll get that for free, and if the item view contains some sub widget that wants to listend to mouse clicks as well, is sufficient to call the function ScrollView::registerAsDragHandle(QGraphicsWidget *), with some eventfilter magic, the element registered will still react to mouse click, but will pass them to the view as well. An example of this is the icon view of the Plasma netbook shell: if you click on an application icon it will launch the application, but if you press the mouse over one, move it and release, the application pointed from that icon won’t be launched, instead all the icon view will scroll and will still scroll for a while if the mouse moved over a certain speed.

There is a small video that show this behaviour over several plasmoids: the web browser, the microblog, the OpenDesktop knowledge base client and the Search and Launch interface of the netbook shell.


Ogg version

The WebView widget will behave like that as well, and if you implement a custom one and you want that behaviour -for free-, you just have to call Plasma::Animator::self()->registerScrollingManager(yourwidget), and provided you gave the proper Q_PROPERTY to your widget, all the magic will be done behind the scenes. The properties you’ll need are:

  • scrollPosition: the position in pixels of the contents relative to the viewport
  • contentsSize: the size of the contents: for instance an image could be 1680×1050 pixels big, even if the widget that is vieweing it is just 200×200
  • viewportGeometry: the actual viewport of the contents could be the bounfingRect() of the main widget or could even be something smaller: for instance excluding the area taken up by the scrollbars, if present.

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

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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.

Netbook: what are you?

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Some time ago Michael Dell said that netbooks delivers a really poor user experience. Now it’s pretty easy to infer that this is because netbooks sales are starting to erode the higher margins desktop and notebook markets, putting the manifacturers in a really difficult situation: one of the most successful type of device of all timesis killing the most expensive ones.

In the end Michael Dell is even right: as a general purpose pc they deliver a pretty poor user experience for both performance and screen real-estate, but this infortunate situation is in a great extent fault of hardware manifactures.

The first netbook attempt, the old EeePC 701 was pretty much a device on its own: it had an ad hoc user interface and it was clear that it served just a limited set of use cases, casual web browsing, audio/video consumption and things like that. Not entirely different from smartphones use case, but for situations when you can carry around a slightly bigger and more convenient to use device.

Then, seeing the fantastic amount of sales of those thinghies the hardware manifacturers figured out that if they put Windows XP and bigger hard drives on them they would have sold even better and this was totally true, to the point that people only want to buy netbooks instead of regular machines, rather than using them as a secondary companion device (bad economy, the easiest way to still get XP rather the much hated Vista, pick the reason you want).

This has taken away every bit of innovation those devices had, like a different operating syste, solid state drives and software specifically designed for those screen constraints: let’s just throw office on it, it will work perfectly no?

This situation is bad for users that are buying an hammer when they need a screwdriver and bad for vendors that are seeing their profits taken away.

I hope this will be taken as a lesson and manifacturers will learn to fear less to be innovative, rather than taking the path of least resilience. I’m hopeful that devices like the arm based ones, maybe with extensive use of the touch screen will make netbooks that really distincht and innovative class of devices that they deserve to be, rather than just slightly dumber laptops.

Random bits

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*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

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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.