Lancelot (the menu) was not really designed to run on mobile devices (although it could be used on such devices as a full screen application quite well), but the Lancelot Part applet proved to be a rather good fit.
I wasn’t involved in any mobile-related developments at Tokamak 4 (I had too much to work on krunner and activities) but I found some time to test the KDE/Plasma enabled Jax 10 devices.
Placing a Lancelot Part inside the newspaper activity that showed favourite applications and a search box was a breeze and it worked quite well. Marco did a really good job of adapting the plasma-netbook edition to mobile (touch screen) devices so the Parts applet required no changes at all to fit in the new environment.
Here is an obligatory blurred screenshot:
I’m planning to make a screencast about using Lancelot in Plasma Netbook, but I’m not finding the time. I hope I’ll be able to make it soon.
This one will be short, I don’t really have the will for writing - it is half past midnight here.
The activities infrastructure is mostly finished - now only polishing is left to be done.
The new organization goes like this:
The core activity-related features are placed into a kded module which doesn’t depend on anything but Qt and the core kde libraries. The class for writing the clients of this service (any program that wants to be able to react to activity changes etc.) will be in kdelibs. The API is minimal and very easy to use - it took me only a couple of minutes to patch KWrite to be able to use activities.
The second part is the revamped Nepomuk Activities service (I already blogged about it - the changes made at T4 were mainly related to make it fit the new arhitecture). If it is running, the above class passes all the info to it. Running the service enables the access to extra meta-data regarding documents and activities.
The third, and last part is the manager class which will be in kdebase/workspace (most probably) because it is only intended to be used by kwin and plasma. Normal programs shouldn’t use it.
Published
in the KDE development section,
on 21 February 2010
Until now, drag and drop and some other things in krunner based launchers (lancelot, kickoff, and maybe SAL?) are based on a small hack - manual detection whether the result is in fact a .desktop file of an application provided by the service runner, and if it is, then we can use it.
So, the first thing I decided to make is some way of allowing serialization of the search results. I decided that the best way is to allow the results to have mime data assigned to them. Naturally, since most of the time you don’t need the mime data, it doesn’t load by default - it is loaded only when requested and only for the specific search result.
That is all for now from T4… I’m sleepy and I can’t really write more…
Published
in the KDE development section,
on 9 February 2010
A small visual update of Lancelot’s pies:
Concerning bars instead of pies:
Bars below the text (like in dolphin) will not be implemented:
I’m trying to keep everything in Lancelot generic enough with a complete model-view separation, so introducing a widget just for a specific model is not an option. Comment by Ivan Čukić — 7 February 2010
Bars as a part of the icon
This one would be allowed when concerning the above statement. But I don’t really see the point in doing it. When the usability is concerned, bars are more desired when comparing multiple statistical variables (national growth per year), while when percentages are concerned, pies are the way to go (and to increase the usability even more – these are color coded – from blue, through yellow to red). Introducing a new feature just for the sake of it is not something I’m willing to do. If you can convince me that bars* are better** than pies, I’m ready to listen.
bars that can fit into the icon itself like the current pies do. ** better as in “should replace the pies” - having a configuration option for something this insignificant would be a waste of space.