You get a three blogs in one since I’m to lazy to write them separately:

Theme

First of all, just to say that I’ve started making a new theme that would fit with the Plasma’s default. It is inspired by the proposed new look for Kickoff (by Davide Bettio - http://www.uninstall.it/kickoff_mockup.png). It looks like this at the moment:

To be honest, I don’t like it, but it fits more with the default Plasma theme. If there is anyone willing to modify it so that it looks more, well, appealing, just mail me, and you’ll get all the help you need :) This version will be in the SVN tomorrow (the 4.1 branch).

Categories versus one button

This comment by Beojan decided what will be the default: _ I object to making “sections in panel” the default.

I think GNOME works with that method because they have a textual description. If all you have are Icons, a new user would find it hard to understand what each of the icons mean, so they would find a single icon, where it is obvious that it launches the menu, with sections inside,which have textual descriptions, easier than having seperate icons for each section.

I have to agree with this - by making the categories shown in the menu by default, the user gets the information of what categories exist. Later, it could be changed to my preferred behaviour.

Compilation issues and crashes.

I’m happy to announce that the compilation issues that were related to Xlibs are now gone. I was linking the Parts applet with the application, and then, it wanted to be linked to Xlibs that are not needed for the applet. Side effect is that now the applet .so file is much smaller.

In other news, the crashes that were occurring during the application browsing are history. At least, I haven’t seen one in a while :) (if you encounter one, please notify me)