Tuesday, May 22, 2007

plasma engine explorer

here's the result of my work today:


Engine Explorer


in a nutshell this gives those developing a Plasma::DataEngines the ability to see what is being published, and people developing plasmoids can see what they can connect to. the code can be found in kdebase/workspace/plasma/engineexplorer/. the binary name is plasmaengineexplorer so as to not run into all the other engineexplorer executables out there ;)

it's not a perfect user interface by any means, but it works. and it started by hacking a bit in kdelibs. and being monday that meant compiling kdelibs several times ;)

you can also see Urs Wolfer's neat new KTitleWidget at the top. that little guy was being used quite a bit in kde4 and it became apparent that it was going to be a nightmare if we ever decided to change how it looked. so Urs whipped up a little class to do the magic. besides being used in KPageWidget, i'm already using it in krunner and the engine explorer.

5 comments:

dhaumann said...

KTitleWidget is a really good idea, I should have done that in the first place when I changed the appearance ;) Much cleaner code now - thanks.

Anonymous said...

Are the "values" refreshed in real-time ?

Anonymous said...

Isn't the KTitleWidget somewhat redundant to the window caption?

Aaron J. Seigo said...

@dhaumann: it's a great example of everyone working together to make something good better, and then that better thing better yet! =)

@anonymous #1: yes, the values are refreshed in real time

@anonymous #2: yea, it's a little redundant. but i plan to use it as a slightly prettier status bar kind of thing showing what you are currently viewing, etc.

also, it's purdy and makes the window less boring =) given that the ui of the window is so small, the extra space it uses is ok.

Alex Merry said...

I showed the KDE4 desktop (with plasma) to one of my friends today. He was very impressed at how it looked, even though it's still obviously a way from completion.