I know it is a bit early to say this, but I wish you all an ECSTATIC NEW YEAR!

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rant:

So, the Calligra announcement raised some eyebrows, and made big waves all across the world.

I guess you’ve seen a lot of articles lately that say things equivalent to “no more pasta with cheese and garlic, end of KDE?”. I guess it is /that/ time of the year again. When people have nothing to write about, they need to invent or /beautify/ the news.

And that, my children, that is called “journalism”.

The thing that always fascinated me is that people really like reading these things. You can’t imagine how many page hits I got when I posted a spoof of OS market share statistics with this post - “Linux and Firefox market share - the reality” (well, unfortunately, neither can I because my WP stats got wiped in the meantime, but it was rather big :) )

The conclusion: Orwell’s 1984 is not about communism and monitoring people…

p.s. I intentionally left out the links to the posts I’m referring to here, as they really don’t need any more publicity…

Ok, I’ve realized I really don’t have the time to finish some of the things I’ve started before. Too many things on my plate both in KDE world and outside.

Plasma themes

One of those was the promise of removing the fanciness from Plasma with ASCII art. The others include Glaze and Spoons themes.

Outsourcing

Because of this unfortunate situation, I’ve decided to give the theme creation up to the community. I’ve submitted the themes in question to gitorious at http://www.gitorious.org/kde-plasma-themes.

So, if you want to help, just clone the repository and start creating art. I would ask you not to fork the themes, but improve these ones - just make merge requests and I’ll accept them as soon as possible. Don’t forget to add yourself to the list of authors.

If you prove to be a serious contributor, you’ll get direct commit permissions to the whole repo.

git.kde.org

If you’re wondering why I didn’t use git.kde.org but Gitorious, the main reason is that the repo was created long before git.kde.org was even in plans, and I just haven’t blogged about it.

So, work on activities has been so overwhelming that I’ve had no time to do anything else lately (KDE-related).

Service

First, the kded module and the nepomuk service that were present in KDE SC 4.5 are no more - they are now merged into one application called kactivitymanagerd (KDE ActivityManager Dæmon). The reason behind this rewrite was to have a more stable system (no crashing kded on dbus locks etc.) and to make it easier to maintain.

Identicons

We have new identicons, fully themable. Since one picture is worth more than no picture at all, here they are:

Configuration

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are two corner-actions for each activity - one to stop or delete it, and another one for configuring the name and the icon.

If you remember, the ‘old’ place for configuring the above was in the ‘desktop settings’ dialogue. It was really the wrong place - this is the activity manager, it should manage all related to them.

If Nepomuk is not running, changing the icon will be disabled.

Edit: The layout in the shots is not showing the whole text of the label - it has been fixed.

Smaller stuff

Few of the things above required rewriting quite big chunks of code, removing a more than few hacks and refactoring. So while all that was happening, I had the opportunity to change a few visually irritating things as well. The most important usability problem was the fact that we didn’t differentiate the current activity from the others.

Templates

Others were also busy, so Chani and Mario started making the templating system for creating and sharing activities, but I’m not going to write about that - I’ll leave it to them - I’ll just post a screenshot of what the ‘Add activity’ looks like at the moment.

That’s all for now, so long and thanks for all the squids.

KDE trunk users, backup your plasma configs, and activitymanagerrc - you’ll possibly need them in the next few days.