Just a small update - Lancelot’s library received a great improvement - support for dropping the items into the lists. Although this doesn’t seem much, since L’s widgets are all totally custom-made and generally speaking implemented from scratch, trust me, it is :)

The first improvement noticeable to the outside world, that is, to you beloved users is that the Favourites list can now be reordered by simple drag and drop. And that you can add items to the Favourites by drag and drop.

(just imagine a mouse cursor dragging the Kontact item…)

p.s. This has reminded me, I’ve really got to make a new Lancelot screencast soon…

Just as a note, since Air is now the default theme for Plasma (and what’s worse, it is even called “default” instead of “air”), you’ll see that the Lancelot themes in 4.3 RC are screwed up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fix this before 4.3 RC tagging today (I was too late to discover the issue in the first place).

It is fixed both in the trunk and in the 4.3 branch, but, as I said, not on the time. So, just that you know, it is already fixed and all will be well in final 4.3.

I am rather excited to announce that Lancelot is one of the finalists in the SourceForge community choice awards for the present year, and that it is a finalist in no more and no less than two categories - “Best Visual Design” and “Most Likely To Change The Way You Do Everything”.

I want to thank all supporters, and I’d like to invite you yet again to join the click-fest called the ‘voting’. By clicking the image above, you’ll get a small questionnaire where you can choose your favourite projects. Lancelot will be automatically selected in its respective categories. Naturally, you can choose another project for those, but I strongly encourage you not to do that :)

Apart from Lancelot, I do suggest you to vote for Avogadro (“Best Project for Academia” category) and Audacity (if you find it as good as I do). For the other categories, I’ll leave the suggestions to other people and you.

Cheerio, and one big THANK YOU!

the small print: * last time as far as the SourceForge community choice awards of this year is concerned :)

It is the time to announce the new version of Lancelot that will be shipping with KDE 4.3.

Most software has code-names for different releases. Lancelot doesn’t, but I’ve decided to dedicate a new tagline to this version - “I just get carried away…”. It is still from the same motion picture as the last one (“In my own idiom” - for Lancelot 1.0).

The news of a new version can never be as grand as the introduction to a new program (especially when a lot of hype preceded it like it was the case for L1.0), so I’ll not bother to make it more grandiose than it is.

Themes

The first thing you’ll notice is that the themes have changed. All themes but Aya which kept its Spartan look.

You can see the Air theme in the main picture above, Slim Glow in the first screenshot and Aya in the second. The other “dark” themes such as Heron and Elegance look similar to S-G.

I’m aware that there will be complaints, so I’ll prepare a “classic” theme pack for the complainers.

Features

There are no ground-braking new features - most of them are related to configuration options. So, if you want to see what’s new in that area, just open the configuration dialogue.

A lot of small improvements have been made - finished keyboard support, some usability improvements, some fixes, better Kopete and KRunner integration, better Parts applet (ok, this one can be considered a grand improvement since the Parts applet has become useful yet again), sorting of the applications in the list according to the XDG specifications…

And, as a topping on a cake, the Contacts section now supports plugins, so you can write them for your favourite mail/chat application. This feature is hidden from the user, and will be until it stabilizes for KDE 4.4.

The continued development - for KDE 4.4

Since the known bugs are sparse (or to be exact, I have only one that I need to investigate), I have continued the real development in a branch in SVN (hard feature freeze is upon us, so I can not do that in the trunk). The liblancelot is now much lighter memory-wise - a couple of bytes per Lancelot::Widget (and that is a lot of bytes per Lancelot application), it is refactored and is a step closer to the API stability and maybe even ABI stability.

That’s all for now - I’m bored and I need to prepare for my talk about Free/Libre software and KDE that is due later today…

SF sent me an e-mail whether I’d like to nominate Lancelot for community awards.

So I did it. If you’d like to help, click the image above, and nominate L for the “most likely to change your way…” or “Best visual design” category (or even both)