There are two reasons for the “half” in the release name:
The first is that I made the requirements of M3 release (contacts
section) before making the parts applet more powerful
And the second is that the parts applet is now a very neat thingie,
but not completed yet.
Contacts section
The new contacts section contains unread mail list, and the list of
Kopete contacts you have seen before. The old code for Kopete
integration was lost, so it had to be rewritten.
Lancelot contacts
Since Kopete’s D-Bus interface still leaves much to be desired, the
list in Lancelot is not real time, but is based on polling at certain
intervals of time. Also, there is no way to retrieve whether the contact
is online, away or something. (fortunately there is a way to tell if it
is offline)
KMail is much better because it notifies Lancelot when new mail
arrives. It still has some polling, but it works much better than Kopete
contacts.
Parts applet
Although you still can not add the search box and application browser
to the desktop, Parts applet has been revamped. Now, you can place it in
the panel - it then behaves like the Device Notification applet.
Also, now is possible to add multiple lists to one applet which you
can see in the screenshot:
Lancelot parts
It somewhat resembles the currently developed (a Summer of Code
project) concept of Plasma’s Extenders (the most requested plasma
feature TM), but, obviously, works only on Lancelot’s items. With the
release of Extender-enabled Plasma (KDE 4.2 probably), you’ll see more
Lancelot Parts improvements.
Bug squashing
The last, but not the least important part is that a couple of bugs
were fixed. A few crashes related to KRunner integration (reported by
Sergey Sedlovsky) and a couple of wishlist/behaviour glitches are gone.
I have to thank Josh Rickmar for posting a couple of very pedantic bug
reports at BKO.
p.s. If the trunk version looks like it is broken, it is only because
of the theme - I’ll port the theme from 4.1 branch when it is
finished.
Well, I’m very glad to announce the release of M1 (milestone 1)
version of Lancelot. This is not a 1.0 version, but the significance is
that this is the first one meant for public use. This
also means that the “don’t file bugs, this is pre-alpha software” era is
now over. So from now on, bugs.kde.org is your friend.
M1 (the revision number
843716)
The menu is in a good shape, and is quite usable. The main feature
highlights are:
No-click application browser
Integrated KRunner
Parts of Lancelot on the desktop - drag a list section (Places,
Devices…) right onto the desktop
M*
Milestone releases regard only the KDE 4.1 branch of Lancelot
(although the trunk is developed in parallel). I’ve decided to make a
couple of them before 1.0:
M2: More powerful Parts applet. Ability to add the application
browser and search box to the desktop
M3: Contacts section. I have hoped that KDE 4.1 will bring full
switch to Akonadi and Decibel, but, since it didn’t happen, I’ll have to
use the d-bus interface to KMail and Kopete.
M4: The configuration interface for the menu (now only the launcher
applet can be configured)
1.0 (M5): The final polished version
The “one-oh” version will be the final version for KDE 4.1. After
that, only the trunk will be developed, and the versioning will return
to normal 1.x, 2.x… (most probably in sync with KDE releases)
I know that I’m being a bit boring, but I just had to write another
post. While everyone is writing about Akademy, unfortunately I am not
going this year and I have to focus my mind on something else (to avoid
jealousy). That is the main reason Lancelot has been improved this much
in the past week or so. :)
Today’s topic is the great return of the Parts applet. As you can see
in the screenshot, my desktop has two different lists from the Lancelot
menu - favourite applications and storage media.
Lancelot Parts
There isn’t a pleasant way of adding those to desktop yet (you would
need to edit the plasma-appletsrc file to get them), but soon it will be
a matter of Drag and Drop, or right click -> “Add to desktop”.
You get a three blogs in one since I’m to lazy to write them
separately:
Theme
First of all, just to say that I’ve started making a new theme that
would fit with the Plasma’s default. It is inspired by the proposed new
look for Kickoff (by Davide Bettio -
http://www.uninstall.it/kickoff_mockup.png). It looks like this at the
moment:
Lancelot 4.1
To be honest, I don’t like it, but it fits more with the default
Plasma theme. If there is anyone willing to modify it so that it looks
more, well, appealing, just mail me, and you’ll get all the help you
need :) This version will be in the SVN tomorrow (the 4.1 branch).
Categories versus one button
This comment by Beojan decided what will be the default: _ I object
to making “sections in panel” the default.
I think GNOME works with that method because they have a textual
description. If all you have are Icons, a new user would find it hard to
understand what each of the icons mean, so they would find a single
icon, where it is obvious that it launches the menu, with sections
inside,which have textual descriptions, easier than having seperate
icons for each section.
I have to agree with this - by making the categories shown in the
menu by default, the user gets the information of what categories exist.
Later, it could be changed to my preferred behaviour.
Compilation issues and
crashes.
I’m happy to announce that the compilation issues that were related
to Xlibs are now gone. I was linking the Parts applet with the
application, and then, it wanted to be linked to Xlibs that are not
needed for the applet. Side effect is that now the applet .so file is
much smaller.
In other news, the crashes that were occurring during the application
browsing are history. At least, I haven’t seen one in a while :) (if you
encounter one, please notify me)
Since there were a couple of reported problems related to L
installation, I decided to write a small how-to. The most peculiar thing
was that ‘make install’ didn’t install any binaries. Thanks to the help
of Jone Marius Vignes, the problem was hunted down and killed :)**
Prerequisites
Subversion client
Python >=2.5 (needed only at compile time)
Qt4 and KDE 4.1 or trunk development libraries (kdelibs and
libplasma)
Enter the directory that contains the source code (cd lancelot), and
do the following:
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix`
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
$ make && make install
If you plan to send me backtraces of crashes, install the
KDElibs, libplasma and Qt with debugging symbols, and replace ‘release’
in above script with ‘debugfull’.
Alternatively, if you have the KDE development environment set up
according to the
article on the Techbase, just enter the source directory and type
cmakekde
Almost there
Now just restart Plasma and add the Lancelot applet to the panel or
desktop, or wherever. If the menu doesn’t show up when you click the
applet, visit this link Lancelot
FAQ: Troubleshooting
