a typical day at Tokamak 5

We just finished our daily progress meeting here at Tokamak 5 where we take turns moving our (self-)assigned sticky notes on the kanban window into the "Done" category. We each share what we've done the previous day, what we're working on now and what (if any) blockers we've encountered.

It's fairly amazing what gets done given that we're only a dozen people. I was live blogging on identi.ca the things that were done yesterday during the meeting and here's the list that resulted:

• New release management system and a git workflow we're going to try over the next three months in Plasma has been agreed upon and documentation has begun for it. This was the result of a couple of hours of presentations and discussions and many more hours of work prior to and after that session. The goal is keep a low barrier to entry given we're using git but to also use a more manageable set of processes.


• KConfigXt meets QML! This paves the way towards pure QML config dialogs while keeping the crunchy XML goodness of configuration data described by KConfigXt.


• Bookmarks can now be easily stored in and retrieved from Nepomuk, allowing them to be easily shared between applications (not to mention more metadata) and presented in more useful ways. There's a GSoC to integrate this work in rekonq which is a nice coincidence. :)


• The existing Nepomuk DataEngine has been turned into a base implementation with task-specific DataEngines, including a bookmarks one, built on top. This is pretty easy as the task-specific ones essentially define the Nepomuk query and little else.


• Some new activity templates: desktop icons and search and launch. Now when people ask for a traditional desktop icon style, we can just point them at the activity manager (which is now easy to see thanks to the new activities button in the panel which appeared yesterday). The photos template was also vastly improved.


• Activity templates can associate and start apps now as well.


• Activities in the activity manager can now be associated with a template instead of actually be created. This allows creation-on-demand of such activities (so they will match, e.g., screen resolution and app availability better) as well as preventing them using any resources at all unless launched.


• The calendar as seen in the clock Plasmoids now has a two-pane design with events in the right hand pane. This was inspired by the approach in GNOME shell, which we thought was pretty nice. :)


• The mobile and tablet widget explorer was improved for usability and readability


• The mouse cursor no longer is visible when used Plasma Active is used on a touch device, as one would hope and expect.


• KWin now tracks and (more importantly) exposes recently used window ordering which will be used in visualizations in the various Plasma shells.


• Plasma Active panel interaction was partly implemented so we can have a nicer workflow for application switching, launching, etc on such devices.


• Different panel geometries depending on screen size


• A panel per screen on multi-screen setups


• Default wallpaper string no longer appears in libplasma, is now 100% controlled by the metadata.desktop file in the theme (and/or the theme fallback), preventing the need to patch libplasma by downstreams

Today's work is already well underway. There is no stopping this locomotive. We are fueled by great food (yesterday pizza, today a green curry feast), great drink (teas, coffees, juices, beers) and passion. Lots and lots of passion. :)