camping out for kde

nospam@example.com (Leo Franchi) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:08:52 -0500

many of you have probably seen in passing jeff's blog post announcing camp kde 2010. maybe some of you even remember what it is! well i'll refresh your memory anyway. campkde is the western hemisphere's response to akademy.

hacking discussions take on a whole new meaning when on a beach like this

it is like the little brother that can't stand being ignored so he decides to make things happen himself. it's quite probably analogous to the overlooked friend trying to make himself known.

well, this post is here to remind you. campkde 2009 was one of the best conferences i've ever attended, and I look forward to it happening again. even though a bunch of hackers descended upon some tropical beach resort, we were productive. had you come upon us at 10pm you would have seen a 20odd group of people sitting in chairs a few feet from the beach, drinks in hand, coding or writing or discussing away.

hard at work in the conference room

the lure of the perfect beach was not enough to tear attendees away from the talks that happened during the day.

this winter campkde 2010 will be held at UCSD in san diego, california. and I should really rephrase that, because january in san diego is not really winter in any real sense of the term. point is, campkde 2010 will be awesome. and you should be there. because a conference is really only as good as it's attendees, and without you, dear kde community, it just won't be the same. so think of the weather, think of the cool kde dudes you haven't seen in a few weeks/months/years, and register now! the homepage is here:camp kde homepage

so, without further ado:

campkde 2010

also, i had some spare time... so just in case you guys are going to forget about campkde, here's a nice little scripted plasmoid to tell you when it is:

campkde 2010 plasmoid!

you can install that from here: kde-look plasmoid page or from ghns in plasma directly!

time to take it away

nospam@example.com (Leo Franchi) — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:52:00 -0400

you may have noticed at the beginning of nikolaj's last blog post that he made a small reference to a competition that we are having to see who can come up with the biggest code-drop once trunk opens again. he then went on to describe his playing around with the navigation system in the left-hand browsers. well, i'm not about to let his challenge to unmet, am i? i can't let him take all the spotlight for himself!

so in order to make amarok more flexible, and give potential community members more tools at their disposals, i finally looked into adding scripting support to the Context View. just like plasma, you can write applets for the context view in a ridiculously small amount of code. the architecture (read: plasma) was always in place, but it was never really exposed properly and it was always a hack to get it to work. so of course, no one wrote any scripts. and so there are no amarok scripted applets at the moment.

but hopefully that will all change! because now i've given you all the power to write your own britney spears themed applets! and just in a few lines of code! i could sit around and explain, but i'd rather show you a picture:

and then because i'm such a great guy, i'll even show you the code that makes that magic happen:

plasmoid.drawAppletBackground = function()
{
return true;
}
plasmoid.dataUpdate = function(a, b)
{
if ( b.current )
label.text = "Playing " + b.current[ "xesam:title" ] + " from " + b.current[ "xesam:author" ] + " on " + b.current[ "xesam:album" ];
}
layout = new LinearLayout( plasmoid );
layout.setAlignment( 2 );
label1 = new Label( );
label1.text = "This is a javascript applet. Just to show off that we can get data from c++ dataengines, here's info on the currently playing track:";
layout.addItem( label1 );
label = new Label();
layout.addItem( label );

label.text = "This is a Javascript Applet";
plasmoid.dataEngine("amarok-current").connectSource( "current", plasmoid );

and, thats it. you'll be able to install new scripted applets directly from inside amarok, and have all the fun that you want. i'd like to note that this is still in a very early stage and all the UI bits are still a work in progress--that includes the currently location of the "Install New Widgets" button. i needed somewhere to put it, and that seemed good for testing.

so, nikolaj... whats next?

Amarok Blog - lfranchi

camping out for kde

time to take it away