Since I’m planning to make the Favourites section a bit smarter
sometime in the future (something like Amarok’s score/rating system),
but it will not happen in time for KDE 4.3, I’ve come up with an idea of
tracking the user’s (your) behaviour and to record which applications
you start. And, maybe, which item you choose from the list when you
search for something.
Before you start throwing rocks at me, here are some details about
the idea.
It would be local only. The collected data would not be sent
anywhere and would remain in your .kde directory for all times. It would
be optional. Though I don’t know whether to turn it on by default or
not. In any case, I think some “what’s new / set up the new features”
notification would be needed.
The data would not be used in the KDE 4.3 version, but in a later
one.
So, in a nutshell, it would collect the data which would be used once
the Favourites section becomes smart.
My questions here are:
Should the tracking be turned off by default? *
Should it be implemented at all before the Fav section gets
smarter?
Note that once the Fav section does become smart, it will be
changed to ‘on by default’.
I have heard that there are a few users unsatisfied with the Parts
applet.
“It [when placed in panel] is not transparent even when I use a
transparent theme”, yelled one.
“I can not resize it [when placed in panel]!”, cried another.
“I want it to show the pictures of naked ladies”, complained the
third one.
Well, to you all, I can only say “Rejoice! The solution is here!”.
(the third one was able to rejoice a long time ago thanks to the Picture
Frame applet)
The parts applet is now based on the Plasma::PopupApplet just like
most other applets including the device notifier (Plasma::PopupApplet
did not exist when the Parts applet was developed - it was introduced
along with Plasma extenders). You can see what it looks like in the left
screenshot.
It has some bugs at the moment, but will be polished in time for
4.3.
New Theme Options
A new theme feature
This is the one new theme feature that I’ve mentioned before, but
never got the chance to make a screenshot to post it here. It’s a new
option for Lancelot theme makers (works both in the menu and the
applets).
I find it impractical and ugly, but there were some requests to allow
Lancelot Parts to look more like MacOSX stacks (is that the name?), so I
made it. Just set the background.type=color-compact for the
items you want to have this type of background.
One of the common feature requests was to make the categories shown
in the applet customizable - that is, to have the possibility to choose
which categories are shown. Well, starting from the current SVN version,
you can.
If you don’t use the contacts or documents section, just don’t show
them. You could make it show only the applications section thus making
Lancelot more simple and more ‘traditional’.
Mind that this only affects the launcher applet itself, when the
categories are shown inside it, and not the menu.
In other news…
… a couple of insects known as bugs were squashed, and VIDE the Vim
IDE is progressing nicely - I’ve moved Lancelot development away from
the Project.vim plugin and similar and started using only Vide
plugins…
Hi all. This post is mostly intended for packagers and distributions.
If you are a Lancelot user, and your distribution ships it unpatched
with Qt 4.5, thus rendering it rather unusable, contact your distro and
pass the link to this post.
Thanks to the Gentoo guys Markos Chandras and Robert Piasek there now
exists a patch for Lancelot, the KDE 4.2 branch, which makes it work
with Qt 4.5 (and 4.4.4 I guess) the way it was supposed to, and the way
the trunk version works now. It does need testing, but that is what
packagers are for ;)
