KDE Commit-Digest for 10th August 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma support for Google Gadgets moves into kdebase. "Places" engine gets service support, and a new "Leave Message" Plasmoid for use with the Plasmoids-on-Screensaver project. More work on the "Weather" Plasmoid and "grouping taskbar", and an initial version of a menu applet for small form-factors, and a new applet to visualise the size of an IceCream compilation cluster. Work on the URL and breadcrumb navigator, and the "capacity bar" in Dolphin. A new "Sphere" effect in kwin-composite. More work on biased playlists, AFT, and a toolbox menu as a replacement for the applet browser in Amarok 2.0. A "fully working" Twitter plugin in Marble. Synonym and antonym modes working in Parley. More work on handling RAW images in Digikam. Various developments in KPilot, and keyboard shortcuts, colour scheme, and "export to HTML" work in the MessageListView project in KMail. Beginnings of master pages support in KWord. Initial import of KDisplay and kio_bookmarks. Kreative3d renamed to SolidKreator. Konversation 1.1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.

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Comments

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

that kio_bookmarks story was awesome; it brings back memories of cutting my own teeth on kde code. thanks for highlighting this one, Danny, and thank you Xavier for the cool kio plugin!

as for Diego noting that "Plasma needs a layout manager that knows about right-to-left issues." that's actually a problem in Qt itself; the layouts are supposed to be aware of the direction, but they aren't. it's missing a few lines of code in the QGraphicsLayout classes to make this happen. so this problem really ought to be addressed in Qt (if it isn't already; i need to look again in the 4.5 branch) because it will affect all apps using QGraphicsLayout. fixing it with extra code in Plasma really isn't enough here.

anyways ... cheers on another commit digest, Danny. your rate of output this last month has been insanely impressive, and massively appreciated =)

by boudewijn rempt (not verified)

You know, I've been absent-mindedly typing bookmarks:/ in the minicli for years and I always vaguely wondered why nothing seemed to happen :-).

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

Yay! So can we now bookmark bookmarks? ;)

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

Heh, yeah you can.
But if you click on your bookmark to bookmarks:/ all the items in the places pane disappear...

by Xavier Vello (not verified)

Hello

I can't reproduce that bug. Can you please mail me a detailed way to reproduce it ?
By the way, any feedback (especially bad ones) and suggestions are welcome.

by NabLa (not verified)

Is the kioslave for bluetooth part of the KDE project or is it something separate? If it is part of KDE, have you got any idea of whether is going to be ported to KDE4 anytime soon? The only way I can think of accessing, say, my phone from within KDE4 is, well, using Konqueror 3. Bit of a inconvenience but at least it works, although it's the only KDE3 program I still keep using (save Amarok and k3b, that is).

by Borker (not verified)

can't keep up with speed of digests...

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

You're almost caught up. :) Thanks for all you do.

..and wow, less than one month into 4.2 development I'm already excited/impatient for the next release.

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

In KDE3, on every textbox, when the line was getting started with a RTL character, it was going RTL.but now the only places i have RTL is Kate and KOffice.casual text boxes do not have rtl support at all for me.I filled a bug report in Qt and the answer was that in Qt4 i should set a config file to set a 'shortcut' for RTL'ing lines, just like windows.I think KDE/Qt 3's RTL support was much better with automatically going RTL.

by Ian (not verified)

get him coding - all the bugs will be killed in a month.... :o)

Thanks Danny and what are you taking??? We all need some....

by Oscar (not verified)

Is it possible to write plasmoids in something other than C++? Are there any guides availible? I only seem to find one for C++ on kde.org.

This is where I'm looking.
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials#Plasma

Should I look elsewhere?

by Richard Dale (not verified)

For me, writing up a guide on how write C# and Ruby script engine based applets is a top priority, as I think a lot of people are interested in writing non-C++ plasmoids that can be downloaded from the internet.

The KDE svn trunk has a number of fixes for the Ruby and C# bindings that will be promoted to the 4.1.1 branch before that is released. In the meantime if you read here for a description of the basics:

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3560

And you can build the Ruby and C# bindings in the KDE trunk, and don't mind asking on places like #kdebindings or #plasma on irc, or the [email protected] mailing list it is possible to develop now.

by Oscar (not verified)

Thanks. I've had a quick look at your page and it looks like something I can use. Are there other "script engines" other than C# and Ruby availible? I know mostly Perl/Python myself.

by Seconded (not verified)

I must second this! Python has a big user base, maybe Richard could include it in his guide?

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

The problem isn't the lack of a guide. The python kross engine wasn't ready in time for 4.1 and is broken. :(

by Simon Edwards (not verified)

Python support for Plasma is being worked on for KDE 4.2.

--
Simon

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

and just for completeness ... the idea of ECMAScript (aka 'javascript') plasmoids is not only still on the table but will likely becomes one of the most useful (as is "can be used in the widest variety of settings") sets of bindings due to the overhead/performance and benefits that will come as we lay in the security framework for them.

by gttt (not verified)

If you are german, you might be interested in the current linux-magazin issue.

http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2008/09/

I did not take a look into it, but they have a howto-dev-plasma article in there.

by gttt (not verified)

Wouldn't it be good to have the kio_bookmark functionality (which really looks nice btw) as a plasmoid as well? You could place it on the desktop.

If konqueror was able to contain plasmoids on a startup-plasma-container as startpage, you could include the bookmarks-plasmoid there, too. Or in amarok or elsewhere. Maybe you could place amarok-plasmoids in the startup-plasma-container of konqueror, too? Hmm, just thinking loudly.

by Vide (not verified)

actually, if you read the commit, it's alredy planned by the kio_bookmark author.

by gttt (not verified)

Oh, indeed, actually I have missed this. Thanks :)