If you haven’t noticed, KDE SC 4.5 comes with a new wallpaper named Stripes. It has replaced the old default_blue that has been our friend since 3.x days (and maybe even earlier, I don’t know).

Since it is used in KDM, it can’t be (yet) shipped with multiple resolutions, but due to its simplicity it scales rather well.

If you are not satisfied with the default resolution (strangely enough it is 1440x900), you can download the multiresolution package from my gallery at deviantArt. Unfortunately, dA doesn’t accept .tar.gz so the wallpapers are zipped.

EDIT: Note that this is not the same version as the one shipped with KDE SC - this one (apart from multiple resolutions) includes a gaussian-noise hack Nuno suggested to make gradients look better.

At last Tokamak (Plasma developer sprint), I’ve made a small KWrite proof-of-concept patch just to see how it will behave with the new activities framework - notifying system when it opens and closes a document. A lot of time has passed since, and activity classes were completely revamped, turned upside-down, went through one API review, and moved from the playground to kdebase/libs.

That original patch doesn’t exist anymore, and even if it did, it wouldn’t work for all the changes that were made to activities.

The uber-awesome KDE conference - aKademy - was a time for something new!

New client

Ok, after this introduction you’d expect that I’ve written another patch for KWrite. Well, you’re wrong. The first application that supports activities as a client is Vim! :)

The main reason I went for Vim this time was to prove that non-kde apps can work with our awesome concept of activities. Another reason is that I didn’t want to use KActivity* classes, so that I can see whether the d-bus protocol is sufficiently profound for this task. It turned out that it is, but there are some improvements to be made.

At the moment, only Vim invoked from a terminal emulator program (eg Konsole) can work with activities since I can’t find a way to retrieve the window id of a GUI-enabled Vim from vimscript, so I’m essentially using WINDOWID environment variable that terminal emulators set.

The following is a debugging output of the activity manager daemon related to Vim windows

resourceWindowRegistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/mailacc.txt
resourceWindowUnregistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/.vimrc
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///home/ivan/
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///usr/share/vim/vim72/doc/options.txt

Truly limitless possibilities!!!

^^^^ just wanted to write an awesome marketing-speak sentence for the end of the post :D

I always was a nonconformist, so while everybody was at aKademy in Tampere, I decided to hold my own version of aKademy in Munich. Well, it wasn’t really my decision, I had more than 6 hours gap between my flights, so I decided to go to the town.

Pictures are worth a lot more than words so:

As you can see, the city was crowded, and they served weissbier and weisswurst.

I arrived to Tampere at 9PM - just in time to join the ongoing party in some fancy nightclub :)

Just a small reminder - in KDE SC 4.5, Lancelot shows Plasma’s widgets/viewitem.svgz as a background for the items in the lists. So, you should remove the files that match lancelot/action-list-view-* except action-list-view-headers.svgz from your themes.

If you don’t, the list items will have two backgrounds and will look ugly.

The reason why I didn’t disable the old backgrounds directly in the code is that someone could possibly want to have the two backgrounds (an example where it looks OK are the list headers).

For those who didn’t see the notice by Tom, you should convert your password based SVN accounts (https) to SSH (svn+ssh) as a first step of migrating from SVN to GIT. For instructions, head straight to: http://www.omat.nl/2010/06/23/convert-password-based-accounts/

I’ve already converted, and I can’t be happier - the sun is shining, everyone wants to be my friend, all members of Pink Floyd are alive again, and I have 10% more girlfriends than before. Ok, I’m stopping with commercialism before somebody kicks me…