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:
Activity identicons
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.
Confirm removalChange info
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.
UI
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.
Add activity
That’s all for now, so long and thanks for all the squids.
I thought making a screencast would take less time than writing a
manual for the Userbase. Oh, boy, was I wrong… constant chat popups,
notifications, /home partition full errors etc.
So after a few attempts, I succeeded making it with only one error
message and no nortifications.
The video demonstrates two basic methods of creating the Shelf
widget
Adding via the widget exporer and then configuring its contents
and
Dragging items from the Lancelot menu widget
It also demonstrates the different ways it can be used - as a list or
iconified, on a desktop or on a panel.
I guess you all know the story how a comma “,” killed a man - the
king wrote: Freedom not, death instead of Freedom, not
death.
Well, something similar happened to Plasma recently. There was
one (yes, just one) extra letter in
the code, and the consequences were (not for all users, but a
significant amount of them):
Panels didn’t have the resize controls, while the buttons for
locking and other stuff remained.
System tray looked half-dead.
Buttons lost their backgrounds. Text was still shown.
Folder view lost the ‘selection’ controls.
Lancelot lost the no-click activation.
… and probably a lot more things I didn’t notice
So, a couple of minutes ago, I’ve made the smallest patch ever which
killed a dozen bugs :)
Just remember that, whenever you step on a flower, it can produce a
tsunami on the other end of the globe! :)
After a few pre-ordered distro-branded versions* of Stipes, the
K.I.A. (KDE Independent Artists) is proud to present a new feature
wallpaper directed by the one and only, the author of “Plan 9” and “Glen
or Glenda”, the memorable Ed Wood.
