Me again. I haven’t been online for a week - went on some pub crawls in Dublin

) - so I haven’t been able to reply to the comments to my last post which showed some nice things coming to Plasma.

BSmith1012: _I love the simplicity and extra effort you put into making it flexible. I know how much you hate icon views, and yet still made it possible to use in your example, so I appreciate that.

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t;=89572

I posted this in the kde Brainstorm ages ago. If you release something like the screenshot that can include all of my favorite applications as Icons, I’d prolly be happy with that and I feel like many others will appreciate it as well. Thanks for all of the hard work!_

Answer: True, I’m not a fan of icon views, but there were a lot of requests to have those in both lancelot and kickoff. This didn’t take much effort now that we have QML. When this is finished, it will be rather easy to recreate kickoff, kickoff with icon view, or any other launcher you are used to. I do intend to create a few different layouts that will be shipped by default with the main launcher.

Fitzcarraldo: Lancelot (currently 1.9.5) is my launcher of choice, so I am interested to read about Lancelot 2. Can you give us a rough idea when Lancelot 2 might be released?

Answer: I’m not sure when it will be released. I don’t really expect it for the next version of KDE Plasma. I might publish a preview version out-of-kde-sc-schedule for testing purposes.

sir_herrbatka: Where the code is hosted? I would like to test it.

Answer: The code is currently at kde:scratch/ivan/lancelot-qml. The main applet is mostly for testing the infrastructure I’m making. In terms of features, it is nothing close to the current version of Lancelot, though it does look similar.

The important thing is that it will not screw up your regular installation - the applet is differently named.

There are some news in the Plasma, Lancelot, Shelf, QML components, blah blah whoop whoop land. As some of the people have noticed from the previous screenshots, I’ve begun working on a QML port of Lancelot.

The Launcher building toolkit

In Lancelot 1, I decided that it would be awesome to allow people to put parts of it on the desktop or panel or wherever even without using the Lancelot menu. Those were implemented as the Shelf (formerly known as Lancelot Parts) applet.

This time, for what will be known as Lancelot 2 I decided to go one step further - to break everything into QML components, be it data models or UI elements.

Now, you need only a few lines of QML to replicate the same functionality of the Shelf applet (the first column in the screenshot). The second is essentially the same, but uses the IconView.

LancelotComponents.ListView {
    modelsList: [
        LancelotModels.FavoriteApplications {},
        LancelotModels.ContactsTelepathy {},
        LancelotModels.Devices {}
    ]
}

You don’t need to stop there - you can create custom widgets and pass custom delegates (third column), custom item views (all the models have the same API) etc.

Lancelot specific

The menu itself is also going to be as changeable as possible - now that the UI is based on QML, the users will be able to create different layouts, and share them on the kde-look.org. So, for anyone who desired a simpler menu, a menu that shows the items in a grid of icons, and not in a list, for anyone who … I can only say - it will be possible.

It will even be possible to create a telepathy quick-send-message applet if you want to.

Maybe even the April 1st joke from a few years ago will be a fair game.

With a title of a great Jethro Tull song, and a teaser screenshot, I’m ending this post.

Good day everyone. I need a brave soul (or two) who have the guts to add a long-standing missing feature to the Activities system …

THE UNIT TESTING FRAMEWORK

… I know, I know. It is far from being a thrilling work, but everyone would benefit from it.

I’ve started introducing asserts all over the code to make it more predictable and tested at runtime, but that is not enough. Asserts are there to check whether somebody is abusing kactivitymanagerd, while unit testing will be for when we (whoever works on kamd) are using some methods in a wrong fashion.

Marco announced a new version (rework) of the Air theme for Plasma.

That reminded me of the fact I forgot to blog about the new version of Slim Glow that will be in 4.10.

The most noticeable change is that the system tray icons, share-like-connect icons, and others are now based on the awesome Font Awesome by Dave Gandy (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome)

The second is that it is now even slimmer. The desktop widgets have smaller border, especially those like the folder view.

The theme is now again a regular citizen of kde-look.org. Since the non-default themes were moved from standard installations into kdegraphics module, I started receiving requests to make the theme available through the Get Hot New Stuff since rarely anyone wants to install kdegraphics kdeartwork. I understood the desire for this, so I complied.