Just a short note for everyone using anything from the kext ontology that is related to activities - since today, kext:Activity and friends don’t exist. Everything is moved from kext to kao (KActivities Ontology)

There are a lot of news regarding the activity manager, but nothing picture-worthy so I’ll skip writing about it.

Security in activities

There is something that a few people here and there have been requesting - having some automatic (UI) way to create encrypted folders to keep their sensitive data in.

The thing I’m going to talk about today is exactly that - starting with KDE SC 4.9 you’ll be able to decide to encrypt specific activities. When you do that, you’ll get a ~/Activities/Something folder that is password protected and encrypted using fuse/encfs.

The encryption/decription process will be done automatically on activity switching.

For example, lets say you have two activities - Leisure and MI5 - with the latter being an encrypted activity. When you switch to the MI5 activity, you’ll be asked for its password and you’ll be able to access the data. When you switch back to the Leisure activity, the system for the previous one will be automatically unmounted.

Plasma Active Three

One of the reasons behind this new feature is PA3. You’ll have a portable device that can be stolen, that could be used by your children (while being single-user) for fun etc. and you don’t want some data to be visible to them.

In the case of PA, since there is no file manager and we don’t want to expose the file-system to the user, every document that you link to the activity will be automatically moved to the encrypted folder.

Drawbacks

There are a couple features that will stop working with encrypted activities - you will not be able to search encrypted documents by contents since the contents will not be indexed by nepomuk, and documents will not be able to belong to multiple activities if one of them is encrypted.

The searching works without issues, and in that area there are no differences between the C++ implementation and the new one.

The things yet to come are:

• In-applet configuration, not a QWidget-based dialog like it currently is.
• Automatic sizing of the popup applet… will be tricky.
• Setting the icon, drag and drop, multiple models in one shell…

Well, this is it for now… just wanted to make the name known :)

Edit: Cool, thanks for the input! I get the gist what is the common format. There are some unpredictable ones, but I think we could come up with some not-useless heuristic to deduce whether two wifis are at the same institution.

Hi all, I need the following information from out awesome users - what are the names of the wifi networks you are using when you are at some institution or something. I don’t need the exact names, just the format.

So, for example, at my faculty. we have names that follow this pattern: faculty_name-classroom_number (eg. Abcd-122). At the math institute, it is something and something2.

Please write your strange formats :)

I have realized I haven’t had a Lancelot-tagged post in a really long time. This just has to change.

After the release of Plasma Active 2, I decided to take a few days off, and do something else. After Martin’s port of Kickoff to QML, I got the idea that I could finally start porting Lancelot to QML. I have entertained this idea in the past, but I was unsure about how backwards compatible QML2 will be and whether I’ll have to rewrite large parts of Lancelot for the fifth time due to changes in Qt.

With all those doubts still present, I decided to bite the bullet.

I’ll try to keep things on the /safe side/ by keeping the Lancelot-specific hacks to a minimum. This means I’ll try to use Plasma Components and standard Qt Quick as much as possible instead of writing my own like before (at the time, there were no pre-made UI components for QGraphicsView).

Data models

The first to port were the data models - instead of a custom ActionListModel class, I’m now using the standard QAbstractListModel, and all the models are exported as QML components in the namespace of org.kde.lancelot.components.data.

This means that any KDE/QML application, plasma applet or something else, will be able to use these models by doing a simple import.

Shelf

After the models were converted, it was the time to test them, and what better way than to re-implement the Shelf applet. As you can see in the screenshot, even the KRunner-based search works.

Regressions

There will be regressions in this process. Some intentional (aka permanent feature removals), some not. At first, there will be no click-free activation, no drag-and-drop, no …

I don’t plan on releasing Lancelot 2 until most of the current features are reimplemented, but this is not the case for the Shelf. It will go into KDE Plasma 4.9 regardless of state it will be in. It is almost usable now, more than a half a year before 4.9 is released to the wild.

Lancelot 1.x

There will be no major changes in the current branch of Lancelot, unless someone steps up to do the work. I’ll try to find the time to fix openSuse-specific (I don’t use oS, so can’t reproduce) crashes that have been flooding bugs.kde.org recently, but that might be after 4.8 is released.