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.
*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 😀
Since two days there is a new module in systemsettings: workspace under the Desktop category.
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.
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.
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
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.
A while since last blog, so it seems nice to give some updates on the progress on the Plasma netbook shell, since in the past weeks i did some visual changes.
Now the widgets in the newspaper activity shows their background, to achieve more opacity (and readability), and the scroll area have a neat shadow effect to make the clipped edges to look better. The widget in the newspaper containment now should also keep their aspect ratio in a better way.
Also the search and launch interface has some fixes in its layout, and when no query is entered in the search field it spots some icons that do default queries, like all programs of a given category, all contacts and all bookmarks.
To maximize the space given to applications in those tiny screen resolutions now the panel is auto-hide, with the same sliding animation present in the main plasma desktop autohide panels (from KDE 4.4 done by my first Kwin effect, yay :D)
Here comes the usual video (the flickering of the panel is just a problem of the screencast), in the usual YouTube or OGG-o-vision, enjoy 😀
At GCDS we did several shiny things, and talked about even more shiny still to come stuff, like the better integration with kwin and new crazy ideas on the ZUI.
A thing that received a good amount of work is the Plasma on netbook project, in the form of several little components. What is really good about plasma is exactly that is done by many little components, quite easy to code, mantain and reuse.
It’s also a little experiment on the html5 video tag, it should use an ogg file on things like new webkit based stuff (in qtwebkit it works, yay!) or firefox 3.5 and fall back to youtube otherwise, anyways the ogg file is there.
A plasma shell (the actual executable), if you were using it previously pay attention that now has been renamed from plasma-mid to plasma-netbook, that’s the form factor it’s targetted in the near future anyways 🙂
A panel, simpler than the one in the desktop, that contains several widgets a “current window control”, an activity bar, a systray usual clock and a search widget (more on that later).
the two main activities: newspaper and Sal
So, the “current window control” is a thing that shows the title and the icon of the current open window, plus a close button, this because there won’t be a titlebar for windows, just fullscreen stuff, and clicking on it it triggers the present windows effect, because there won’t be a taskbar either.
The newspaper activity now looks like tthis, and compared to the state of te previous post is now possible to scroll, adding applets (yes, it needs a brand new add widgets dialog, but that’s coming from a gsoc, yay!) and rearrange them by drag and drop.
The thinghie that is called SAL, meand Search and Launch, and will basically an interface for krunner: in the desktop the alt+f2 dialog is something that is not very prominent so is not really used by the mythical creature called “joe user”, but when you show the thing to them, they love it
So in the netbook, a thing like a menu is not really up to the job (in fact most of previous projects starting from the original eeepc shell to ubuntu netbook remix to moblin all have some different idea about how a small screen proof menu should look like). We have instead opted for a full screen prominent krunner interface, driven by the search box that pops up by clicking on the top right icon on the panel. Compared to the “normal” krunner there is a group of bookmarks in the top area and there will probably be some way to access saved searches (since the first time one uses it it won’t be so obvious what to search for)
Aaand, for really putting the “net” in the netbook, there will be web based runners too, like the wikipedia runner that is already in playground (sebas and rich, you’re great :p), the idea is giving access to network resources like that via runners, plasma widgets and libraries, even without always the need a browser, that is a great thing but not always the best ui possible.
It’s good to see other parts of the OSS community looking at the current state of the X system tray and not be satisfied at all, it’s good because as you can see from this blog, i think the current approach is really really limited in many ways, as it was explainedseveraltimes…
This time is about look… now, the idea of having monochrome systray icons is actually quite good, but is quite a pita with the current protocol and actually a good use case for the new one.. why?
Let’s say we have a black panel (as the mockup of jono’s blog), so it’s reasonable to expect we want white icons, but what about if we suddenly change our color scheme to a light colored one? (or plasma theme in case of KDE) Of course the icons will become invisible, so we could need to change all of them to another theme on the fly, and this could mean also that those icons can’t belong to the system wide icon theme, or we could have to change the global theme just for the systray, that’s no good, right? 🙂
Now, the current systray protocol requires that is the application itself draws its own icon, and this theme-dependent icon color switching is kinda possible (just open the configuration of the panel… by every application) but it’s really clumsy and not cross desktop at all.
The dbus based systray protocol we’re working on requires instead that is the systray the one who paints all the icons, and being part of the panel of course it knows well what the color scheme is. The icons can be sent in Dbus by data, passing all the icon bytes themselves and in this case of course we can’t do much more than painting what it arrives, but the recomended way is to just pass the icon name (following the icon name freedesktop spec of course) and in this way we can decide where to pick this icon, we could have systray-specific icon themes dependent from the color scheme (falling back to the system wide one of course)
Now, I don’t know if we’ll actually implement a thing like that and if it’s worth the effort, but it’s a while we are talking about that thing and i think soon or later I’ll give this idea a spin 😀
It really doesn’t seem true GCDS is almost over (just a day remainig, how sad :/), and I’m kinda realizing just now that the internets actually exists, so I didn’t blogged at all while here, that happens when I can actually talk in person to most of the internet I care :p
What I can say, the location is fantastic, met some old faces and some new (hello, gnomies :p) and the whole thing has been quite productive, maybe not much on the code side but definitely on the design and the planning part.
We have got some crazy ideas about the ZUI and there is a new plan of collaboration with Kwin that will make the workspace even more integrated.
I’m also veryvery happy with the progress so far by our gsoc students (unfortunately only Chani and Ana are here, this period of the year kinda sucks for students unfortunately), most of their work will probaly be in KDE4.4 (being tired at late night made me write KDE 4.2, DOH!:P)
But what I’m more excited is the Plasma on Netbook project, if the implementation will go straightforward enough, it looks like we something usable is not too far ™, stay tuned :). WEll, actually don’t try to use it now because me and Arthur are turning the thing upside down at the moment, so it will eat your children 🙂
And oh, besides
that on the coding side I’ve continued the work on the embedding of plasmoid into the system tray, continuing our plan to show only what you need, when you need it, screencasts about it to follow in the next days (probably when i will get back home).
