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.

Reported as BUG:268552

The Missing

The main thing I’m missing is auto-completion or a tag-cloud of the post tags used before.

The Overall

Even with the above, it is very likely that Blogilo will become my replacement for the WP’s web interface :)

I was (more than) a bit silent lately. The thing called ‘life’ happens and you get dragged away from your computer ;)

The strange thing is that lately, I’ve been doing more artwork than coding, so the new openSUSE 11.4 is fully stripe-themed and (IMO) looks awesome.

I don’t use openSUSE, but that doesn’t mean I should avoid contributing to one of the best KDE experiences out there, right? :) (Ok, this ended up being a contribution even to Gnome installs which required quite a lot more work, but I don’t really mind)

The additional thing that made my day was the openSUSE review on the Linux Action Show. Chris (one of the hosts) didn’t stick with the original theming, but chose to use the standard blue Stripes with the Slim Glow plasma theme. The only thing better than being the default is being a choice over the default. :)

Coding again

Well, after reaching the artwork stardom :), I decided it was the time to return to my true calling. The first thing in line were a few Lancelot bugs that needed attention, and that don’t depend on the future libplasma2 development. No new features yet - but stay tuned - there should be some soon.

Activities

The main reason I got involved in developing the activities system in the first place was to have different favourite applications, different usage statistics (files opened, browser history etc.) in different activities. It always seemed daft to have Inkscape, Gimp and similar in the appmenu when I’m doing some non-GUI C++ coding.

The thing that will be responsible for that kind of stuff is the kactivitymanagerd. It currently (4.6) only controls which activities exists (along with icons, names, running/stopped states…), and which one is currently selected.

The next big thing is making it track the user’s behaviour and things that are accessed on per-activity bases. At first the data was supposed to be stored in Nepomuk, but Sebastian raised concerns that it might slow down the database too much (needs to be tested) since it would require a vast amount of data to be stored.

The second option was to use Zeitgeist as proposed by Seif (the lead Z devel). Now that we have a usable Qt API for it, the second option became viable as well.

Since I’m not famous for betting all my money on one horse, I decided to refactor the current code to be able to handle different backends, and use the one(s) that is(are) available.

Features

Currently, the following is planned for the backends:

1. Rating will be automatically calculated based on usage
2. Files, locations, web pages, contacts etc.
3. If the tests show that Nepomuk doesn’t slow down when saving each event individually, this will be a ‘yes’

No-backend support

Naturally, if you don’t want to use Nepomuk nor Zeitgeist, you’ll not get the rating goodness. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be left out - per-activity recent documents, places etc. are still a possibility.

Ok, this was a bit longer than I expected, sorry for that :)

A few discussions regarding the communication between FLOSS projects are going on now. I’m not going to get involved in those for the time being (mostly because Aaron already said enough) - I’m just going to mention something that has no connection to Gnome, Canonical, or anything like that.

I’ve recently found out that Lancelot was the default menu in Linux Mint.

How did I found it out? Thanks to this bug report which states that it was a showstopper for Linux Mint 10 to use Lancelot as default. The good news is that the bug was fixed in a matter of minutes after reporting.

The bad news was that nobody from the Mint even tried to notify me of anything. How does anyone expect bugs to be fixed if those are not reported?

From my point of view, this should have followed the following algorithm:

1. Mint: Noticed a bug and they decided it was a showstopper for Mint 10 release
2. Mint: Report a bug (either by mail, IRC or BKO) stating that they would need it fixed for the release
3. Ivan: Fix the issue, commit to SVN (now GIT) and send a patch directly to Mint peeps

Would this be too much to ask?

Ok, this sounded a bit fancier than it is. This post is not about what the future phones might look like, but rather about something related to touch-based UIs (or to use the fancy term UX :)) that has bothered me for a while now.

Preamble: To be honest, I haven’t had much opportunity to use various touch devices apart from my Symbian S60v5, and I’ve played a bit with Androids. With that said, I have really no clue whether the ideas presented here are implemented somewhere, but I haven’t seen them.

Current gestures

This part is a bit ranty, so feel free to jump down to the next section. :)

When touch-based devices went world-wide, the most touted thing was how natural the UI was. Palm WebOS closes the apps when (IIRC) you drag them down, iOS uses pinch zooming, etc.

While I have nothing against these concepts, they work quite well, let us consider how natural those actually are.

• Get a pen and a notebook. When you finish writing, do you drag the notebook down from your desk? No, you close it, and put it away.
• Open your photo album, and take one photo out of it. Put it on the table. Put your index finger in the centre and the thumb somewhere else on the photo. Try to zoom it by stretching.

So, please stop using the word natural and replace it with ‘intuitive’ (which, again, can be debatable, but can’t be considered as plain wrong).

Guided gestures

So, the gestures are useful to make some tasks quicker. The thing that I want to be able to do faster is to chose a contact and call it/send sms without the need to ‘click’ more than once. The gestures could be ‘drag contact up to call’, ‘drag contact down to send sms’. But that is not really intuitive.

Enter guides:

The picture mostly says it all, but here’s a short synopsis - you have your favourite contacts placed on the dashboard of some sorts. Every contact gets a size proportional to how much you did contact him/her. Other contacts are automatically added if you have unanswered calls from them, or sms messages.

When you touch the screen, the guides appear - in this case you have 4 actions - call (up), sms (down), info (right), more (left). If you want to send an sms, just move your finger down and release it.

Now, the same for the message list. Dragging up/down behaves as expected - list gets scrolled. But when you drag to left/right, you get two commonly used actions - ‘delete’ and ‘forward’ (replying is embedded in the bottom of the window - not shown in the picture).

When you touch one of the messages, you get the icon guides. When dragging the item to one of the sides, the icon for that action becomes less transparent, and so does the tooltip - as a visual indication of how much you need to drag the item to perform the desired action.

QML

Just to note that these are not mockups - all UI is implemented using QML - it is not yet connected to real data, but the widgets are as real as they get. :)

The FedoraTM story

I’ve made Fedora branded stripes to submit it for potential inclusion in F15. Unfortunately, Mairin (the famous Fedorartist) explained that wallpapers need to be published under a free license, and since mine contained Fedora logo, it can’t be (that is, Fedora logo is TMed).

So, because I didn’t want to really throw away what I made, I made it into a generic wallpaper dedicated to the infinity symbol. The nice thing is that due to the distortion, it still resembles an ‘f’, so for all you who requested a Fedora-branded Stripes, you can use this.

It is similar to the original Stripes with a bit stronger shade of blue.

Implications

This means that no further distro-branding will occur unless one of the following conditions are met:

• I get an official request
• The logo is published under GPL or similar license

For the second, if you use a distro that has it (for example, they ship with a replacement for a KDE icon that has a distro logo on the blue rectangle KDE logo used to be on), please give me a nudge.

Gnome 3 stripes

Well, I guess most of you saw screenshots of G3 and saw their version of stripes (the default wallpaper). It is fun that both KDE Stripes, and Gnome stripes were created (approximately) at the same time and (for me) truly represent the differences between KDE and Gnome artwork (like Oxygen icons vs Gnome’s).

Owl

I’ve got quite a few distro related requests. Some of them were made, some not yet. If you sent me a request, and you didn’t get the wallpaper, please send it again since I lost my mail archive.

I remember there was one distro with an owl as a logo, but I don’t remember the name :( … for others, I don’t even remember the logos.