new toolbox, another trip (Munich)

Hey, ho, another day, yo. (It had to be said. The day was not lame enough yet.)

So besides the new menu being just about ready to go, I'm nearly done with the new toolbox. It sits in the upper right corner as a translucent quarter circle with a little icon in it (right now I'm using the configure icon, but I want to replace it with the plasma icon once it's in Oxygen). When you mouse into the area it expands and a set of tools emerge from it (add widgets, zoom, etc) that you can then click on. When you are done, you mouse out and it slides back into the corner out of your way.

This encouraged me to add support for generic, as opposed to stock, animations in Phase which don't use Animator. This allows us to write little animations without having to use separate timers or timelines. Things also just look so much ... "together" when they are all animated on the same tick. So this is another win for power consumption as well as look 'n feel.

I'm also really happy with how the kickoff-inspired menu is coming together for 4.0. We've managed to keep things like mouse over activation of tabs while getting rid of the jumpiness of it (both real and perceived, both of which had a role to play). It could be even more Zackesqy, but we only have so much time before 4.0 and I've got to jump on other parts of things that are way below where they need to be (panels are minimal right now and krunner is still awaiting it's cosmetic surgery). I suppose that gives us stuff to work on for 4.1 ;)

Now, if you were hoping for screenshots: nope. =) Screenshots just aren't that interesting with these interfaces which really have to be experienced. Even the screencasts hardly do things justice as they are too jumpy; projectors ("beamers" to the Deutsch; I love that name for them =) don't do it justice either. Matt Rogers commented on how much nicer the fade out anim on the line edit clear button was when viewed on screen versus the projector I showed it on in Cali the other week due to the projector's refresh and clarity not being up to snuff.

Regardless, I do feel really bad about not having that screen cast together for you. Things have been busy this week trying to work on plasma while having a gaggle of meetings to also take care of. (Waking up with a fever that one day probably didn't help? =) We'll see if I get to it tomorrow morning, but that depends on how the house work goes as I have to have it all done (including being packed) by 16:15 in order to catch my flight to LHA on route to Munich where I'll be until Thursday. If it's any consolation, I've hardly dented the new Gibson book which shows just how crazy things have been.

If you're in the Munich area and would like to meet up for a visit, please get a hold of me. I'll be at the Trolltech Dev Days keynoting about KDE4 again. I've reworked my presentation from the Cali show to fit better into 40 minutes and hit some of the points I wished I had after having talked to some people afterwards. I understand that there will be nearly 500 people at this event, so this is a really nice opportunity to spread the word about cross platform development and what KDE4 is bringing to table in that regard.

Speaking of Munich, I took a quick look online to see what's going on in the city on the days I'm there and holy crap are there a lot of cultural events, like opera and "classical" music concerts, that happen there. At least compared to Calgary which, comparatively, has 80% of the population but probably only 5% of the culture. =)

I should also pop a shout-out to Marcel Gagne, fellow Canadian, F/OSS advocate extraordinaire, writer and all around nice guy, for having presented at the Ontario LinuxFest today about KDE4. I wish I'd been there to hang out a bit and meet one of the plasma devs (Shawn of the Weather) that showed up.

Anyways ...