SoC weekly report – issue 5

Five weeks have passed and now is when I’ve just started to tame Plasma. Let’s start with the snapshots.

Now when an applet doesn’t fit in the current containment it’s sent to the next availiable one. I’ve also added a header on top of the containments with a label which will allow users to name the containments.

Applets in a column are now hidden when the Context View widget is resized and there is not enough space to paint them in a usable way. They are shown again when there is enough space for them.

What I’m currently missing is a way to highlight the current selected containment. I’m thinking of using a glowing border on the containment to accomplish that.

Next week I’ll be working in redesign the Current Track applet and in a different approach to add applets to the Context View.

The applet browser approach to add applets might not be the better way in our case so I’ve been thinking of something like this:

I hope I can get some artwork help. These are early mockups but (I hope) they do not need much explanation.

In the redesign of the Current Track applet I’ve asked a friend with actual artistic skills to do a mockup and he did an excellent job IMHO. This is what he did.

Thanks Jacobo

GSoC weekly report – issue 4

For those who never heard about me before I’m the SoC student working with Amarok’s Context View. This is already my 4th week report during GSoC but until now I was only sending it by e-mail to my mentor Leo Franchi. This week he had asked me to set up a blog and post about the project progress.

During this week I’ve been fighting against QGraphicsGridLayout. The new grid layout is working just fine after some sizing issues. Also when an applet is removed the remaining applets are rearranged to occupy the space left. This is pretty simple but also very cool, and would look great with animations.

I’ve started to add multiple containments to the Context View and enabled zooming (ctrl + wheel). The idea is that applets are added by columns first. If there isn’t space left to insert an applet in a new column then it would be sent to another containment and the focus would be set to this containment (animations would be great here too, like zooming out from the current containment and zooming in to the new one). Again sizing issues have risen and although you can zoom in and out you can’t add applets to the others containments. I have to figure out what’s happening to the signals and the events of the contaiments.

Here are some snapshots showing the zooming:

As you can see in the images the wikipedia applet is working again. It is using Plasma::WebContent which allows us to set a transparent palette. The only problem is that scrolling in it is extremely slow. If no one else fixes it I’ll have to take a look myself, but for now I’ll wait since I have other issues to fix first.