weekend updates

Thought I'd offer a few updates from the weekend, which I've taken pretty easily just because I can. =)

Applet Positioning on the Desktop

Ambroz has been working on a new QGraphicsLayout class for use in full screen containments that basically acts like an organized corral: when new widgets are added, it tries to find a place for them that doesn't overlap with other widgets and if you drag a widget out of the containment or screen by accident, it pulls it back in. It resolves several issues at once, such as being able to drag items out of the screen with the applet handle, size changes leaving widgets in outer space and being left with piles of widgets in one corner after double clicking a bunch of entries in the Add Widgets dialog.

This work was the result of a build of things on Ambroz' part. I first started noticing his patches in bugzilla, but soon he was on the Plasma list and got his own svn account so I wouldn't have to commit his patches for him anymore. He fixed a number of smaller, but certainly annoying, bugs and eventually moved to the full screen layout issue. The first iteration of the fix was to write something just for DefaultDesktop; the second was to take this logic and make a proper QGraphicsLayout from it; the remaining step will be to eventually move this layout into libplasma where any Containement can make use of it.

The Beat Goes On

Lots of other work has been going on as well. Marco's been working on the panel control bar to make it more discoverable (in terms of its usability) and polishing up some of the widgets he recently added to libplasma (nice scrollbars and the tab widget), while Alex went on a absolute tear this weekend closing numerous bugs in both the 4.1 and 4.2 branches; I think he made over 20 commits on Saturday alone. Very impressive. Marijn has remained busy making sure we don't break compilation on the ARM architecture, usually due to one of us not using qreal as often as we should. Petri's continued to work away on containment switching so that it will work smoothly in 4.2.

In part, this is what keeps me going day after day without much pause: if I stop for too long I fall behind all the work everyone else is putting into things, and I can't have that. =)

More On My Webkit KPart Experience

I'm writing this with post with Konqueror, which may not seem very odd except that I'm using the "Compose" tab in Blogger. That's the one with the fancy HTML editting bits and it actually works! There are a few little bugs here and there, but in general: success. This is why I'm excited about QtWebkit usage: it gives me access to features I can otherwise only get in Gecko, and even a few that I can't.

There are still some problems in the KPart and QtWebkit though. The version that will ship with Qt 4.5 should be a lot more performant and have a lot of bugs worked out. Right now with Qt 4.4.1 when I close a tab before the page is completed loading, Konqi crashes. If it wasn't for the crash recovery feature in Konq this would have driven me back to the default khtmlpart some time ago.

... right now I think I'm going to go sit outside on my porch stairs and play some guitar in the sunshine.