During my blogging hiatus (blogatus?) there's been the usual frenetic pace of Plasma development.
There are a few new plasmoids in kdereview now, including an input method plasmoid. This will be the first time KDE has shipped with an input method widget; up until now they were always distro provided add ons and that resulted in a lot of duplicated effort and spotty results. KIMPanel (for "KDE Input Method Panel") can be run as a widgets on the desktop, in the panel or as a stand alone application. Major props to Wang Hoi for making this happen.
There's also a cute new system status plasmoid that shows system activity in the form of bubbling goo. Neat. The refactored device notifier is just about ready to go into kdebase as well.
The new system tray protocol stuff is moving along really nicely thanks to Marco's usual heroic efforts, and the Enlightenment 17 people have expressed interest in it as well as they face similar challenges with the current system tray protocol due to also being a modern, canvas-based desktop shell.
Job notifications now show file and directory stats, extenders can be grouped for stacking/collapsing (really handy for things like notifications), notifications show icons properly again, clocks can speak the time, Aike's been backporting multi-screen fixes, Wilder's been backporting krunner fixes, Davide has been puttering about the code base despite getting essentially mugged on a bus last week, Chani's been working on actions and toolboxes ... it's been relatively busy around the Plasma house. :)
Today I committed a few other things, as well.
First is the ability for runners, those plugins for KRunner and other things that want to provide query->result type workflows, to register their syntax. KRunner gained a new button that, when clicked, lists all the known commands and syntax patterns. They are displayed as search returns, and if you select one of them the syntax is placed into the search box. The edit caret is even in the right place, e.g. before the '=' for the calculator. I've only modified the runners in kdebase to register their syntax, but kdeplasma-addons will follow.
KRunner itself now shows results in a vertical list with items taking the width of the window. There's a bunch more work to do there to make it pretty, including adding some nice little animations, and there is now room for action buttons. The action buttons will allow us to show "other" actions besides the primary one, for instance to remove a file from the Recent Documents, to send a file by email or to configure the user to run a command as (ala minicli in KDE3).
Finally, I also committed a change to the Plasma desktop shell such that when the desktop toolbox is clicked, the desktop is cleared of windows using the "show desktop" functionality. When the toolbox is closed, the windows come back. This is rather convenient when doing stuff with the desktop and you don't want to pull the dashboard forward or the dashboard is viewing a different containment.
Besides the usual flow of new patch contributors, there have been lots of really great Google Summer of Code proposals making their way to the plasma-devel@ list as well. So while the "old hands" have been busy plonking away on all sorts of things to make 4.3 a fun, useful and impressive release, it looks like we'll have lots of new blood to help make 4.4 even better than that. :)
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8 comments:
>> KRunner itself now shows results in a vertical list with items taking the width of the window
Halleluja! That's what I suggested way back, just before Krunner was even announced. I always thought it was completely bizarre to have this icon view where most matches didn't have enough space for the match name and were faded out.
Now krunner will be actually useful with more than one match. Rockin.
Any news about the glitches of KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5? ;)
IMO the dbus spec for systray needs a lot of love. Many of the method are actually properties, enums are evil when using dbus I would suggest using string for this since it helps a lot when debugging and finally there is a lot of places where dictionaries (a{sv}) could have been used (icon/image) since they are easy to extend.
@Rafa: things seem to generally be working alright at this point, though still no guarantees. we aren't seeing new/unresolved Qt 4.5 related bug reports at this point, though, so that's probably a decent sign.
KDE 4.3 (svn trunk) is working just fine with Qt 4.5 of course ...
@Vudentz: please send feedback to panel-devel@kde.org; it's a brand new bit of work and i'm sure there's lots of things that could be improved in it. i'm not sure Marco reads my blog comments, so you won't be reaching everyone by talking about it here :)
"Many of the method are actually properties,"
yes; that file may have been autogen'd from a c++ file; i'll have to take a look.
"enums are evil when using dbus I would suggest using string for this since it helps a lot when debugging"
there are enums being used for status and category; yes, those could pretty easily be changed to strings. either way, this really should be hidden behind an API making it a bit of a moot point.
"and finally there is a lot of places where dictionaries (a{sv}) could have been used (icon/image) since they are easy to extend."
which would beg the question of "what would we want to extend and why?" obviously we can't foresee the future with perfect clarity, but we try not to make things flexible in the API just because we can.
if there is reasonable expectation of the possible requirement of extension where using a dictionary would be more sensible, provide some use cases :)
It would be cool if there was a standard method that allowed for the developer to create a progress bar somewhere over the icon when a certain application is performing an action. This allows the user to just look at the icon without refocusing into the app to see the progress of the given action.
I don't think this is a standard OS X feature, but I've seen it on Toast - CD writer software.
Something similar to this:
Dock Progress Indicator
@Vudentz: Many of the method are actually properties, enums are evil when using dbus I would suggest using string
done and done :p
dictionaries (a{sv}) could have been used (icon/image)
hmm if i understand correctly it would have made the thing more flexible but also less definite?
i.e having all the available icons possibilities deined in the interface itself could avoid more than different implementations will extend the thing with icons not supported by the common spec, or at least it would ake mre obvious when someone do.
Nice to seem KDE improving.:)
But when I compare the evolvements form 4.1 to 4.2 regarding new key features, I have the impression that 4.3 will feel like a solid update of an already reliable 4.2. I thought every release would be a huge Step forward, and an absolute improvement to the former release. That is not a critic, though;)
What I am personally interested in is a new Add Plasoid-dialogue in 4.3. The old one does not fit everydays usage scenarios anymore, I think. Too few Plasmoids displayed, and optical hardly fitting in plasma.
However, More important would be a new panel layout. We still use the (in general) old KDE3 and Windows one. What about new approaches of placing the Menu, the taskbar and the systray? I guess there is room for improvement;)
And maybe a merge of quicklaunch, systray and tasks would be nice, like a dock.
And I will praise the day when Krunner uses nepomuk and strigi and akonadi and what not. So I can just type "find file jondoe.jpg" and I appears instantly. But rumors say that is coming.
Although I point out several wishes I appreciate the improvements in plasma in 4.3, especially speed because of QT4.5, the new Air-Theme, The notifiers etc.
Any idea where I can get details on how to configure Kimpanel in KDE?
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