WARNING: Contains NO spoilers! :)
DanaKil: “Great great :)
and I’m curious about your “Lancelot”… nice name btw, and smart pun for a french speaker (”lance” can be translated by “launch”) ^^“
Well, the name occurred to me when I made a superkaramba applet for myself (never have published it) for faster launching of my favorite apps. Lancelot - as launching-lot (lot as in parking-lot). And I have used the name Sir Lancelot sometimes as my alias (and yes, I’m a Monty Python fan).
Since then, Lancelot have changed. Mainly because of one of the commit-digests, due to which people thought Lancelot to be a kmenu replacement like Kickoff and Raptor. It was not intended to be anything of the sort.
The main idea that was guiding me was to create a simple application launcher (and nothing more than that) that would have a no-click (Absolutely No Click Needed At AllTM) interface.
Commit digest just gave me the wings. Things have changed - instead of making a simple Plasmoid, I started a separate application that uses libplasma for implementation (similar to what Amarok team is doing) that is going to have all needed features for an ALI.
The thing is that majority of users adore kickoff, while I hate it. I like the general idea behind it, but IMHO the layout is a bit wrong, categories too, and the non-favorite application browsing is painful. I wanted to address these issues in my own particular … (idiom sir?) … yes idiom.
Lancelot is, at the moment, only my experiment with which I want to achieve a couple of things:
- Testing area for more complex no-click user interfaces
- Development incubator for Plasma (FileBrowser, KioBrowser, BorderLayout were backported from Lancelot to Plasma)
- Possibility of having Plasmoids in an ALI - customizable ALI
- KRunner in the ALI
- Having an alternative if I don’t like the default ALI for KDE 4.0 (yes I’m being a bit selfish :) )
Well, that’s all clarification that I’ll give at the moment - no mockups nor screenshots yet - as I’ve said “no spoilers”.
p.s. If there are people who like when KDE applications have K in their name, you can call it Knight Lancelot :) *[ALI]: Application Launching Interface