Tag Archives: screencast

Drag, drop, search and launch

Software

KDE SC 4.4 is just out of the door (by the way, what an achievement, woha :D) and as our tradition we are already cramming features on trunk, that will be KDE SC 4.5.

In plasma land you will probably see more things in the tone of polishment and refinement of stuff already there rather than completely new stuff. But since the fourth Tokamak is approaching, expect something really really tasty coming out of it 😀

But now there’s a little appetizer: in 4.4 in the Search and Launch interface of the netbook shell is possible to add favourites and remove them by clicking on the little “-” icon

While that’s good and will still be available, now is possible to add favourites where you want with drag and drop from the results view and move them by just dragging around.

The drag operation will start with a pretty low sensibility, making possible to still scrolling the view by dragging.

For instance since the results view scrolls vertically, if you drag vertically the view will just move, but if you drag horizontally over an icon, after a while a drag operation will start.

This feels pretty natural and make it actually usable on touchscreen and mobile devices, as it’s shown on this video:

OGG version

For the curious, that mobile device is a standard off the shelf thing, available from quite some time. That’s all I’ll say for now, during Tokamak wou’ll hear many more details about this and many other things 😉

So yes, I’m definitely…

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:)

Painless Drop

Software

Just a little thing, but it looked to me it kinda deserved a really short screencast 🙂
Adding applets to the panel with drag and drop in plasma was a bit of a pita, because you had to hit exactly that 4 pixels between an item and the other, so painful that wasn’t really obvious it was possible at all…
so here is how the current trunk behaves 🙂


Ogg version

In other news some days ago something like 7 applets (did i forgot some others?:) were merged for 4.2 release counting what is in the workspace module and in the addons module, so there will be a ton more stuff to play with :).

That’s the reason for the kabooms we are fixing right now, but no fear 🙂