Plasma in Randa

For the first time I managed to go to Randa, a beautiful quiet village in the Swiss Alps. Here at Randa we’re currently having a week of intense hacking sessions and cross-platform porting and planning efforts.

The awesome Albert Vaca showed me how to use Android Studio and setup building the KDE Connect Android app. I’ve had many ideas for it but never actually managed to build it. Now I can finally start implementing some of my ideas. The first patch I submitted was making sure the Remote Control plugin could handle scroll inputs from the BlackBerry touch-enabled physical keyboard.

Calendar applet showing the current week number
Calendar applet showing the current week number

Of course I spent quite some time on Plasma whose 5.7 Beta release is due tomorrow: The Pager (virtual desktop switcher) applet got cleaned up and now lists minimized windows in its tooltip as well. Moreover, the calendar applet – a standalone version of the digital clock calendar – now shows either the current day or week number in the panel. The latter having been quite a challenge as the JavaScript Date object has no week number property.

New and cleaner splash screen providing a unified startup experience
New and cleaner splash screen providing a unified startup experience

Last night David Edmundson and I spent time finishing the all-new login and splash screen experience. Unfortunately the design was finalized quite late in the release cycle and thus we had to make some compromises on what to change. At least the Plasma Blue™ gradient is consistently used from startup till desktop now ;)

Various other improvements have been made, notably fixing invoking System Settings Modules through KRunner or Kickoff, applet tooltips sometimes showing up ontop of context menus, and the Media Controller applet loading the full-sized album art into RAM just to scale it down in the UI afterwards. Lastly, I implemented a feature request about adding an option to have windows or groups minimize/restore on middle clicking them in the taskbar.

If you like what you saw and want to bring KDE Software to other platforms like Windows, OSX, and Android, please consider supporting our Randa Meetings Fundraiser Campaign! :)

5 thoughts on “Plasma in Randa”

    1. Theoretically you could just copy the lookandfeel package from Plasma 5.7 and use it in an older version.

      The splash screen is just a minimalist QML file and the login screen also shouldn’t use any new fancy functionality.

  1. Great. Thank you for all these little – but important – optimizations.

    For the calendar applet (from digital clock) it would be nice if you could reeimplement the function to change the months via mouse scroll. This was possible with KDE4 and I really miss it with Plasma 5, especially when KHolidays will be back with 5.7 and Akonadi appointments in a future release.

  2. What are the features that you want to implement in Android app?

    PS:- Please add Jetpack plugin to this blog so that notifications would work.

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