Although my intention was not to make the Contacts section for 4.1
(that is to disable it) and to wait for Telepathy and Akonadi to be
integrated into KDE PIM, I just couldn’t wait.
Kopete contacts
Lancelot now shows on-line contacts from Kopete, altogether with
contact pictures. Unfortunately, the D-Bus interface to Kopete is
underpowered so the list updating is pooling-based. Alternative would be
to make a Lancelot plug-in for Kopete, but that will have to wait for
post-4.1 period (if the need for that remains).
No other IM applications are going to be supported for the time
being. I intend to make the IM connections pluggable… but it will not be
done for 4.1.
The next step will be to populate the left side of the window with
e-mail related stuff such as unread messages from KMail.
Well, I confess that I could be called lazy and all, since there is
not that much visible progress in Lancelot’s world. But I have a couple
of excuses:
Exams. Unfortunately, I have obligations beside
KDE, Plasma and Lancelot. If somebody would like to pay me to do KDE
work, I would gladly accept. :)
Plasma breakage. As you probably know, Plasma went
through API review and conversion to WoC. So, that had to be done for
Lancelot as well. And it was quite painful since Lancelot is based on
completely custom-made widgets (now in a separate
liblancelot library).
So, enough complaining and excuses, Lancelot is now again in
buildable state, and more importantly, in a screenshottable state:
Lancelot WoC
(the wallpaper atm is from NetBeans projet’s website).
The news include:
PUCK: Improvements to PUCK (Plasma UI Compiler) which now has an
automatic module generator for custom classes. It parses the class
definition and generates Python modules for PUCK (most Lancelot modules
for PUCK are generated using this).
libLancelot: The backgrounds for all widgets are based on
SvgPanel.
Lancelot launcher applet: The main applet is rewritten, and it has a
few glitches at the moment. The configuration is now complying with the
new Plasma’s configuration framework.
Lancelot menu: Have I mentioned that it is screenshottable? Nothing
more than that ATM.
I was a bit jealous when I saw the
Raptor menu’s site, so I decided that Lancelot needed one too. While
compiling the latest KDE (and Plasma) from SVN I had nothing better to
do than web design. The result
is available right here. It is not finished yet - documentation and
screenshots are missing, but I intend to make it more comprehensive in
the future - along with the new developments in the world of L. So to
repeat, the address of the site is http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org
The split
The latest development before the Big Plasma Breakage (or as some
call it ‘the transition to Widgets on Canvas’) was that the Lancelot is
now divided into two main parts - the application and applets on one
side, and the liblancelot library on the other. The library contains the
base framework including advanced Plasma widgets and layouts. It is in a
very experimental state at the moment, and it is not advised for anyone
to use it outside of Lancelot. The API compatibility is being broken
every week at the moment, but at some point it will stabilise (sometime
around KDE 4.2 or 4.3).
WoC
Plasma is becoming stable enough (API-wise) and now it is Lancelot’s
turn to reach the Big Breakage. Or to be more precise, it currently is
in it’s Big Brekage state, but needs to get out of it. Since there are
quite a few things that need to be changed, I have decided to do a bit
more, so a couple of old widgets are being reimplemented from scratch to
be more flexible and reusable (most notable example is that the old list
widget is being split into ScrollBar, ScrollPane and List).
That’s all for now, I’ll ping you all again when the library becomes
compilable in all its glory.
Ovde
imate članak o KDE 4.0 koji je izašao sa mesec dana zakašnjenja, i sa
nekoliko što gramatičkih. što semantičkih grešaka napravljenih od strane
lektora. (Original nema te greške, i to mogu da dokažem :)
)
Plasma now supports different looks for panels depending on the
screen edge where the panel is located. You can find more details about
how to make this kind of themes at
KDE’s Techbase. Basically if you want to create a custom look for a
left panel, just create all background elements for it and add prefix
‘west-’ to the name of every element. (east for right, north for top and
south for bottom panel).
If you don’t want to name all the elements yourself, you could always
use the Slim
Glow theme as a base template since it uses this new feature of
Plasma.
