This is a slot that is called every time an applet’s configuration is changed behind its back. This is usually because there’s a configuration script running (at startup?) or anyways, the user is modifying the settings from a different place than the configuration dialog.

I finished today with the kdebase applets, now I think that I will start with the ones in kdeplasma-addons (much more fun ).

So, if you’re an applet developer you may want to do a similar change in your code (and backport it to the 4.4 branch too), or if you’re looking for a junior job to get started with development I think this is a perfect task for you. If you plan on working on such things, please drop me a line though (you can get my mail on my blog… it’s there on the left, yeah, there! black and shiny), so we don’t step on each other’s toes.

You can get a better idea of what you have to do by looking at the commit diff on this cumbersome websvn page:
http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=1088785

As you see you simply have to move the configuration reading and setup from init() to configChanged(), and eventually use it from init() too.

Oh and by the way… I’m going to Tokamak 4!

so, short introduction: i admit that it’s really a while that i’m not blogging, and because of that 99.9% of the comments on the blog posts are just mere spam. Most of the times it’s just uninteresting russian or brute force porn links, but this one is so amazing i think it’s worth sharing. Only important note: this was on the page where I blogged about the mockup of the battery plasmoid

okay, the introduction is over, this really speaks for itself:

Hi,

Thanks for writing such an interesting article. Its really good to know about the batteries in detail. Seriously do we realize how many things in your house that need batteries? Let’s count it, from the flashlight, cell phone, iPod, cameras, and many more. Knowing it should make us realize on how essential the presence of the batteries in our daily life. However, with that so many kinds of battery, which is generally different between one to another, sometimes we have some difficulties in finding the desired type.

Find the right batteries supplier is not hard if you check out  *REMOVED LINK* because this website provides the widest selection of batteries and you can choose the right battery based on the categories. You can get the procell batteries which available in several sizes and voltage. You also can find Duracell batteries that divided into duracell plus batteries and duracell ultra batteries. All of the batteries come with cheaper price because this website provides the discount batteries in bulk, wholesale, and retail quantities.

Thanks,

- Andrew Morales

yes, amazing.

- roophie (which is going to have more kde news to blog about)

(and, oh yeah, i have to fix blockquote…)

The design has started at akademy, on wade’s commission, and then got several rounds of refining and polishing, last of which been done by nuno who was trying to accomodate the usual bikeshed that developers’ taste brings up.¹

We still have to work some more on it, pixel perfectionness is the first thing that comes to my mind, then some more fluidity in the layout (thanks to felipe who told me is working on a patch for it), and, most important of all, someone that knows about CSS and HTML that can give a hand. Jonathan has done a terrific work, but, as he says, that’s the best that his web skills permits him.

Then we need to refine all those little things like alignments, shadows, and so on…

Anyways, already a great improvement, no?

Enjoy the new planet!

- Your beloved Roophie

¹ no offence meant, we already cleared that up, just… history!

Yesterday I was feeling pretty pissed off by how things were going. But fortunately, the KDE community demostrated once more how great and friendly it is. =) I received a lot of virtual hugs and good words on IRC, on private mail and in comments. And I’m really thankful to everyone of you for the kind words, they really helped me. =)
Sebastian turns out to be our most favourite teddy bear ever, and today, despite he woke up at 5 AM and was just back from a long journey, popped up on IRC and pinged me, we explained ourselves, and in a few minutes the atmosphere and everything was back to the usual KDE hugs and kisses. Misunderstandings are pretty bad, but fortunately now all seems good. Or, as sebas writes… I love teddy bears! =)

So, today I finished my mockup for the battery, and sent it to the Plasma devel mailing list. I’ll show it also here, so that I’ll gather some more feedback.
However, before I’ll show it, a couple of notes:
The icons (especially brightness icons) are temprorary, as you might guess. I’ll probably add a brightness label too, I was just feeling lazy .
Some icons will probably also need to be made ad-hoc, for now I just borrowed some from the icon theme. In place of the ‘java’ icons there will be icons specific to each profile.

Apart for that, this is the mockup for the popup that will appear clicking on the battery in the panel, while on planar (desktop/dashboard/media-center…) contianments there will be just the ’status’ part (the part above the line) with a little togglable button (label for it? “options…”?) bottom-right which will slide out the configuration options and will make the plasmoid look like the following mockup, which is designed, as I said, for the panel.

Some other points that are worth noticing:

• I tried to pack up the space, and manipulating the background with inkscape is not the easiest thing ever. I’m sure that the end result (especially with better font rendering) will look less cluttered.
• a ‘brightness’ label on the slider might be good, I was just hoping for cleaerer icons. let’s see how this turns out.
• the checkbox “disable warnings” will become another thing, used to toggle “presentation mode” (no autosuspend, no warnings, no screensaver, …)
• yes, I will show the CPU frequency in the progressbar
• we need better wording =)

Ok, so, after the notes… here it is!

And, yes, this is meant to become the controller for powerdevil. =)

As a sidenote, and to unveil the last part of my title, lately I got pretty annoyed with the status of the development of raptor so far. Especially with the estimated developed times being 20.000 years (I’m saying the truth, check here if you don’t believe me! (towards the end)) . To put it bluntly, things were simply stagnating for way too long. So I sit down, met, talked to and recruited some devlopers (namely Dario ‘drf’ Freddi of PowerDevil’s fame, Davide Bettio and Lukas Appelhans), we created a git repo, and we started the fun.
We’re being hosted at github for now, like arora, and we plan to merge back to SVN right before moving to kdereview.

The repo URL is: http://github.com/ruphy/raptor.

The biggest work will likely be the view, so if you have some expertise in QPainter, layouts, or computer graphics, and feel like you want to give us a hand, don’t exitate to drop us (or me) a line or fork the repo on github. =)

So, now, our stated goal is to have raptor ready for 4.2, with *at least* basic functionalities and legacy category support.
Note that, once we’ll have some usable code, we’ll badly need some feedback from users so that we can see what we can optimize further and what are the concepts that work better, so that we can then optimize the menu the best way possible.

We’re all motivated and dedicated to do it, we’ve just completed the design phase, and me and drf will meet in RL weekly for some code sprints on it, too. And we’ll also be joining our forces with our good friend Ivan Cucik (please pardon me the accents, ivan =) ), author of Lancelot, to be able to faster kick, kickoff, off.

Wow, that was long! Later on!

however, the fact remains: I’m back on blogging. finally. and, on a related note, i’m also burning out. so maybe i need it. maybe reading all the nice people will stop me from wanting to just give up on the stuff. dunno. but fuck, yeah, i’m not even rereading the post this time. that’s pathetic. i’ll just stop here wasting space on the planet. bye.

Davide ‘WindowsUninstall’ Bettio asked me to add a note to remind that i might have blogged in another happy moment before now too. but as i said in the opening, i don’t really know why i did that right now.  the happier ones will follow i guess.

Yea, I know it was yesterday (the 18th) but you decided to disappear from IRC… … and I can’t blame you for that.

On a sidenote, what did I become now, the official KDE birthday reminder? At least judging from all the posts I’m writing lately…
Hmm… this has to be fixed… but… never fear! I will be back blogging about stuff asap!!! =)

(that’s just alphabetical order)

For those who don’t know, today it’s the birthday of two of our great fellow artists! David ‘davigno’ Vignoni and Eugene ‘it-s’ Trouneuv. To their health!

(to be sincere I wanted to put here a birthday e-card but then I considered that this would have resulted in being more creepy than what I eventually already am. So, take just the words please )

For the rest, I’m continuing with the complete graphic revamp of this blog, sorry if it doesn’t look completely shiny now, but I will make it so in the next days. Great inspiration in my mind…

And a flood of articles are coming too… I just didn’t want to post anything until the revamp had finished, and I’m only making an exception to the rule just for this special occasion.

See you soon my lovely fellows!

P.S. krunner is coming along greatly!

No, seriously now, here it is:

Hope you like it. Happy new year everyone, may 2008 bring the best things to you! =)

For KDE, it will surely be a great one, the launch of KDE 4, the start of a new era, and then… but, hey! will say more of this yaddayadda in the next post…

Ah, and see you next year¹!

P.S. I’ll commit this into SVN in a second…

UPDATE: as nobody seems to read my answers, I’m pasting here my comment #7, which was intended as a reply for the first ones, but nobody seems to really have seen it.

Something better will be done for 4.1, I promise, it’s just that I couldn’t do anything else (and really, anything else) for 4.0 except than re-adapt the existing code for the old splashscreen to the new artwork: we’re in feature freeze now…

This is really, really the best thing we could have ever come up with, because of the limitations in ksplashx. It’s not the best thing ever, but I still think the final result *is* nice, after all.

I would like to add that I *will* add a progressbar, like in the mockup Nuno did

–
¹ Sorry, but I can say that only once in a year, can’t loose the opportunity

Don’t worry, I will make a proper release with a proper announcement with all the colors linked and all this stuff when it will be the right time… this is meant to be a 5 minutes post, already lost too much time on endless mail (and IRC) discussions in these days.

If you’re interested, Harald ‘apachelogger’ Sitter made a screencast showcasting the cursors in all of their beauty (unlike the pic showing a naked Zack ).

See you soon!

–
¹ They seem to think that a cursor theme might break something, or they have other points which I still haven’t understood… but I don’t want to polemize… anyway, I seem to need to convince them to include the theme in 4.0.

I’d just like to wish you everything you wish yourself for Christmas!

And to give you the promised present…

With David Miller, in these two days I’ve done quite a big rush on the cursor theme, as you can see on its cgit page.

We’ve targeted to complete at least a basic set to be given away as Christmas present, and as preview of what will be included in KDE 4.0 as default cursor theme (at least I hope so, I’m writing the mail to kde-core-devel right now).

The clock cursor is the big missing, altough the pointer+clock is already there. And I made the hand thinner.

Here are the links to the white and yellow themes, installable, but first the mandatory previews, in random order.

Normal pointer:
Hand:
Contextual Help:
Text, ibeam, xterm, blinking, or however you call it :
Grabbing:
Pencil:
Diagonal resizing:
Pointer + clock:

UPDATE: Download the newest sets which are linked in the other post. They work better

The cursor theme is licenced under the license LGPL version 3, and is Copyrighted (C) 2007 by Riccardo Iaconelli and David Miller.

Please note xterm, I think it’s just lovely. And it *does* work greatly on text!

Actually, there are more cursors drawn in the git repo but I haven’t created all the config files yet. I will try to sit down with fredrikh and finish this off too. Then I’ll probably have to ask jpetso to work with me on a sane spec for cursor naming, currently this is all a plain mess.

Feel free to report me any bugs or usability annoyances in the theme. =)

Ah, because I remembered you asked, I will try to make a lefthanded version of the theme too. And maybe some other colors… and… who knows, maybe some will be with the Tango palette.

Have a very happy Christmas and a good new year!

Bye! =)

P.S. There are two sentences in the text, which are quotes from a song of one of the most known groups in the history of music. I have a bonus present to the first who can find the two quotes and tell where do they come from, including name of the song.