Published
in the Other section,
on 31 December 2009
For all of you who celebrate anything related to the fact that we
are soon to be in have entered the year 2010, have a happy
New Year, even happier holidays, and ecstatic life.
This year, the /card/ is rather simplistic (especially when compared
to the last year’s), and looks
like crap when zoomed out - so, please, click it and open the full
resolution one. :)
The last few days were dedicated to Lancelot and the bugs assigned to
me by our friendly Bugzilla system at bugs.kde.org. Most important bugs
have been crushed.
But, it is no fun to talk only about bug fixes.
Item reordering
It all started with reordering of the favourites and a bug report
about the documents and computer sections not being sorted correctly.
The item reordering is now finished and works smoothly.
The perk with the reordering and drag and drop is that now it only
works when Plasma is unlocked. So, Lancelot feels more like a part of
Plasma than it did before - before this change, you could try to drag
items from L, just to find out that you can’t drop it anywhere since
Plasma is locked.
Search box in Lancelot Parts
Well, the title says it all. Right-click the parts applet ->
Lancelot Part Settings -> Show the search box
First of all, let me just say that Tokamak 3 experience was more fun
than riding on a carrousel under the influence of LSD (or so I heard)
and more strange than some of the episodes of the Monty Python’s Flying
Circus (which was, by the way, quoted many times - mostly by Aaron and
me).
All kudos go to Mario, the father of our big Tokamak family, and all
in all a swell guy. We taught the Brazilians (Ana and Artur) what snow
is, and I think they will remember it for a long time :D :P
Ok, enough about the fun parts. You were/are able to read about many
things that were done during T3, so I’ll not bother you with the others’
work. I’m just going to write an update to the last
post.
KRunner + Kickoff
Kickoff in trunk now uses KRunner as its search engine. There are a
few bugs and a few concerns about functionality that will be resolved
soon.
At the moment, all runners in KRunner are active in Kickoff as well,
but that will change since we’ll need to make a whitelist of approved
runners to avoid Kickoff crashing the plasma-desktop process on an error
in KRunner. This means that Kickoff’s search will be less powerful than
the KRunner and Lancelot, but that’s the price of running in the
plasma-desktop process.
Plasma + Nepomuk
The service for activities runs well and is located in the
playground, and so is the testing client. The current work is to
completely integrate it into Plasma which has proven to be more
complicated than I expected at first. The thing that makes it hard is
the need of libplasma to stay API and ABI compatible. The
Plasma::Context class has been introduced some time ago, but it did
nothing and some methods defined in it weren’t sufficiently
granular.
At first I tried to implement everything with no API changes, but
I’ve hit a wall very soon and had to deprecate a few methods, and
introduce a new class named GlobalContext. It seems to work, so I’ve now
switched on to implement the handlers in the plasma-desktop. I hope to
have it working till the end of the week so that I could post it all for
an API review.
Favourite applications
I was hoping to have more time to talk to Ruphy about making a
library for handling the usage data and favourite applications handling
(to be used in Raptor and Lancelot… and possibly in other menus) but
Ruphy could stay for only a few days. I’ll have to start the discussion
about this on plasma-devel when I finish the activity stuff and when I
look the relevant parts of Raptor’s code.
Photos…
Photos will come later… hopefully from other guys and gals aswell
(torrent comes to mind)
I’m aware that I could write more often from Tokamak 3, but I’m too
lazy. I’m now recompiling KDE, so I have the time.
First, the most important things - we are having a great time, both
fun and productive, and I just can’t wait to see all the ideas mentioned
here implemented.
I’m gonna mention only the things I’ll be doing soon (and that I’m
doing right now).
Plasma + Nepomuk activities
So, you know, the plasma activities? Those don’t make so much sense
at the moment, but the idea is to make the whole environment aware of
them. And to make the rest of the environment able to control and manage
them.
I’ve already written a Nepomuk service that manages activities, and a
library that gives the applications access to this service without the
need to deal with d-bus and nepomuk. The library is almost finished -
the only thing left to do is some pretty way to deal with the /offline/
mode (when the nepomuk is disabled).
The next step is to connect/synchronize the plasma’s activities to
this service. Mind that this is only the beginning - the future will
bring applications that will be able to adapt to the running activity…
(and it will bring a nice and fancy interface for all of that)
Imagine Kickoff, Lancelot, Raptor with favourite applications that
depend on the task you’re dealing with at that moment… the file dialog’s
and dolphin’s places…
Kickoff + KRunner
The second thing that should have a large impact is something nobody
really expected me to do - to replace the current search mechanism in
Kickoff (yes, the KICKOFF!!!) with KRunner, just like Lancelot does.
It really is weird that I should improve a /competing/ program, but
Sebas asked to do it, so… why not. (he, he, even with that Kickoff will
suck compared to Lancelot and Raptor ;) )
