Kao što već znate, imaćete za nekoliko meseci moj kod (doduše
kompajliran) na svojim računarima… bar oni koji koriste KDE.
Ono šta je interesantno je to da će ‘na mala vrata’ da udje i u
Amaork 2. Pošto će Amarok 2 koristiti Plazmu (ono fensi sto KDE4 koristi
za desktop), koristiće i moj ljubljeni PAB koji bi trebalo da ubacim u
libplasma za koji dan. Heh, vest dobrodošla za moj već prenatrpani CV.
:)
and I’m curious about your “Lancelot”… nice name btw, and smart
pun for a french speaker (”lance” can be translated by “launch”)
^^“
Well, the name occurred to me when I made a superkaramba applet for
myself (never have published it) for faster launching of my favorite
apps. Lancelot - as launching-lot (lot as in
parking-lot). And I have used the name Sir Lancelot sometimes as my
alias (and yes, I’m a Monty Python fan).
Since then, Lancelot have changed. Mainly because of one of the
commit-digests, due to which people thought Lancelot to be a kmenu
replacement like Kickoff and Raptor. It was not
intended to be anything of the sort.
The main idea that was guiding me was to create a simple application
launcher (and nothing more than that) that would have a
no-click (Absolutely No Click Needed At AllTM) interface.
Commit digest just gave me the wings. Things have changed - instead
of making a simple Plasmoid, I started a separate application that uses
libplasma for implementation (similar to what Amarok team is doing) that
is going to have all needed features for an ALI.
The thing is that majority of users adore kickoff, while I hate it. I
like the general idea behind it, but IMHO the layout is a bit wrong,
categories too, and the non-favorite application browsing is painful. I
wanted to address these issues in my own particular … (idiom sir?) … yes
idiom.
Lancelot is, at the moment, only my experiment with which I want to
achieve a couple of things:
Testing area for more complex no-click user interfaces
Development incubator for Plasma (FileBrowser, KioBrowser,
BorderLayout were backported from Lancelot to Plasma)
Possibility of having Plasmoids in an ALI - customizable ALI
KRunner in the ALI
Having an alternative if I don’t like the default ALI for KDE 4.0
(yes I’m being a bit selfish :) )
Well, that’s all clarification that I’ll give at the moment - no
mockups nor screenshots yet - as I’ve said “no spoilers”.
p.s. If there are people who like when KDE applications have K in
their name, you can call it Knight Lancelot :) *[ALI]:
Application Launching Interface
While waiting for Aaron (it’s hard to write his name properly instead
of AAron, isn’t it?) to give me the instructions for merging the Applet
Browser into the libplasma, I had to do something interesting to keep me
warm.
The first thing is that the FileBrowser engine is
moved from playground to the plasma’s trunk. If you don’t remember, the
engine gives you the ability to monitor files and directories for
changes, to retrieve file meta data etc. and all of that from inside the
Plasma applets.
The second thing is a new Plasma layout named
BorderLayout. It is inspired by the Java’s
java.awt.BorderLayout. I needed something like this for my
not-yet-to-be-revealed-launcher Lancelot. It can contain up to 5 items -
one for each border (left, top, right, bottom) and one for the center.
Since it is easier to show it, than to describe the actual layout, here
it is:
Top
Left
Center
Right
Bottom
The sizes of the borders (width for left and right, and height for
top and bottom) can be calculated using the sizeHint of the items
(default), or can be user-specified (developer-specified).
And, finally, the last thing that is not in the SVN yet is the
KioBrowser engine, which retreives list of ‘files’ at a
specific KIO location (for example applications:/, system:/)
p.s. The OpenID+ plug-in has some fatal error while activating, and I
don’t have the time to fix that - so no openID identification on this
blog yet…
Well, first of all, I’ve moved my blog away from Blogger to my own
domain powered by the all-mighty WordPress. The first step was to make
it look unique an pretty - so a new WP theme was born.
Then I thought of what would be fit to celebrate the moving, and it
just occurred to me - why not make a Plasma theme that will be based on
this blog design? Making a Plasma theme is surprisingly easy job so I
encourage you all to give it a try.
The only obstacle I had, was that the painting of the borders was
done by repeating the border pattern, and I needed my borders to be
stretched. So, after a small patch to the Plasma’s background painting
routine, Plasma now has the ability to paint both pattern (default
option) and stretched background borders. The only thing you need to do
if you want your borders to be stretched is to create an object in the
SVG file called “hint-stretch-borders”.
Here’s a obligatory screenshot of a couple of more prominent widgets
using the new theme.
My Plasma Theme Screenshot
P.S. One thing more about the new blog is that for validating user
comments I’ve activated the reCAPTCHA system that helps in digitalizing
books by giving you (people that make the comments) words that the OCR
can not understand
Published
in the Other section,
on 9 September 2007
Za one koji ne znaju, captcha je sistem za
proveravanje da li je posetilac vašeg sajta čovek ili bot. reCAPTCHA ima
istu tu ideju, ali uz mali dodatak - pomaže pri digitalizaciji knjiga
tako što posetiocu daje reči koje OCR program nije u stanju da
prepozna.
Možete videti kako izgleda i ovde, na mom blogu - pojavljuje se pri
slanju komentara.
