so, what's all this you're seeing? well, there's the tiger svg applet written in javascript. then there's the digital clock and the twitter plasmoid. and finally a plasmoid that failed to load properly.
the js tiger is being run via the qtscript powered javascript ScriptEngine. ScriptEngine is plugin based so we can change up the scripting support pretty easily by just supplying different plugins. you could, for instance, create a kjs based ScriptEngine and use that instead of the qtscript based one. or create a python or ruby or lua or perl or ... whatever ... ScriptEngine. the plasmoids define what language they are written in and that determines which ScriptEngine plasma tries to grab. i'm not interested in non-qtscript ScriptEngines quite yet though as the ScriptEngine API is still new and i want to have a proven and tested API for scripts as well.
the tiger hasn't turned the standard background on, while the other two successfully launched plasmoids have. those borders and background are fully themeable using suitable svg. personally, i'm thinking we may want a thinner outer border by default; they look really nice but do take up quite some room. fortunately all it takes is playing around with the file in an image editor.
twitter shows how easy it is to bridge web services to the desktop (that lineedit lets you enter new entries, aka "tweets", to your microblog timeline).
what you can't see there are the animations, such as when you post a new tweet and the "syncing" label fades in and then back out. or when the time changes and the clock animates the number flipped "down" ala the real old school clocks. it's all subtle and so smooth.
what you also can't see is that layouting now works. the failed plasmoid is being circumvented by plasma and a (fairly useless at the moment ;) error message gets shown. eventually it'll be a nicer looking label (about 2 lines of code; damn i should just do it now) with slightly more information. but the point here is that the the geometry of all the label and applet are being managed by a dynamic layout. now that they are working i can start playing with the panel replacement.
so if all goes as it has been, i should be able to screen cast a panel and d'n'd installation of a js plasmoid package demo. suh-weet.
mosfet also poked his head up on kde-core-devel the other day. he's put together a little package of graphics utils that might be rather useful for 4.0. i'm hosting the tarball on plasma.kde.org for him right now, but will let him announce it. tune in to kde-core-devel tomorrow if you're interested.
and speaking of graphics gurus ... i'll be seeing zack and the rest of the norwegian trolls in about a week's time. i'm off to the trolltech offices for a (work) week of hacking and then its off to germany for a board meeting in darmstadt. i'm home for a day and then p. and i take off to my sister's place in washington state for two weeks, during which time i'll only be working 4 hours a day or so (in other words ... pretty much a vacation for me).
if you're in the oslo, darmstadt or seattle area and want to meet up for a visit i'm sure we could figure something out.
18 comments:
I realize that Plasma makes your desktop of great use rather than displaying a nice and stupid wallpaper. One can actually do a lot of stuff on the desktop itself.
However, I rarely get to see my desktop as a few application are always open. Will there be way to access plasma widgets easily?
A few days ago, in a local store i saw a demo of Mac (? which version i don't know. I saw a mac for the first time). When u click the small button in the middle, all desktop widgets show up on top of open applications. Will there be something like this in KDE4?
@anonymous: i'll answer this question in a blog entry tomorrow. i've answered it a few times in the comments on past entries, but i get the question so i often i'm just going to devote an entry to it tomorrow.
In the last screencast I watched, you showed a weather data engine, but no plasmoid. Do you know if there will be a LiquidWeather++ for plasma? That's the one widget that makes me run SuperKaramba all the time. I did a quick look on their site and didn't see any such news. I probably should ask them, but I thought you may have some insider knowledge (you usually do). Thanks.
@anonymous mark II: yes, there will be a weather plasmoid. the engine is being finished first and we're waiting for a couple more advanced applet related features at the moment.
what's really nice is that with the weather engine it become trivial to create new weather front ends. so i expect to see a good number of such designs.
remember how many system monitor thingies their were for SK? that's because the data was easy to aquire via the SK lib. same thing will be possible for any of the data engines, inc weather.
the one that ships with plasma by default should rather pretty from what i've seen of the design thus far. a real step up =)
oh, i should also note that the SK LiquidWeather widget already runs on plasma as well.
Anonymous: From what I understad, Plasma will be everywhere you want it to be. It will be in your panel, sliding in, popping over, rolling over your screen and in other apps (read: amarok).
And I probably missed some places. So don't worry, I think you will see the applets more than often enough;)
I'm not sure I'm going to get bored yet. And with the speed you guys update the screenshots it will take a while...
I was just wondering will there be such default options like 'stay on top' for one widget?
When I use transparent frames around windows I noticed that these windows somehow do not distinguish themselves from their background because one can actually read through the transparency. Normally if you look at object those behind it do not have the same focus.
Does anyone else think that it might be a good idea to blur things that are shown through transparency and thereby giving windows with a transparent frame a visual border back that makes it more obvious for the eyes what is in front and what is not?
@Sven: assuming you are talking about window composition, the blur-on-translucency plugin is already in svn for kwin 4.0
Looks awesome, can't wait to see what the panel will be like :)
Is each plasmoid a seperate window that's taken care of by kwin? Or is it all handled by the plasma library itself?
Mosfet? _That_ mosfet? When you say a blast from the past... :)
@anonymous: no, applets are handled completely by Plasma not the window manager. the WM only steps in when we need to do things like compositing multiple windows. we will be using that for panel translucency, just as we do with krunner's window.
@bluescarni: yes, that mosfet =)
Looks nice, I really dislike those ugly fat borders though ...
Well, I really like those "ugly fat" borders!! Maybe their size should be dependent on screen resolution (I'm running 1920x1080 so they don't even look fat here)...
Actually I meant the default border of plasmoids.
@Sven: ah.. yes, i actually have code that does that, but it relies on currently private API in Qt. the result is really quite nice (as you'd expect from such a thing for the reasons you note) but .. private API =(
i'm going to look at our options when i'm in Oslo and can pick the brains of the Arthur guys in person =)
Please leave the border to the compositor. Please. It's the only way to make window management consistently themeable across desktops.
And keep the shots coming, Aaron!
louis: Yes, there will be an applet for the engine. I'm still busy making more backends for weather sources until the Applet api settles down.
- Shawn Starr.
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