If you were to pass by Sebas’ house these last few days of Tokamak 5, you’d see a window full of post-its that contained tasks that we plan to do (can be seen on Kevin’s blog).
One of the post-its was 1/8 in size compared to the normal ones and it only said TSP, an abbreviation for ‘The Secret Project’. I didn’t want to tell anyone what I was doing until I see what comes out of it.
So, after meddling with Xlib, strange code-paths in kde-workspace I’m proud to present a new splash screen engine that can do QML.
Why this? The main reason is that creating new splash screens currently sucks - everything is prerendered and the theme authors don’t really have any control over the process. That is probably the main reason we still have basically the same splash screen as we did in KDE (SC) 3.x.
Currently under a GIT branch of kde-workspace, KSplashQML allows the theme creator to define the animations in a more pleasant manner, to adapt the animation to the screen size…
The theme is rather simple - black/white KDE logo with rotating gear that fades into the logo that can be seen in the screenshot. If you are wondering why the text says ‘Friday’, it is because we are recognizing the fantastic song made popular by our idol Rebecca.
Tokamak 5 is approaching the end - only Marco and I still linger around (and Sebas, naturally) - and that is going to end tomorrow around noon.
So, as you all should already know, Tokamak 5 (plasma developer sprint) is in progress. The main desktop-related thing I’ve been working on last two days was presenting a few chosen activity templates as if those were real.
What does this mean? That you’ll see a couple of activities in your activity bar that don’t really exist. This was done, along some other stuff, to promote the activities a bit more.
Currently, as far as I know (as usual, I’m the backend guy and have no clue what will end up in the release for the user to see :) ) the only one /fake/ activity you’ll see is the ‘Photos activity’. It is meant for something that we all enjoy - managing our photo collections.
Before you start arguing that you don’t want to see a bunch of templates in your list of activities, this affects only the defaults - you can easily remove them like any other activity - click the red ‘x’ and you’re done.
Running applications
Apart from defining the widgets layout, templates are now able even to start applications. In the case of the ‘Photos’ activity, it will start Digikam and Gwenview.
Since the templates can be downloaded via GHNS (from kde-look and similar sites), automatic execution of apps is rather dangerous, so you’ll be asked for the confirmation on which programs to run.
You can see what it looks like in the screenshot above. Recognized desktop applications are presented with their names and icons, and are automatically selected. While other programs (like in this case ‘rm’) will have a warning icon in front and will be automatically deselected.
EDIT: I’ve just added a rather rigid test for the ‘safety’ of apps - the application is automatically selected only if it is a registered desktop application and it doesn’t have more than one argument specified. So, the things like konsole -e ‘something’ are not going to be selected by default.
As Notmart said “I have a dream!”. (I have no clue what this sentence has to do with the blog post, but I didn’t want to finish it with the usual ‘that’s all for now’ :) )
I’ve been interested in Telepathy for some time now. And every time it was mentioned on PlanetKDE, I wanted to test it. Some things worked, some not. Now, that the important ones are functional - system settings module, contact list, chat window - I decided to start the preparations for Lancelot to switch from Kopete to Telepathy.
So far, I’ve managed to display the list of accounts, and it will soon show the contacts as well.
Plans for 4.7
AFAIK, Telepathy will not be replacing Kopete in 4.7, so Lancelot will still be using the old (current) contacts model.
With that said, there will be a possibility to use the Telepathy model in the Shelf applet - it will be available via the configuration dialogue.
For Lancelot, I’ll probably make a hidden (non-UI) option.
This is a short post about one of the interesting events that is going to happen in Randa this summer.
Usually, multiple developer sprints are not held in the same place at the same time, but now we’re gonna have four very important ones from June, 1st to June, 7th in Randa, Switzerland - Platform 11 (kdelibs and kde platform sprint), Nepomuk, Multimedia and KDevelop.
I’ll have to develop a split personality for this one since I’m planning to get involved in P11 and Nepomuk as well. My main purpose over there will be to finish the activities backends and to push a few things into kdelibs.
Join the evolution
Aaron and Sebastian have already blogged about Platform 11 and the Nepomuk sprint so I’m not going to repeat what they said.
I’m just going to add that if you are interested in smarter handling of recent/favourite documents/web pages etc. based on user’s usage statistics and not only on the last access timestamp, if you want to have the possibility to retrieve documents that are tied to a specific project/task youre working on … and other activity-related stuff, you should join us and get the opportunity to discuss these topics in-person.
You might have noticed that this is the first time activities are a part of a sprint that is not Tokamak (Plasma sprint) - it is due to the fact that we’re expanding :) - the activities are now nicely separated into the libs/data/backends (Platform 11 + Nepomuk sprint) and user interface (Tokamak 5 - soon to be held in Nederlands).
I’ve been using Blogilo for the last few blog posts, so I decided to write a few lines about it.
The Good
Well, almost everything. The program really works and feels nice like most KDE apps. Kate-based editor for the code - nice syntax colouring, code completion etc.
The Bad
The generated html code is formatted badly. It wouldn’t be much of a problem if you edit things using the ‘Visual Editor’, but it also reformats your manually entered html code.
The code in the editor gets reformatted on Preview. And on ‘Submit’, althoughit doesn’t change the code in editor, the submitted code to the server isreformatted.