Between Linux and Anime

So alpha2 of Plasmate got rolled out a day or so ago, and here I am again to give you an obligatory what’s-new screencast! This is my first ever voiced screencast too. Hope I’m legible :) Here goes…

And that summarizes the larger part of the changes we committed since last month. Big thanks here to Sandro who hacked up the much anticipated GHNS integration at Tokamak! It only works for plasmoids now and has a fair number of kinks, but its good and sweet enough for a try out.

The plasmoid use case is pretty stable now, especially after a fix that came with 4.4.1 permitting python plasmoids to have a main script name other than ‘main.py’. Folks joining the Javascript Jam might want to give it a whirl, it may make your life easier! As for non-plasmoids, they edit, install and export perfectly now, and we’ll be diving in towards implementing previewers for them very soon. Great things lie ahead!

As Aseigo noted, you can get the alpha2 source tarball here. OpenSUSE users can grab it packaged from KDE:KDE4:Playground thanks to Will Stephenson.

Happy hacking!

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!