Blog: KDE Plasma Miscellaneous stuff

[menotu]

By Ivan Cukic - 10 May 2012

Brainstorms for the activities in the desktop plasma needed

..............................

Linking the documents to activities

Background: One of the purposes of activities is to link documents (including web pages, images, etc.), applications, contacts etc. that are related to the activity so that you can access them faster. Apart from manually telling the system which resources belong to an activity, the goal is to have the system score the documents based on the number of times you’ve used them in a specific activity*.

So here are some of the ideas I plan to make reality.

Manual linking of files by right-clicking them in dolphin.

Linking via Share-Like-Connect applet – eventually, when most of our applications get patched to report the documents they open to the activity manager, we’ll know which document is in focus at any given time. This way, we’ll have global (in the panel) buttons to share the document, bookmark it, link it to the activity.

Linking contacts from Kontact, Telepathy and similar

Linking the highest scored documents automatically or semi-automatically

Have the favourite applications section in menus dependent on the activity

Rank krunner results according to the scores

Browsing the resources that belong to the activity with Dolphin (and file open/save dialogue)

Showing all that in the Shelf applet
* actually, it is a little bit more complex than that, but it is irrelevant for this purpose.

Other simpler things

System settings module for advanced activity configuration – the name and icon setup plasma provides is a bit underwhelming

Setting the basic activity info, creating and deleting

Setting whether the activity is private (requires a password to be unlocked, data is encrypted) – see Encryption in KDE SC

Setting whether the usage statistics should not be collected in a specific activity at all, or only for certain applications

Dreams

Automatic grouping of documents that relate to each other based on the usage statistics (for example, the literature you used while writing a scientific paper)

Full article

[menotu]

By: Martin Klapetek 11 June 2012 (dot.kde.org)

New KDE Telepathy version features audio and video calls

After four months full of work, the KDE Telepathy team is back with another release. Version 0.4 of the Instant Messaging suite for KDE Workspaces now supports making audio and video calls right from the desktop. It also adds the ability to browse chat logs. We focused strongly on stability and performance, so most of the improvements are "under the hood". In addition, work was started to have a Kopete log importer in the next release.



User Interface

Plasma Integration Tech Preview

Groundwork was done for further Plasma integration, so tech previews of new Plasma components can be tested:

a Chat Plasmoid allows you to communicate without switching windows. It sits in your panel and pops up with new messages.

a Contact List Plasmoid shows the presence of your buddies and lets you start a chat with them.

the KRunner interface makes it easy to search for contacts and start chats.

Even though these Plasma components are alpha, they are integrated with the release and installed by default. We encourage you to try them out. Please report bugs, ideas and suggestions at the KDE Telepathy Bugzilla or our new forum, where we continuously watch and provide support.



http://dot.kde.org/2012/06/11/new-kde-telepathy-version-features-audio-and-video-calls

[menotu]

Just for fun.................

======================
From David Edmundson's Web Log

Experimenting With Telepathy Tubes

During Akademy Daniele Domenichelli and I held a workshop on Telepathy Tubes and how they can be integrated in your application.

What is a Telepathy Tube

In Telepathy, a tube is a method of sending arbitrary data between two contacts over the XMPP stream. This is abstracted to the developer in the form of a local TCP socket or a separate Dbus session between the two computers. This allows you to set up a network connection without having to worry about all the difficulties of IP addresses, firewalls, routing and NATs.

In simple terms, it allows you to exchange more stuff with a contact than the normal text, files or video traditionally associated with instant messaging.
Fun and Games

After the workshop Daniele and I decided to try and add Telepathy tubes to an existing KDE application, in this case KBattleship.

We added a button to the main menu such that instead of starting a game by having to manually type in hostnames and port numbers we simply select a contact from the menu. Considerably easier!

http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/telepathy-tubes-in-kbattleship

[menotu]

From David Edmundson's Web Log

KDE Telepathy 0.5 To Be Released Next Week

Over the last two months we have been preparing to release version 0.5 of KDE Telepathy.

This release brings over 50 bug fixes and 500 commits since 0.4.

About our release cycles

Every alternate release in KDE Telepathy does not bring many new features, but instead puts the focus on bug fixes, minor improvements, and putting on the extra polish throughout our current feature set.

This release schedule allows us to do more than simply patch releases as we are able to fix any strings or add code where it is needed. This also encourages us developers to spend the time on improving our code rather than chasing new (more fun?) ideas as the master branch is still closed for large features.

How can I get involved?

There's still plenty of room for more testers, and there are plenty of things that can still be improved upon. For further details please see our wiki page, or join us in #kde-telepathy on freenode.

http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/ktp-0-5-coming-soon

[menotu]

Submitted by Martin Klapetek - 27 Aug 2012

5th release of KDE Telepathy Instant Messaging suite

The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce the fifth major release of the new KDE Instant Messaging suite. The immediately available 0.5 version brings polish in many places, better stability, 58 reported bugs fixed and some nice new features too, making the instant messaging experience in KDE Workspaces more pleasant and enjoyable. Special attention was given to the log viewer, which received improvements galore.

New Features

The chatting application was given a message processing plugin system developed as part of this year's Google Summer of Code, featuring an image plugin, which displays a preview of any image link you send or receive. More plugins, like embedding a YouTube videos, LaTeX fomulae and reading incoming messages out loud are in the works and will be available with the next release.

Users now have bigger control over instant messaging using KRunner. You can change your status, add status message, start a chat, audio or video call directly from KRunner.

Contact list is now able to tell you which friends are online on their mobile phones by showing a mobile icon next to the normal presence icon. New mini-list type was added, which aims at showing you as many contacts in the list as possible by using your configured smallest font. Work was also done on improving accessibility.

Calling features have been improved and stabilized. Users are now able to dial-out an arbitrary number with SIP accounts, right from the contact list.

Lots of improvements were done in to group chats. In relation to that, after careful consideration, we have decided to not support IRC in this release. There are plenty of very good IRC clients which can be used in KDE Workspaces and our team is just not big enough to continue working on IRC support. This way we can focus better on filling the missing components in KDE and not duplicating functionality.

The Quick Chat plasmoid also received many updates and has improved a lot, however it still has not left the alpha stage for this release.

http://dot.kde.org/2012/08/27/5th-release-kde-telepathy-instant-messaging-suite

[cirehawk]

Wouldn't mind trying it out.

[menotu]

From David Edmundson's Web Log - 5-Oct-2012

KDE Telepathy 0.5.1 Released

Today we are releasing 0.5.1 of KDE Telepathy, the first patch release in our 0.5 series.

We have fixed over 14 bugs since release, including:
Skype no longer appears in the list of available protocols if it is not available
Fixed issues when KWallet is disabled
Log viewer crashes fixed
Loading logs for facebook users
Fixed log viewer not showing names in group chats
Added an indication that an account is connecting in the presence applet
Presence applet autohides if the user has no telepathy accounts
Presence applet fits in smaller panels correctly

http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/ktp-0-5-1-released

[menotu]

From David Edmundson's Web Log - 5-Oct-2012

An update on Extra Mile

The aim of the extra mile project is put some energy into fixing the little annoyances in KDE, the small bugs and UI issues which get in the way of the user.

We've been working on areas all over KDE, I've outlined some of my favourite changes I've been working on over this past week.

http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/extra-mile-1

[menotu]

From David Edmundson's Web Log - 17-Dec-2012

KDE Telepathy 0.5.2 codename "we already have it" has just been released.

This brings a whole tonne of festive bugfixes. What better present could you ask for?

Since 0.5.1 we have fixed the following:

    Potential Freeze when declining contact request (311548)
    Connection Errors when using WICD (303498)
    "Connecting…" indicator keeps spinning forever on login (307758)
    Make Presence plasmoid icons plasma themeable (302993)
    No notification sound when a new message comes in in an active chat window (310946)
    Crash in Accounts KCM (307302)
    Correctly align right-to-length languages (305045)
    Deadlock between Amarok and KDED when starting (310826)
    Sometimes initial selected item in contact list has the wrong foreground colour (310081)
    Crash in Ktp-Log Viewer (310552)
    Deadlock in auth-handler (310505)
    Previous and Next conversation links are shown twice (309828)
    Fix colours in Contact List view (308802)
    SIP advanced configuration: 'Transport' is always reset to 'auto' (309180)
    Speedups in the ktp-debugger (308204)
    Flip video stream of preview in call interfaces (so it's like a mirror) (308976)
    Kwallet interaction fixes (1) (308079)
    Kwallet interaction fixes (2) (308973)
    Handle Enter key as well as Return to send message (308895)
    Contact list did not update to style changes immediately (308820)
    Mobile icon is not hidden when user goes offline (308217)
    Quick Chat applet doesn't scroll to the bottom when new messages come in (298392)

http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/ktp-0-5-2

[cirehawk]

Is Telepathy going to availbale at some point?  I'd like to give it a shot since KoPete doesn't seem to be seeing anymore improvements.

[menotu]

From martys.typepad - 18 Dec 2012

KTp Presence Plasmoid is now Plasma themeable

Thanks to our Google Code-In student, Peter Amidon, our little presence plasmoid in the-just-released v0.5.2 can now haz proper monochrome icons. The plasmoid is looking for icons in "icons/presence-applet" and names matching the oxygen scheme with "-plasma" suffix, here's the list:

"user-online-plasma"
"user-busy-plasma"
"user-away-plasma"
"user-away-extended-plasma"
"user-invisible-plasma"
"user-offline-plasma"

So, Plasma theme creators, get at it!

http://martys.typepad.com/blog/2012/12/ktp-presence-plasmoid-is-now-plasma-themeable.html

===============

The presence plasmoid allows you to view and set the presence of your telepathy accounts. It can be just an icon on a taskbar or a full size desktop widget. since all telepathy components are dbus activated, it may well not be necessary to have a systray icon as well as the plasmoid for IM. However it might be better to keep one for the buddy list app too?

[menotu]

From David Edmundson's Web Log - 17-Feb-2013

We are pleased to anounce the release of KDE Telepathy 0.5.3.

0.5.3 is a patch release in the 0.5 series and provides various bug fixes and updated translations.

Fixes

    291653 - Cannot edit identity on local-xmpp account. (Accounts KCM)
    310529 - Status is displayed as offline when contact list is opened (Text UI)
    310981 - Avatars are not loaded sometimes (Log Viewer)
    311928 - Contact list doesn't refresh after filtered contact was moved to other group (Contact List)
    312339 - Make tab switching able to cycle tabs. (Text UI)
    312603 - Chat starting time should be when the first message was received, not when the window opened (Text UI)
    312615 - There should be a shortcut for opening chats, maybe Enter (Contact List)
    313110 - Emoticons ending in "\" cause UI corruption (Text UI)
    313437 - Edit Identity button not enabled/disabled when account connects/disconnect (Accounts KCM)
    313525 - ktp-text-ui crashes, on "bad" sent/received message" (Text UI)
    313927 - Telepathy/KDE crashed (Contact List)

Source tarballs are available from  here  and should be in your distribution shortly.

http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/ktp-0-5-3

[menotu]

By Ivan Čukić - 5-Mar-2013

There are some news in the Plasma, Lancelot, Shelf, QML components, blah blah whoop whoop land. As some of the people have noticed from the previous screenshots, I’ve begun working on a QML port of Lancelot.

The Launcher building toolkit

In Lancelot 1, I decided that it would be awesome to allow people to put parts of it on the desktop or panel or wherever even without using the Lancelot menu. Those were implemented as the Shelf (formerly known as Lancelot Parts) applet.

This time, for what will be known as Lancelot 2 I decided to go one step further – to break everything into QML components, be it data models or UI elements.



Now, you need only a few lines of QML to replicate the same functionality of the Shelf applet (the first column in the screenshot). The second is essentially the same, but uses the IconView.

Code: [Select]

LancelotComponents.ListView {
    modelsList: [
        LancelotModels.FavoriteApplications {},
        LancelotModels.ContactsTelepathy {},
        LancelotModels.Devices {}
    ]
}
You don’t need to stop there – you can create custom widgets and pass custom delegates (third column), custom item views (all the models have the same API) etc.

Lancelot specific

The menu itself is also going to be as changeable as possible – now that the UI is based on QML, the users will be able to create different layouts, and share them on the kde-look.org. So, for anyone who desired a simpler menu, a menu that shows the items in a grid of icons, and not in a list, for anyone who … I can only say – it will be possible.

It will even be possible to create a telepathy quick-send-message applet if you want to.

Maybe even the April 1st joke from a few years ago will be a fair game.



lancelot

http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/2013/03/05/whatever-you-want-whatever-you-like/

[menotu]

1, 2, 3… Plasma!

Dantti's Blog is here
=====================================

Posted by Michael Larabel on March 09, 2013

KDE Can Now Start A Heck Of A Lot Faster  (Video links below)

At the end of February, Sessionk was announced, a new component that's capable of allowing the KDE Plasma desktop to start-up a heck of a lot faster.

In a lengthy blog post, Daniel Nicoletti describes his experimental work on Sessionk. His post goes on to explain narrowing down what's taking the KDE desktop so long to load and what he's done to improve the situation with his new Sessionk project.

The blog post is worth reading for KDE users that are looking for their desktop to load faster.

He's been able to get the KDE Plasma desktop to load in three seconds, rather than 10+ seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX24phsmR-k&feature=player_embedded

He can get the full KDE Plasma desktop going in about seven seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceVHcPALN5Y&feature=player_embedded

Also using Sessionk, he can get the Qt-based Razor-qt desktop to load in approximately four seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-GR8eIMUuas

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMyMjk

[menotu]

From Aaron Seigo - Tuesday, March 12, 2013

extending plasma desktop scripting

The Plasma Desktop Scripting system allows one to add, remove or alter essentially any aspect of a running Plasma Desktop or Netbook shell at runtime using nothing more than javascript. This scripting system is used to define the initial setup you get when you log in for the first time, to provide configure updates and to provide user-friendly ways of adding new kinds of panels and desktop layouts. You can even write scripts interactively by typing "desktop console" into krunner.

Today I was asked on irc if one could extend the Javascript API at runtime so that instead of people writing scripts having to know how your applet works internally they could just call things like "awesomeWidget.setTheme('foo')" and have that do the correct thing.

At first I said "no" because the API is defined and managed by the shell and that's all C++ and there is no plugin mechanism .. but then about five seconds later I remembered that I had indeed added a plugin system. In fact, that is how the "New panel" menu works in Plasma Desktop. I even had an example on disk: org.kde.plasma-desktop.findWidgets. This is a small  desktop scripting template package with ~13 lines of Javascript that adds a findWidgets call to the API.

Here is how you use it in practice:

Code: [Select]

var finder = loadTemplate('org.kde.plasma-desktop.findWidgets');
finder.findWidgets("pager", function(widget, containment) {
print("Found a pager with id " + widget.id + " in a " +
containment.type + " containment with id " + containment.id);
})

Which gets me output like this on my laptop:

   Found a pager with id 4 in a panel containment with id 1

The "big trick" is that the findWidgets package does not have an X-Plasma-ContainmentCategories entry in the metadata.desktop file which prevents it from showing up anywhere in the user interface. As a result, it is only accessible via the loadTemplate call when installed into share/apps/plasma/layout-templates/.

You can distribute layout template packages with your Plasmoids or other Plasma add-ons to allow easy (and future-proof) interaction with your add-ons from user written scripts.

 Such fun.

http://aseigo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/extending-plasma-desktop-scripting.html

===================

Edit:

Opening krunner (Alt+F2) and entering desktop console will show



selecting Open Plasma Desktop Interactivee Console will now show the Scripting Console