Blog: Introducing Homerun (KDE fullscreen launcher)

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Aurélien's Room - written on Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Introducing Homerun 0.1.0 (KDE fullscreen launcher)

Today I am happy to present you the result of a few months of Shaun Reich and I work: Homerun, a fullscreen launcher.

Quoting the homepage:

    Homerun is a fullscreen launcher with content organized in tabs. A tab is composed of several "sources". A source can provide one or more sections to a tab. Homerun comes with a few built-in sources, but custom sources can be written using libhomerun.

Homerun can be opened from its applet



Or used as a containment:



I also created a screencast explaining how it works:

Homerun 0.1.0

Getting it

Homerun currently requires kdelibs 4.8, 0.2.0 will likely require 4.9 or 4.10.

Version 0.1.0 is now available from download.kde.org.

Git repository is on projects.kde.org. There is also a nightly PPA for Kubuntu users. Of courses, packages for other distributions are welcome.

For more information, check Homerun homepage.

What's next?

Activities

Homerun could greatly benefit from integrating with KDE activity system. For example I have a "Code" activity and a "Photo" activity, I would like to have different favorite applications and places for each of them.

More sources

The more sources we get the more useful Homerun is.

I have a few ideas in mind, for example a world-clock source showing time in selected timezones (we are KDE: we need more clocks!), sources for Flickr or Picasa would be nice as well, I am pretty sure you can find interesting ideas.

One could even create an Amazon source... Could be handy as long as it is not on the Home tab

ou can create sources using libhomerun. Generate the API documentation by running make dox and have a look at the helloworld example source.

Blog and links

http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun

Edited Subject line - removed version number

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Aurélien's Room -  27 Feb 2013

Homerun 0.2.1 released

Was about to blog about the 0.2.0 release yesterday, but some bugs sneaked in at the last minute, so here comes Homerun 0.2.1. Here is an overview of the main changes.

"Single runner query mode" support

Homerun 0.1.x can show results from KRunner runners through the Runner source, which lets you combine a set of runners and query them for results.

A little-known feature of KRunner runners is the "Single runner query mode". This feature means Homerun can take advantage of these special runners to display a list of items without requiring the user to search for something.

This makes it possible, for example, to add the Activity runner to your Home tab and switch between running activities, or to add the Kate or KDevelop session runners and get a quick list of available sessions.



In Homerun 0.2.1, these runners are directly listed as Homerun sources in edit mode, making it easy to add them to your tabs.

This is still experimental though: one important limitation right now is that there is no way for such sources to refresh themselves. This means that your list of activities is not going to update itself as you start or stop activities. It also means the "Recent documents" runner is not yet a suitable replacement for the "Recent documents" source since it cannot refresh itself :/

Multiple actions per item

Homerun sources now have the ability to expose additional actions for each item.

The other actions are accessible through a context menu, which can be triggered by:

    Left-clicking the arrow in the top-right corner of the item
    Long-clicking the item
    Right-clicking the item
    Pressing M or the "Menu" key

File-oriented sources like the "Dir", "Recent Documents" and "Favorite Places" sources take advantage of this by showing relevant "Open With" actions and a "Properties" action. This makes it possible to open a file with another application or to open a folder with Dolphin instead of browsing it within Homerun.

The "Recent Documents" source also adds an action to let you remove an item from the list.

Actions exposed by runners are also displayed in this context menu.

Note that favorite handling has also been moved to this menu, making it more unlikely to remove a favorite place by mistake.



Improved Power tab

The Power tab received a few improvements:

    Unavailable sleep modes are not listed anymore.
    Opened sessions are now directly listed below the session items, making it fast and easy to switch between opened sessions.



Visual changes

Homerun is a fullscreen launcher, it is now even more fullscreen: the borders around the screen has been removed, reducing clutter a bit.

Header titles are now aligned to the left of the screen, they look less odd on tabs which do not have many items, such as the Power tab.

In containment mode, a shadow is now shown behind the text. This improves the readability of text over highly-constrasted wallpapers.



Conclusion

That's it for this version. You can get it from download.kde.org. Note that this new version requires KDE SC 4.10.

http://agateau.com/2013/02/27/homerun-0.2.1-released/

[agmg]

Archie had created a package for version pre-0.1.0 which worked quite well.
I'm not in these launchers but if someone would like to try it out, it's in the testing section.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,110850.0.html

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Aurélien on Monday, April 22, 2013 - Aurélien's Room

Homerun 0.2.2 is out

Just a quick note to let you know version 0.2.2 of Homerun has been released.

This new version includes one often requested bug fix: the ability for the "Installed Apps" and "All Installed Apps" to refresh themselves when new applications are installed or uninstalled. Homerun 0.2.2 also ships with translations which have not been released in previous versions because of some mix up with release scripts :/ (It turns out if your application is not released as part of KDE SC, you should use releaseme, not createtarball)

You can get the new tarball from here:  homerun-0.2.2.tar.bz2,   this version comes with:

    8 complete translations: da, fi, lt, nl, pt, pt_BR, sv and uk
    3 mostly complete ones (> 80%): es, ru, tr
    a bunch of other less complete ones

We plan a 0.2.3 release two weeks from now which should come with more complete translation coverage.

http://agateau.com/2013/04/23/homerun-0.2.2-is-out/

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Edit - a few screenshots from userbase.kde

Features

Homerun is a fullscreen launcher with content organized in tabs. A tab is composed of several "sources". A source can provide one or more sections to a tab. Homerun comes with a few built-in sources, but custom sources can be written using libhomerun.



Application launcher

Homerun can browse your installed applications and start them or add them to the favorite list to be able to quickly start them from the homepage.



Document hierarchy browser

Homerun lists your favorite places and let you browse them: clicking an item from the "Favorite Places" section will list the content of this folder, making it possible for you to navigate your folders to open a document without having to use a file manager.



Running as a containment

Homerun can be used from a launcher button in a panel (like Kickoff), or as a containment (like the Search and Launch containment).



http://userbase.kde.org/Homerun

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Aurélien on Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - Aurélien's Room

Homerun 0.2.3

As announced two weeks ago, here is another release of Homerun.

This new release comes with many more translations (16 complete translations, and 4 more than 80% complete). It also includes some fixes:

    The "Alt-Up" shortcut key to go up one level when navigating is back

    The "Power" source no longer uses internal DBus APIs, making it work again with upcoming KDE SC 4.11 (Thanks to Hrvoje Senjan for this fix)



That's about it. As usual, you can get the tarball from download.kde.org.

http://agateau.com/2013/05/07/homerun-0.2.3/