Plasmate 1.0

As you may have read on The Dot, we released Plasmate 1.0 today. I'll just quote from article to give you an idea of what it is:

Plasmate follows the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well". As such, it is not a general purpose IDE but rather a tool specifically tailored to creating Plasma Workspace add-ons using non-compiled languages such as QML and Javascript. It guides each step in the process, simplifying and speeding up project creation, development, adding new assets, testing and publishing. The goal of Plasmate is to enable creating something new in seconds and publishing it immediately.

 We have been pushing at this bit of code for more years than I care to admit. I seem to recall hacking on the package model class at the Tokamak in Porto in early 2009. 46 different people have made commits to it over its life time, and it finally all came together.

We have Giorgos and Antonis Tsiapaliokas to thank for getting this bad boy finally out the door, however. They have toiled and tended the code base for a while now with one goal in mind: release .. and they finally reached that point.

So why another IDE? Simple put: because it isn't another IDE. From the start page through to the publisher, it is a "get out of your way" interface that is entirely workflow driven. You will not write the next great C++ application with it, this is quite true, but that's not its purpose. Everything that makes a great IDE like KDevelop or QtCreator "too much" when trying to make a Plasmoid or a KWin script is exactly why we made Plasmate.

You don't have to worry about package structure, or external previewers, or revision control, or how to import a Plasmoid from the online KDE Apps catalog ... it's all right there for you.

Super neat tidbit: you can write KWin desktop effects in Javascript with Plasmate too .. that's right, twiddle your windows by pushing hardware accelerated code around with Javascript. Yay! :)