plasma, media centers

a couple weeks ago i'd just about had it with the constant harrasment about plasma-this and plasma-that. it drove my moral right into the ground, to be honest, and unfortunately i don't have too many crutches in the form of people available for when my legs give out. which is probably 100% my own fault, but hey .. it is at is.

it all came to a head after a really annoying conversation on irc where i asked the most annoying of fellows to stop discussing why i shouldn't be surprised at the state of things and just suck it up. unfortunately, the conversation just kept going. i got really frustrated and ended up not on irc for the next 10 days or so.

instead i busied myself with other things that kde needed from me. i also spent a few nights out partying perhaps a bit harder than is good for my internal organs. eventually i got over it.

not, i'm sure, that many of you care ;)

so here's something you may care about: as of now, plasma sets itself as the desktop layer, sets up a graphicsview canvas and paints a desktop background. DataEngine, DataSource and DataVisualization work now. what the heck does that mean?

well, there is a cute little svg clock that is a DataVisualization which tells plasma it needs the Time engine. plasma loads the Time engine plugin and the Time engine starts feeding the clock .. well .. the time and date. the clock displays what it gets.

what's neat is that this is all quite generic. you can connect any DataSource to any DataVisualization, all you need to know is what Engine provides it and what the name of the Source is. and for the latter you can get a list of them from a given Engine.

there's more API needed still, but it generally works. which is to say, you can now tell the time and look at something nicer than a black or grey background using plasma.

i posted a list of about a dozen or so "next steps" to the panel-devel list. assuming that this start is enough to make people shut the hell up and leave me alone so i can enjoy breathing again, i'm feeling pretty good with how things went the last over day or two of coding and figure that i can keep this pace up for a good while now.

wait ... what, no screenshots? nope, not tonight. =:P

before i finish this blog entry out, in my last entry (written whilst coming off a night of partying =) i mentioned cool stuff to talk about at akademy. someone posted a comment asking me not to leave everyone hanging. fair enough.

i've been recently (as in "over the last 2 months or so") working with a group of people to bring a full fledged, kick ass, "just works" media center suite into kde. we're working off a proven code base; 'proven' as in 'you can find it on commercially available consumer electronic devices'.

this is completely different to (and complimentary with, imho) amarok, kaffine, etc. some of the stuff it can do is just crazy ranging from integration with telephony, controling HD TVs (in ways that puts vista mce to shame), sweet eye candy 10' interface and cool hardware gadgets like a wii-like motion-control remote. this won't, obviously, make it into 4.0 given where we are in the release cycle and the amount of integration work left ahead, but there's already a proof-of-concept of this integration target based on kde 3.5 and kubuntu feisty and we'll be working to provide it as an easy to get/integrate add-on for 4.0. the proof-of-concept will be publicly available as a downloadable customized kubuntu iso soon.

and that's really just the start of it. i don't want to steal too much of the thunder that'll be in the weeks to come, but i think that this could be a huge deal for post-4.0 kde. besides being cool technology, it will also be bringing financial investment, new partnerships with name brand companies and give us an extra boost when trying to break into the early majority band of user adoption.

at akademy i'll definitely be talking more about this in detail. until then, there you go: cool media center stuff is coming.