Today being the day it is I should start with wishing all my fellow chinks out there a very happy and prosperous Chinese New Year. And then to the rest of the world, Happy Valentines Day! While I’m at it let me also congratulate KDE on a stellar 4.4 software compilation release, thank the openSUSE folks for a pretty darn good upgrade-experience, and of course, last but certainly not least, congratulate Plasmate, the lovable Plasma add-on creation tool, on our recent first ever alpha release!
You cannot imagine how excited I am about this :)
Unfortunately I don’t have much to add to the other posts who have already previously announced the news, so I decided to do a brief showcase screencast instead. It’s a simple one where I demonstrate creating a simple Python plasmoid from scratch in Plasmate, which would hopefully hint at the workflow we are aiming to create as well as demonstrate the salient features that made it into the alpha1 release. Here it is:
I had to make do with slow-internet while doing this one so kindly excuse the slow loading on the documentation widget :) There is also unfortunately no sound.
As noted in the other posts, brave souls wishing to give this alpha release a spin could acquire the source tarball here, or check it out of svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/tags/plasmate/0.1-alpha1. As with all alpha software this release is incomplete and may contain bugs so be warned. We’ll of course appreciate bug reports, which should be submitted under plasmate to b.k.o.
Have a lot of fun!
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WindPower
Congrats :D (So that’s what the previous post on recordmydesktop was for…)
Is it save-stable though? As in, can I start using it right now, knowing that the save format won’t change in the future so that everything is forward-compatible?
Will Stephenson
Great screencast, and it’s lovely to see you using openSUSE and boosting it. One request though, can you use a fullscreen window and a larger editor font so the text is more readable at the blip.tv resolution? Fullscreen would hide your wallpaper animations too.
Jason "moofang"
@ WindPower : Hehe yeah. I made the leap up to KDE SC 4.4 and discovered to my horror that recordmydesktop has started failing.
Re: your question, I can’t make any guarantees (the definition of alpha software is we can’t guarantee it won’t eat your babies :P ) but FWIW I think it’s highly unlikely – the projects are saved/exported as standard plasma add-on packages, and there’s no reason I can see to use anything else. So as long as the plasma project formats don’t change in a backwards-incompatible manner, you should be safe.
@ Will Stephenson : Thanks for the feedback. Not going full screen is a habit of mine and I do it without thinking nowadays. I’ll also keep the font size in mind next time.
I don’t think I’ll redo this one though – I’ve already spent way too much time on it :( In any case you won’t miss much even if you cannot read the code – it’s just some simple Python and Plasma api calls.
[Po]lentino
Awesome screencast Yuen Hoe ;)
Let’s make PlasMate rocks !!!
Aaron Seigo
“knowing that the save format won’t change in the future so that everything is forward-compatible”
as Yuen Hoe notes, it uses the Plasma Package format, which we’ve been committed to since 4.0. it’s very flexible and similar to other widget package formats, actually. in any case, the format will not be changing; it can’t, actually, without breaking Plasmoids everywhere, in fact. the good news is that we have no need at all to change it as it does everything we could want it to :)