Tag Archives: plasma

Screensavers and the KDE Workspaces – your opinion is needed

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Recently in the Plasma mailing list, KDE developers have discussed a new screen-locking implementation that could be added to the upcoming 4.8 release of the KDE Workspaces. The first reason to do so was to solve some security constraints of the existing implementation. As an added bonus, screen locking should be also more aestetically pleasing.

There is however a trade-off: such implementation would mean that screensavers that rely on X (also called X screensavers) would not be compatible. The current plan is to have a fallback mechanism if a user has a screen saver configured, and remove the support for X scrensavers entirely by 4.9. It is the intention of the developers to ultimately provide a way to make screensavers with QtQuick (QML) and in a way that they could be shared via GHNS (e.g., places like kde-look.org). 
That said, this looks like a large change because existing functionality will change or be removed. Hence, to quote KWin maintainer’s Martin Graesslin,

We are not sure how our users would react if we remove the X screen savers and replace them by a new solution. We would like you to contribute and share your opinion. Tell us why you need screen savers and how you would think about if the currently used screen saver could no longer be used.

And how to gather your opinion? Through a poll. A poll has been opened in the KDE Community Forums by Martin himself to gather opinions on this upcoming change. Please jump in and let the developers know what you think!

Interesting plasmoid: Drop2Tag

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While browsing around kde-look.org, I’ve stumbled upon a nice little Plasma scripted widget, and I’m publishing this to have it get more exposure.

A good part of the KDE community knows at least little about Nepomuk, and its ability to attach semantic tags to your files – basically words that describe the file, be it an image, a text document, or anything you’d like. For example, you could tag all the photos from your vacation with the name of the place you’ve been. After that, you can recall tagged files by accessing the nepomuksearch://hasTag:TAG_NAME url in Dolphin or Konqueror (there are more advanced uses, but I won’t cover them here), where TAG_NAME is your tag.

Up to now, the usual way to tag files was to either select them in batch and add a tag, or do them individually, then click “Add tag”, then select the tag or create a new one. It was kind of laborious, although not too complicated. And that’s where Drop2Tag comes in.

Drop2Tag in plasmoidviewer

Drop2Tag stays in your desktop, configured for one of your Nepomuk tags. Then, you just need to drag files to it to have them automatically tagged. Also, clicking on the big Nepomuk icon will open your file manager with the nepomuksearch://hasTag URL with the selected tag. Neat.

The plasmoid is written in Python (I’ve taken a look at its source) and despite being very early in development, it already does the job very nicely – I have put one on my “Graphics manipulation” desktop activity to tag photos and images. A nice addition would be to select the tag from the plasmoid itself, rather than using the configuration option – it would make things much more flexible. Perhaps a Plasma.ComboBox would do the job here.

In any case, I’d like to congratulate its author (nik3nt3) for a job well done.

The next iteration of the Plasma FAQ – call for help

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A few may know that I more or less maintain the Plasma FAQ page on KDE’s UserBase. Given the rapid advance of Plasma between KDE versions, each time a new version is out a new FAQ needs to be made, as the content rapidly becomes obsolete. For 4.3, unfortunately, I’m not sure I’ll be able to put a new version up in time for the 4.3 release.

The reason is mostly practical: it takes a bit of work to collect and add information, and currently my free time is limited due to a rather heavy workload and some other commitments. As UserBase is a wiki, I thought I could ask the KDE community at large if I could get some help in having a new version ready before release.

The big advantage is that you don’t need any special coding skills, just a knowledge of Plasma and being able to run 4.3 (RC2 at this stage). I have already made a skeleton page: people can edit bits of information, removing outdated items and adding new ones. Also, Aaron’s excellent screencast can be used to see which new features are in Plasma.

If you have wondered how to help KDE without being able to code, this is a good opportunity to do so!