It's amazing how a little bit of flour, an egg and a bit of water can, in 5-10 minutes time, produce enough pasta (and then some!) for four people. Add some sauce, toppings and settle in beside a main course or a salad and voila .. great meal. The taste and texture of the pasta is unachievable with dry pasta or even the "fresh" pasta I can get from the grocery stores here. So instead of pulling out some dry pasta from a box (which takes about 10 seconds), I'm spending a whole extra 10 minutes or so to get something that tastes better and which is enjoyable and gets my hands moving. There's something about making food from raw ingredients that's very wholesome feeling. So that's 9:90 well spent. :)
Anyways, enough about the pasta machine. You probably want to see that Plasma screencast I teased you with in the title before spewing about the inconsequential kitchen activities of yours truly. Fair enough. First though, I'd like to kvetch about the weather: it snowed another 10cm or so again today before melting into great puddle of blah everywhere in the afternoon. It's staying light late into the evening and we're still getting snow. Seriously, what the hell?!
Oh, I'll be on the Linux Link Tech show next month. I'm tentatively scheduled to record with the crew on the 8th of April and the show should show up sometime shortly thereafter. I'll keep you posted when the time comes.
Ok, so .. Plasma screencast! I demonstrate a couple of cute little features we've put into 4.3: a nicer moving desktop toolbox that performs little tricks when you click on it, a KRunner that is self-documenting (huzzah for discoverability) and a new KRunner results layout. As you watch it, you may also want to marvel at the speed of it: KRunner is feeling a lot faster in current trunk/. Wilder, David Faure and I have the blisters to prove we earned it. ;)
So without further delay tactics, you can grab the screen cast in ogg vorbis glory by clicking on the screenshot below. Enjoy!
25 comments:
Nice work!
And about those 9:90... 9:50? ;)
In order:
Woo aseigo pasta maker! ;)
I think that "pasta machine" is correct. In Italy we call that tool "macchina per la pasta" which translates literally to "machine for pasta"... so "pasta machine".
Wooo KRunner user help!
Awesome, I think the syntax thing could really lower the barrier between KRunner and common (non power-) users!
@Sam Stone: I use metric time. :P
@fmontesi: i'll make you some if you ever come visit. then you can give me an authentic Italian review. :)
Regarding the plasma-tab/cashew... if you have more than one plasma-activities, do they appear as tabs as well, so you can switch between them without zooming in and out?
hey, what happened to those Plasma-vidcasts you did a while ago?
@Janne: I always hoped for that - it just makes sense to use that as a activity switcher :)
Looks great. Did you have a look at ubiquity? It's really the greatest thing I've seen in a while http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/ and the unstable version is usable outside of firefox.
Looks good, keep the screencasts coming.
I've got a couple of questions/ideas.
1. the tab for the toolbox, is it possible to use tabs like that for the "Multiple Desktops" instead of (or as well as) the way it is presented to the user now? (I may be missing a feature of plasma so shoot me if necessary) I was thinking that this would be better way to present a simple desktop to my mum i.e. tabs for Internet, Office, etc. instead of using the menu for common activities.
2. With your Krunner example, how about making the full descriptions pop up as tooltips otherwise it'll take up too much screen and that (to me anyway) looks messy.
Regards
Ian
@Janne: no, you don't get more tabs. that's not what it's for, and overloading it with additional meaning would end up being very clumsy.
i've considered putting an activity lister in the toolbox, but even then ... the problem with the zooming is the UI around it and the speed of QGraphicsScene at painting zoomed out. we're working on it.
@patcito: yes, i'm aware of ubiquity. krunner predates it, though enzo (which is the spiritual father of ubiquity) i think predates krunner? anyways, the concepts are pretty much the same, except that krunner is not as focused on the web as ubiquity, and is more about being a run command replacement than enzo.
there are numerous similarities, though, and they all come from rather similar design philosophies.
@Ian: we actually have some SoC proposals that provide a much more appropriate interface for what you are describing. hopefully one or more of them will be selected :)
as for krunner descriptions in tooltips, i'm considering placing a maximum # of lines on them and then scrolling the rest of the text inside the entry if they go beyond that.
we'll see, though, how it all feels. i do have some examples with reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaallly long descriptions, so i've got good testcases :)
@Janne: there is the sctivity bar plasmoid for that
@aseigo: hope i can taste it and give it a "figata" rathing some day :p
In my own opion,the krunner syntax list maybe too long,that users even me are tempted to read through all entries.
Maybe group the icons with similar syntax or use other classify methods.
Or use some algorithms like editor length calc to popup a context help only when you "detect" that user forget or misuse the syntax. This sounds best but hard to implement.
The krunner syntax list is too long.
Users are tempted to read them all.
Maybe use some group or classify methods.
AFAIK, The ideal way is to "DETECT" what user wants to do and popup a context help. Like the quick help in M$ Office.
Very nice! The Plasma development keeps amazing me.
Thanks to all plasma devs!
One problem I found with your list approach, is the fact that all the type of items appears to be mixed together (documents, applications, urls, etc).
I suggest that you use the same group view that Dolphin uses, maybe putting in the top the latest used items (with a options to show the most used ones), or maybe use two colors, one darker and one lighter, for each item.
Also, I suggest that the title of the result be in a light bold, to make it easy to read.
Thanks and keep your good .
looks good. Especially the new krunner results is way nicer than the icon mode. The only thing I would change is the highlighting. Before you explained the smooth movement, the first thing I thought was "why is the highlighting so laggy?". So do consider that what you perceive as smooth, others might perceive as a performance problem.
@大猫: "The krunner syntax list is too long."
it's a list of what's available.
"Users are tempted to read them all."
that's actually the idea behind documenting them :) to see what's available.
"Maybe use some group or classify methods."
being able to group them into things like "files, people, locations, system control, etc" would be nice. i haven't added that yet, but might yet. probably not before krunner itself supports grouping in the interface though :)
@doutor.zero: "I suggest that you use the same group view"
the problem with grouping is that things are sorted by relevance, so when grouping is put into the mix we then have to balance sorting by relevance with grouping.
given that some returns may not be files/people/locations/system control at all, it's not as useful as it sounds at first.
"I suggest that the title of the result be in a light bold"
i may make the font of the title a bit bigger than the text below, but bold seems to not work out so well in many cases with lots of listing items. i'll play with it though and see how it looks here :)
@Leo_S: "why is the highlighting so laggy?"
recordmydesktop doesn't capture every frame and it destroys the smoothness. in actual usage it feels a lot nicer than it looks in the screencast.
Excellent! (and I hope the same can be said for the past :-) )
Before the items are hovered over they are grayed out and in the UI metaphor that I am used to this means 'is not available in this context' so it may lead to a little confusion.
That apart I just like tastefully colourful things more than concrete gray :)
Thanks for the screencasts!
Please keep them coming, makes it so much easier to grasp new ideas and features :)
wonderful work as usual!
I also really appreciate your scope of knowledge and ability to respond concisely
What I like about ubiquity is how it automatically grabs the clipboard content and allows you to execute commands very fast like "translate this", this being the content of the clipboard. It also has a great "natural" language parser https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mitcho/ParserTNG such as "add plasma meeting tomorrow to my calendar", "add bob bob@example.com to contacts" etc I know KDE has all the technology to have something like this too so I'm confident :)
i currently use katapult as my app laucher because krunner currently doesnt have a shortcut key.
is this something in the works or it is designed not to have one.?
katapult users alt+space to bring it up. gnome-do has a key combination of its own but it can be changed.
when kwin is running with composite on, krunner pops up at one position and then jumps to another position when the display animation is over ..very annoying
it seems that it displays where it was last closed and then jumps to the center
running kde4-svn
@behavedave: we actually do something quite similar in the taskbar; that said, it's actually meant to show what the active item is very clearly (there is a passive nature to this due to being fairly highly keyboard driven) and the text isn't greyed out.
if this does turn up to be a real problem in user testing an usage, it's easy to address at least.
@patcito: we could provide a generic NL parser in RunnerContext that individual runners could then use. just need someone to write it ;) in the meantime, i'd be happy with a runner that adds things to my calendar, NLP or not.
as for grabbing stuff from the clipboard, we could replace any trailing usage of the word "this" with the clipboard ... but then what is "this"? it would require, i think, showing the contents of the clipboard to the user at that point to make it clear what the computer considered "this" to be.
would make an interesting set of projects for someone ...
@mhogomchungu: "i currently use katapult as my app laucher because krunner currently doesnt have a shortcut key."
alt+f2, same since KDE 1. :)
you can change this in system settings to alt+space if you prefer.
> it would require, i think, showing the contents of the clipboard to the user at that point to make it clear what the computer considered "this" to be.
Yes, this is how it works in ubiquity.
One last thing and then I stop bothering you about ubiquity :)
It also has a nice template language for writing commands so that you barely need to know javascript to write a command http://geeksbynature.dk/?p=30
In general scripting support+simple template for generic use case (add support for my favorite website search) to krunner would be awesome.
> ubiquity
The Ubuntu installer? :P
I just tried Mozilla Ubiquity after reading about it here and I think it would be great to have something like this for the whole desktop. It already works pretty well. My dream would be to be able to do a lot of work over this and have it easily extensible. For example I should be able to call it from a Dolphin window and tell it to
"Convert all images in this folder to 1600x1200 and upload to Picasa"
or something like this. Or in Konqueror on a webpage
"Download all pdfs from this page"
This would be awesome. Can't wait until something like this is accomplished (and then we'll need good voice recognition :))
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