Tag Archives: plasma

A simple way to test Plasma themes

Graphics

Some time ago when testing the code that draws the svg themes in Plasma (like applet backgrounds, panels and tooltips) i wrote a very simple plasmoid that its sole purpose was to test that code, its very uninspiring name was SvgPanelTest, because surprise surprise it was a test for the class named SvgPanel:P
It turns out this applet can be actually useful also for theme designers that wants to test the themes they’re doing without killing plasma all the times.

Since now there is a contest to make Plasma even more gorgeous, i’ve decided to publish it in an easily buildable source package, and i hope that it could somewhat help you (yes, YOU :P) to make a beautiful theme that will make vista and osx to look as they are coming straight from the 80’s (well even if it’s a very little help :D)

You can download it here (also a kde-look page here) or from KDE’s svn in /playground/plasma/applets/svgpaneltest

Some notes:

To build it a KDE4 developing environment is needed (see the techbase article)
at least KDE 4.0.2 is required, but a recent svn snapshot is preferred.

A plasma restart could be needed to see it listed among the plasmoids, or you can also start it with the command
plasmoidviewer svgpaneltest
or, with a very recent svn snapshot (from some minutes ago actually :P)
plasmoidviewer svgpaneltest /path/to/your/theme.svg

On device notifier again

Software

Another post on devicenotifier :), so let me introduce his shiny new look:
new devicenotifier
The code derives directly from the kickoff delegate (with some fixes to RTL layouts), but the interesting part is that it has been pushed in libplasma, so all listviews in plasma that works like a menu can use it and have a consistent look (At the moment kickoff is still independent but i will port it shortly)

This will make possible for third party applets that wants to have a listview/menu that is well integrated into plasma without much hassle.
To use it you must use the new Plasma::Delegate class (or a subclass of it) and either use the roles that Plasma::delegate defines or if you can’t modify the model, use its function setRole(internalrole, yourrole) to map a role of the model to a role of Plesma::Delegate

If you want to paint additional data into an item you can subclass the delegate, and in the paint function calling Plasma::Delegate::paint and then paint the additional things in the space left empty that you can retrieve with the functions rectAfterTitle, rectAfterSubTitle and emptyRect.

That’s it 😀

ways to unmount things

Software

In the planet posts i’ll mostly blog about the little things i do for Plasma, hopefully with screenshots when possible 🙂
At the moment i’m playing around the device notifier to make it more appealing and most important more intuitive. One problem was that there was not an intuitive way to unmount removable discs/eject cds, the dolphin rmb menu is well, a right mouse button menu and the drag and drop to trash is funny but i admit it a little bit silly :D.

Now there is a little eject icon in the device notifier near to all the mounted devices, clicking on that it does the proper action whether is unmount or eject. now the look is this:

devicenotifier eject

In the future multiple icons so multiple actions will be supported and will devicenotifier will support different kind of devices it will be possible to offer an intuitive way to perform common operations, like turn off a webcam, interrupt a bluetooth pairing or well, whatever 🙂

Now the appeal part… at the moment the look sucks a little bit, also because it’s totally different from how kickoff looks, but now we’re working on a way to give all the similar plasma applets (at the moment kickoff and devicenotifier, in the future who knows) a cool unified kick-ass look, stay tuned 🙂

Some commits to Plasma

Graphics

new plasma desktopToday you will find the plasma desktop looking something like this. This after some commits I did today that fixes two things.

First of all now the text fits better into the icon applet and you won’t get anymore text always elided also when this is not necessary.

And the new white text on dark background combination (that fits the general dark color scheme of plasma) ensures that the icon text is always readable no matter what the background is. Maybe in the future the text will appear with a blurred halo/drop shadow like in the poor old kdesktop or maybe it will stay so, we’ll see 😀