Preamble: I have no intention to start a dispute
related to the new applet browser in Plasma. Some people like it, some
don’t, some prefer the old one, some want something completely
different…
As you don’t already know :), Marco did some great work which I’m not
gonna talk about - he said he’ll make a screencast of it eventually. So
I’ll just mention a side-effect of that made possible by a 1-minute
patch by yours truly.
KRunner (and Lancelot, naturally) as widget
explorers
From KDE SC 4.5, you’ll be able to fire up KRunner or Lancelot,
search for some plasma widget and drag it to the desktop.
KRunner
Well, that’s all :)
Edit: You can also create a shortcut like Meta+P to
open krunner with only this /plasma/ runner enabled via Global Shortcuts
(thanks vilder for info)
I’m not going to make a detailed post, just a screen-shot based
overview of the new features you can expect in KDE 4.5.
Cascading popups
There was a lot of talk in the beginning about why Kickoff and
Lancelot are not like the classic menu - and don’t have popups. Although
I still don’t consider cascading popups to be good, liblancelot supports
them. After a large amount of polishing, the feature is ready to be
exposed in the menu itself. It is considered experimental, but it works
quite well.
Lancelot cascading
How to activate: Configure Lancelot Menu > Applications > Open
popups for subcategories
This feature is not yet enabled for the Shelf applet (ex Lancelot
Parts) but it still may find its way into it for 4.5.
Smaller section buttons.
Lancelot sections
vs.
Lancelot sections with small buttons
How to activate: Right-click any of the section buttons and choose
“Make buttons narrower”
Search history
Lancelot now remembers what you have typed in the search box, and
auto-completes your query.
How to activate: Start typing - the closest match will already be in
the search box, grayed out a bit. To use the whole completion, press End
key. For completing smaller parts, press right arrow key.
Search engines (runners) configuration
Now, you can choose which runners to enable and which ones to
disable. You can disable the slow or crashy ones, …
First of all, I need to apologize for not doing this earlier - I was
rather busy lately.
The other problem is that “remember the milk” plasmoid is
ruining/spoiling me. Until I started using it, I somehow found the time
to do stuff in order not to forget what I need to do. This way, when I
have a reminder, I can postpone most of the items in it indefinitely.
;)
So, without a further ado, I present the first public release of the
fantastic, greatest and uber-awesome brand-new (and did I say fantastic
and awesome?) plasma theme named ASCII (it is awesome… and fantastic…
and unique… and gorgeous… and uniquely fantastic… and awesome…):
There were two main problems with the Lancelot Part applet.
The first was the name. The name, although it does represent what the
applet is technically, it doesn’t really say what the applet is meant
for and what it does.
So, it is problematic when you see it in the applet browser, and it
isn’t any better to see it when you drag and drop a folder onto the
desktop and get the options to show it in the “Folder View” or “Lancelot
Part”.
Configuration
]
The second problem was that a lot of users thought that Lancelot Part
does nothing (aka doesn’t work) because when you add it by using the
widgets browser, it is just an empty applet. (nobody really bothers
reading the instructions these
days).
Now, you can use the configuration dialogue to choose what you want
to be shown in the applet.
Ideas
Shelf
I’m currently having some problems wording a couple of things and I
would appreciate any help you can give.
The first problem is what to put as a description for the Shelf
applet. “Generic list which can hold various types of items” sounds
really bad :)
The second is the title for the section of the configuration dialogue
shown in the image above - the section below “show the search box”
option where you can choose which /sublists/data models/ to show in the
applet.
Internals
The ‘internal’ name of the applet (as seen in plasma*rc files) hasn’t
changed to keep the back-compatibility without the need for hooks in the
configuration system to tell plasma about the rename. The other thing I
had to watch out while redoing a few things was to keep the old applet
configuration structure intact. Surprisingly, I managed it somehow.
The applet’s source code is still located in
kdeplasma-addons/applets/lancelot/parts but it will be moved to
kdeplasma-addons/applets/shelf soon enough.
Lancelot (the menu) was not really designed to run on mobile devices
(although it could be used on such devices as a full screen application
quite well), but the Lancelot Part applet proved to be a rather good
fit.
I wasn’t involved in any mobile-related developments at Tokamak 4 (I
had too much to work on krunner and activities) but I found some time to
test the KDE/Plasma enabled Jax 10 devices.
Placing a Lancelot Part inside the newspaper activity that showed
favourite applications and a search box was a breeze and it worked quite
well. Marco did a really good job of adapting the plasma-netbook edition
to mobile (touch screen) devices so the Parts applet required no changes
at all to fit in the new environment.
Here is an obligatory blurred screenshot:
Lancelot Mobile
I’m planning to make a screencast about using Lancelot in Plasma
Netbook, but I’m not finding the time. I hope I’ll be able to make it
soon.
]
