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).
Tokamak5 Logo
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.
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.
Activity template
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).
