kicker mellows; krita heats up

fixed a couple of bugs today and a few more yesterday in kicker 3.5, many around the new-in-3.5 "lock panels" feature though some (such as the "don't show kicker tips if there's an app in fullscreen mode) are just usual polishing type fixes.

anyways .. locking. if you haven't noticed it, there's a new entry in the panel context menu which is available by right clicking on a clear area of the panel, on a button or on an applet handle.

when "lock panels" is selected, you can't accidently move buttons, applet handles disappear, context menus shrivel up ... this (admittedly inspired by MS Windows) feature was really easy to add since kiosk support was improved in 3.5 fairly dramatically. you can now lock down individual buttons, applets, panels, menus, etc... so turning on "lock panels" simply activates kiosk controls at run-time.

unfortunately this was a bit of a "blunt instrument to the head" approach as it meant you couldn't drag objects out of the kmenu onto the desktop (one of the kiosk controls), right click menus on kmenu entries disappeared (instead of just shrinking to remove "add to panel") or drag new items onto panels if it started in locked mode and then you unlocked it .. you get the idea. it seems the "lock panels" feature is fairly popular because just about any possible screw up with them was reported in the last few weeks. which is great, i really appreciate the time taken to provide feedback.

and now because of those reports things work much more smoothly as the panels now differentiate between being locked via "lock panels" and via kiosk in certain key areas. it still uses the kiosk framework for everything, which really shows the flexibility of it.

something i've been toying with is the idea of making the arrows that are added to buttons that show menus when clicked shown on mouse hover or when the associated menu is being shown only. obviously the arrows need to be there as they are a nice visual cue that it's a menu not a launcher, letting one know what will happen when clicked on. but do they need to be there all the time? i dunno...



the idea came when playing around with some button stuff for plasma, and at first i thought it was a really bad idea. so i tried it out on my local build of kicker so i could get a feel for it. and i kind of like it =) it makes the panel less busy, doesn't screw with the icons as much and still reminds me which buttons are menus when i hover on them.

if you want to try it out, i've uploaded the patch which applies against 3.5. let me know what you think.

and meanwhile, whilst kicker is mellowing in its old age (no new features, just polish and stability) krita is positively searing hot when it comes to development. a quick glance in my svn commits folder in kontact showed some 400+ commits in just the last month or so. that's impressive!

and it seems to be having a nice positive effect user base wise as well. not only did krita appear on the linux questions 'member choice' awards in the graphics area for the first time it scored 8% of the votes! wow... this is obviously a simple reflection of it improving so rapidly and therefore getting more attention and usage. even this art profressor noted he'll be teaching krita next year (in addition to scribus, quanta plus, gimp and inkscape).

hats off to the krita team ... it's great to see the koffice motor really revving, of which this is but one example. harkens back to the days around kde2 when devel on the then-brand-new koffice was white hot as well.