There have been some good news regarding the distribution specific packages. Thanks to many of you, packages exist for most mainstream distributions - Kubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva, Slackware, Gentoo and Arch. I haven’t heard anything about Fedora and Debian yet, so any info would be appreciated. Note that I haven’t tested these packages.

Apart from that, there is now a source package for those of you that don’t like using SVN.

Most of the links to packages are available at the old address http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/download. Mandriva’s package is in cooker.

Cheerio, and thanks for all the fish (help). :)

p.s. Some of you have had some problems with the Parts applet. I’m not sure yet what is causing it, but will investigate it.

_… I’m afraid when I’m in this idiom, I sometimes get a bit, uh, sort of carried away.

Sir Lancelot, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

If you’ve been watching the SVN logs, you might have noticed the tagging of the Lancelot 1.0. And now it is official!

Introduction

Lancelot is an alternative menu, or application launcher interface, for KDE 4.x series. If Kickoff or KMenu don’t fit you, feel free to try it. Lancelot provides a quick access to the most used applications, to your devices, contacts etc. in a familiar yet refreshing way.

1.0 Release highlights

• Optional no-click interface which allows you to navigate through the menu and perform any action in it without making a single click.
• The layout of the menu adapts so that most used parts are always closer to the mouse cursor.
• Advanced search capabilities. Thanks to KRunner integration, you can search not only your applications, but also contacts, bookmarks and many more (even a calculator is included).
• You can place parts of the menu directly onto the desktop or your panel for quicker access.

Documentation/Usage manual

Although the documentation is not finished, the basic usage section is. You can reach it at lancelot.fomentgroup.org/docs

Some statistics

I thought it would be interesting to compare the sizes of Plasma and Lancelot since the later is based on the former.

The first is the line-count of all source files (only .cpp for C++ and .py for Python are included)

liblancelot 5916
lancelot    4482
puck        1470
----------------
total      11868 lines

libplasma  21903
plasma     33611
----------------
total      55514 lines

So Lancelot is one fifth of Plasma. Not bad :)

Thanks

I would just like to thank all of you who have tested Lancelot in the past, all of you who are making distribution packages, all of you who provided feedback and all of you I forgot to mention in the first part of this sentence.

Disclaimer

Only 3 pixels, and 5 lines of code were harmed during the making of this project.

p.s. If the popularity of this blog could be measured by the SPAM messages it receives, I have to say that approaching the 1.0 version was a real traffic drawer :)

Well, after today, I really will not add any features to the 4.1 branch. I know I said this before, but this time I really mean it! This is now a hard feature freeze.

What does this mean?

This means that from now on only bugfixes will be introduced, but Lancelot will look and behave the same as it does at the moment of writing. There are a couple of things in line for fixing (for example a bit more polished click-on-the-button-close-the-menu). So, you can consider it as a Release Candidate 1.

This also implies that the trunk version is now where all future and feature development will occur. (BTW, I’ve got some great news concerning Kopete’s D-Bus) So, in a sense, this marks the beginning of the era of Lancelot 2.0 development. Bugfixes will obviously be shared between the 4.1 branch and the trunk (for a specified period of time), but that will be all.

What’s new since M4?

The latest addition is the ability to drag the items from the application browser. Now you can drag the applications to the desktop to make icons of them, you can drag application categories to show them as folderviews etc.

You can drag them from the lists, but from the breadcrumb bar as well. If you drag the Favourite applications from the breadcrumb bar, it will be shown as a Lancelot part.

One side-effect of having all that is that now, if you want, you could show a folder in a Lancelot Part instead of FolderView. It is not meant to replace the FolderView, since it lacks any file manager functions, but if you just want to create a launcher with a custom set of applications, Lancelot Part is a perfect solution.

p.s. If you drag an application category to the desktop but you only see a list of directories (or subcategories) and not the applications, it’s not my fault, but a fault of applications:/ KIO service.

I’ve had a feeling that a long period of time has passed since I made a screencast of anything. It turned out that the last one was made more than a year ago.

So, I decided to make a screencast of Lancelot… it beats writing user documentation every time :) enjoy:

The main reason for the cast was the fact that the Parts applet is not that intuitive to use (if you don’t see what you can do with it). And if you’re asking how I know that most of you haven’t tested the Parts applet, then the answer is simple - there are no bug reports on it, while it is the most unstable part of Lancelot.

EDIT: Here you are - the direct download http://www.sendspace.com/file/52jr89 8MB

Yes, this is the last milestone before the 1.0 release of Lancelot. This means that Lancelot now has all features the final version will have.

Configuration

The first thing you’ll notice new is a small Lancelot icon in the corner of the window

This is a door to the Lancelot’s configuration (one of the doors to be precise). When that button is activated, you get a menu with a couple of options.

The alternative to this menu is to right-click the launcher applet. It now provides access to menu’s configuration as well as its own.

I decided to keep the configuration dialogue minimal in this version since there is no need to configure mail and chat programs since only kmail and kopete are supported. And the same goes for office applications which point to OpenOffice, Gimp and Inkscape, at, least until the final version of KOffice 2 arrives.

Other news

Many things got polished, for example the breadcrumb, and a couple of bugs got squashed. You can see the active Lancelot related bugs here. Obviously, I tend to keep that list minimal at all times :)

One-oh

The 1.0 version is planned in the first half of September. Possibly followed by 1.0.1 bugfix release somewhere after 20th of September. That will most probably be the last Lancelot release for KDE 4.1.