I’ve become overly lazy when writing blog posts is concerned. Maybe it is because I’m again working on the user-visible features, and it is much easier to just post a screen-shot or a screen-cast, than to actually write anything meaningful.

It also gives the audience a chance to ask ‘does this mean that plasma will have …’ which sometimes brings wonderful ideas to life.

Plasma 5.0 has been released today, but the work does not stop with it.

We have been preparing features planned for 5.1 (and later) for some time now. The new activity switcher is one of them, and it is coming along nicely. It is already much more polished and optimized than the one available in 5.0.

If you want to see it in action, just check out the new screen-cast (I recommend watching it in 720p, it looks much nicer):

{% youtube uxaDaXW67Oo %}

It shows some old features, but also a few of the new ones.

Be seeing you!

I have returned to the colourful world of UI (still refusing to say UX :) ) development.

The new pretty thing that is taking away my time is the activity switcher which got a rather big revamp for the next release of Plasma.

{% youtube nVUTww3oMhA %}

Apart from the new UI, it got a few usability improvements, namely full keyboard navigation. You are able to filter, navigate and switch activities without touching your mouse.

Meta+Tab activity switching

Unfortunately, not all is great - the Meta+Tab shortcuts for switching activities are not going to be enabled for the first release, they will have to wait for the one after.

What will that look like?

As you can see in the screen-cast, the Meta+Tab will (unlike old Plasma) have a visual feedback - it will show the switcher until you release the Meta key. Similarly to how Alt+Tab for window switching works.

Per activity global shortcuts

The second thing that will need to wait is the port of the global shortcuts plugin by Makis Marimpis. I expect it to be present in the same release as Meta+Tab.

Foreword

Since we lost the King Nepomuk at the battle on the now red desktop fields near the Semantic River, the common people lost the ability to tie things to their activities.

Stories and hymns of how King Nepomuk got to the throne by learning the sacred skill of tying things to one another with differently coloured strings and with labels attached to them, will remain in our heads and hearts for years to come.

The most famous and loved will always be the balad of the Active lands of Plasma where the society became so enlightened they managed to expel the Royal Society for Putting Things on top of other things.

What the future (KF5) brings?

Ok, stopping with the story now.

KActvities are back in the world of semantic linking, this time without Nepomuk, and without any unnecessary performance overhead. The new service implements all the features Nepomuk provided for activities, but also goes a bit further than that.

Everything is exposed to the developers via the ResourceModel available via the org.kde.kactivities QML import.

With the new system, we are finally able to implement one of the most requested features - to be able to define some Kickoff/Homerun/Lancelot/whatever favourites to be tied to a specific activity while leaving some to be global as they are now.

A small task for a volunteer

If someone is willing to port the Dolphin plugin and the Activities KIO to the new system (for KDE SC 4.13), please send me an e-mail.

Namely, the new activities service (although based on Qt5/KF5) can and should serve as a drop-in replacement in the future 4.x releases (if the distributions decide to ship it, I’m not going to force the issue).

In order to restore the missing features that depended on nepomuk, the two components from above need to be implemented to work with the new service.

My current focus is on KF5 and Plasma Next, and I’m not going to be able to implement those any time soon.

So, if you think you’re up to the task, and would like to be able again to link stuff to activities in 4.x, ping me.