Tag Archives: plasma

Lovin’ the dialogs

Long time no blog as usual, so let’s do some Plasma Quickies:
I’ve decided to do some love to two configuration dialogs, the wallpaper one and my loved ultrascary panel configuration “Thing”.
A while ago the configuration dialog had some problems.

The monitor preview looked ugly and deformed on widescreens, but most annoying thing it wasn’t possible to chose the desired cropping or scaling method when in slideshow mode, so you had to chose between a single image or a series of horribly distorted images 🙂

now the thing looks like this:

Desktop activity and theme before the wallpaper section, because wallpaper configuration will be just one aspect, even secondary behind the concept of activity (oh and now there is a textbox t give them a name), explayned way better by aaron.
the monitor preview looks always good, not important what weird ratio your actual monitor has 🙂
All the controls are better aligned conforming the HIG and making less visual noise.
The folder list in the slideshow mode grows and shrinks when adding/removing folders, so there is no more a big white empty spot when it’s empty 🙂

Now, my favourite configuration little monster, the panel configuration:

The size handles have little arrows that should be a bit more intuitive what is the min and what is the max and
now the move and resize actions are buttons with a label, so should be more obvious how to do to move it and change the height, while the less frequent actions (or dangerous as in the case of remove panel) are moved in a submenu, so it gives a less crowded look.
And oh, now there is a config ui for the quite recent panel autohide too 🙂 you can chose between normal panel always visible as is now, autohide or a panel not always on top, that can go under other windows.
It still looks a bit ugly but will be given a way more plasmalove(tm) look in the next days, stay tuned 🙂

Akademy, 810 and stuffs

came back from akademy saturday by plane together with Ruphy, WindowsUninstall and Andjam, all gone smooth, unlike other people, sorry guys 🙁 apart from the fact i now have a spectacular cold (probably weather nicer than the belgian one was a too big shock :))

don’t know what to say about it in particular, apart that KDE people are really amazing, especially those people have done a really crazy job, there was a sense of world domination really fantastic, it makes feel that is actually possible (hmm, maybe not world domination, but at least market domination yeah:).

Now at home, have a couple of patches still in the laptop that should really be polished/committed or mercilessy thrown away (/me laaazy)

Most important i should really do my thesis, and i’m trying really hard to do it (now i’m in the phase of making old terrible code to look good ohyeah, funny as eating a bunch of nails:)

But really nicer things pops up, like uhm… installing KDE4 on the new shiny n810 (Sorry for everybody else, but i’m reeally happy it did come with an Italian type L power plug eheheh) 😛

These are some reeeally empirical advices i’ve got, btw the Mek’s guide should be mostly enough:

Space on main device storage it’s negligible, just compile with a prefix under /media/mmc1 or /media/mmc2, maybe even qt
If you like me are a bit autolesionist, installing on vfat does work, just copy dereferencing the links with cp -R -L, would eat way more disk space but yay, works!
internal or external memory cards are mounted with noexec flag by default, so before starting it go into root (r&d mode must be enabled) unmount and mount them again
Installing dependencies and compiling qt+kde under scratchbox eats an humongous quantity of disk space, be prepared to sacrify around 10+ gigs of hard drive space 🙂
as Mek said if you got a compilation problem good odds that is qdbuscpp2xml (qt bug?), so delete the 0 bytes generated xml file, make with VERBOSE=1 to see the exact command and generate that file again with the system’s qdbuscpp2xml outside scratchbox
maybe it’s just here, but sometimes seems to really hate make -jsomething, even if you have a garzillion of cores better you forget it when you compile kdelibs under scratchbox
most of dependencies can be downloaded with apt, except shared-mime-info that the provided one is freakin’ ancient, oh and boost (ouch!) if you want kdepimlibs, but till didn’t managed to get pimlibs compile

Random impressions:

Very nice device, love its openess (well at least of the software) and hackability, it’s nearly not marketed at all and way too expensive, otherwise would sell many times it sells(or rather not sell) now

Little roadblock between us and world conquering: QGraphicsProxyWidgets seems to not accept some keyboard input: letters don’t work, enter and control shortcuts work, it’s in this way i managed to post from twitter applet (qt or hildon input methods bug?)

Oxygen widgets on one hand looks really nice due to the really high number of dpi, on the other hand gradients looks way crippled by the 16bit color depth

Overall is slow but not so much, some applications react to the tiny screen size better than one would imagine, plasmoids are in general behaving well, apart the input problem, /me thinks having a plasma interface designed for this type of beasts won’t be too hard.

minor but nice details

These days at akademy i really couldn’t do that much in the code perhaps i’m lazy and i left the laptop turned off (and the brain too:) from quite some days.

By the way so far it’s really fantastic and insanely tiring, yaaawn (i don’t ride the bike THAT much usually) 🙂

A little thing i managed to get done it’s a graphics change in plasma widgets and applets that have a scrollbar in it.

The Oxygen scrollbar was not really suited in plasma applets, both for its style and its colors, arrow button black on black with a flashing blue handle wasn’t really it in the plasma style… so now it’s svg themed too as other widgets.

it’s not really pretty as code but was really the least worst way, it uses a qstyle that must be explicitly set for each scrollbar, but it’s totally hidden from the api, since only widgets in kdelibs uses this thing, so just use widgets/
ScrollBar or TextView and all is done (hmm, i suppose i’ll have to provide also a set of treeview/listview and stuff so…).

On panel thinghie again

KDE 4.1 is out from not too much but feature addition for 4.2 are in a really fast pace already, by the way 4.2 will be the answer to Life, Universe and everything (ok, bad pun but couldn’t resist :P)

As for Plasma, the changelog published by a certain KDE hacker (welcome back Aaron:D) is already pretty impressive, i wanted to talk about a feature that should really clarify the why of a thinghie that is present in KDE 4.1:

...
Plasma Desktop Shell
--------------------
* Features
   * Panel
       * resizes itself when an applet changes its sizehint
           according to its maximum and minimum size
...

KDE 4.1 has the possibility to resize/edit/move the panel with a widget that pops up over it, to decide the size you use a thing that resembles the wordprocessor paragraph rules, and there are 3 of them, because you can decide the position, maximum and minimum size. The difference between the maximum and minimum sizes in kde 4.1 is used only when adding/removing applets.

Since some time (and writing about it only now because i’m laaazy:)) the new behaviour, that was the intended one since day zero is:

When you move the minimum slider, the panel resizes itself until a size it consider somewhat “optimal” to fit all its applets without whitespaces. When an applet wants to grow (or shrink) it notifies the panel, which will resize itself according the chosed maximum and minimum size.

The white slider instead represents the “origin point”, so for instance if you have the panel aligned to the left and the white slider moved by 100 pixels you will always be sure that the x coordinate of the panel will be 100 pixels, even if it grows or shrink.

Of course (well, at least i think:)) the default setup will still be a panel with 100% maximum and minimum width, so will look as now, but will be very easy to obtain different behaviours 🙂

This is a video that shows the standard panel that is being centered, grows and then shrinks:

Theora version

Widgets party

A target i have for Plasma in KDE 4.2 is to have a set of widgets that
integrates nicely with the Plasma theme to be reused across multiple plasma
applets.

We need this to minimize the amount of code required to write a fully
functional applet, and also we need them to be well integrated with the
Plasma theme, they must be as fast as possible and look as good as possible.
So (at least for the most common widgets like the buttons) we need to
reimplement them as pure QGraphicsWidgets that will be SVG themed as the
other Plasma elements.

Now i have mostly finished two widgets the first is a generic button with a
nice halo around it that appears with a fade in effect when the mouse pases
over it.

The other widget i’m writing is a tabbar also SVG-themed. The first place where it will be used will be the weather applet as you can see in this beautiful sneak peek by Nuno.

When the active tab
changes it slides to the new one and also the page displayed changes with a
nice sliding animation. These two widgets for now lives in playground but i
hope to move them into the main trunk for general usage as soon as possible.
here is a video that shows the animations of both the button and the tabbar,
the last part of the video shows quick switching of tabs with the mouse wheel.

More decent Ogg

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.

Mart

Tale of a little pixel