baby steps to 3.4

haven't blogged in a while .. i got busy for a couple days and then i got the flu, which i'm only now pulling out of .. didn't really feel like blogging while flu-ish.

i have a new neighbour moving into the little apartment/suite behind the house next month. i met her for the first time tonight, and i think things will be well. she's a pierced post-modern hippy lookin' type that has a really nice calm energy about her. this is good, as we'll be sharing laundry facilities in the basement and it's common knowledge that one doesn't want to share laundry facilities with someone you don't get on with. i wonder if she's a vegetarian ....

.... a vegetarian restaurant, only the second one in Calgary, openned this week just 2 blocks from my house. suh-weet!

Peyton was in his first school production this past Friday, the Winter Concert. i was feeling really rough but there was no way i was missing it. how could i? it was an odd feeling to be one of the parents at the school function. very odd, but fulfilling and satisfying too. Peyton did great, singing and dancing his heart out in the three songs his class did. during the tea afterwards the teachers told Mahlah and myself that they'd like to move Peyton up into the kindergarten class in January as it would be more interesting and challenging for him. he turns 5 in May so it's not like he isn't old enough.

i mean, he's already helping me with KDE hacking ;-)

speaking of which, i've got panel-to-panel dragging working, thanks in part to a proof of concept QDragObject Stephen Depooter (sbdep) sent me. i told him a week or so ago on irc that if he did the dragobject that i'd do the rest. well, he came through so i had to as well. you can now drag buttons from one panel to another. huzzah. applets aren't draggable yet, but the new drag object moves Containers around which means it's ready for applets once they get around to dragging state.

i also discovered the wonders of KMultipleDrag, which allows one to attach multiple QDragObjects to a single drag event, making drags that might be any one of a number of types very easy to implement. thanks to dfaure for pointing it out to me!

the initial draft of the panel stacking code is in CVS (though still very buggy), moving a panel from one edge to another is now acceptably fast and i discovered why the panel wasn't initializing for some people. so, baby steps towards release readiness. at this point that's what i'm starting to go after. and that's where the bad news starts.

i haven't seen wicky around for a few weeks and i'm getting concerned i'll be left to debug the new layout code on my own. not a big deal, it just means more on my plate. and i've yet to see the finished patch for the mouse over effects for kicker, which makes me a bit nervous that i'll end up spending a sleepless night or three doing it myself. so ends the feature additions, then, and it's on with the bug fixing. top and left panels still don't draw borders correctly, and the ends of panels need to be capped as well. there are numerous geometry issues and the stacking code isn't as intelligent as it yet needs to be. inserting new items on a panel also leaves much to be desired. it's going to probably take me the better part of a month to root all these issues out to satisfaction. =/

in greener news, Kévin Ottens announced a couple of new ioslaves aimed at making the desktop a better place: system:/ and remote:/. the former is a jumping point to various ioslave-delivered locations in your system, the latter for easily making and finding connections to remote resources. i really hope these make it in for 3.4, so much so that i'm even going to stop bugging Kévin about making the Trash applet a menuext (well, at least for a day or two ;)

between trash:/, system:/, remote:/ and a bevy of general improvements around KDE 3.4 is going to be a cool release; a parting kiss from the KDE development team before departing for the longer journey towards KDE4, if you will.