Today was Tuesday, which meant reading circles at P.'s school. So I went up there 50 minutes earlier than usual to host one of the reading circles. We're reading "Stuart Little" which is not only a great children's novel, but one I loved as a kid myself. We take turns reading and discuss vocabulary and what not. I had them act out some of the passages to help them understand some of the verbs and we dissected nouns they didn't know to their roots.
Picked up a new external hard disk to replace the one that I broke a few months back so I can start doing backups again. Amazing how cheap 750GB of external disk is now. Crazy.
Over the last few days I've managed to watch a couple of rather sad though inspiring movies: Other People's Lives (German) and This Beautiful City (Canadian). Both are tragic tales and I highly recommend them both if you haven't seen them.
On the Plasma front, I added DataEngine support for Wallpaper plugins to make life a wee bit easier for John as he implements the rather cool weather wallpaper. It's a cool idea and nice to see it coming together. So far it's just 370 lines of code, including configuration, which is pretty impressive for something that fetches weather data over the Internet. Viva la DataEngines!
I also have a first run implementation of runner settings. We had this in 4.0 and I think 4.1, but with the new UI it got lost. It shows up as an icon inside the selected match that, when selected, shows the configuration below the item.
What I'm not sure about, however, is what items to actually implement. "Run as a different user" and "run in terminal" are already implemented, but there are a number of other items and I'm wondering which are actually useful. There are "run with a different priority" and "run with realtime scheduling"; these require root privileges (usually, anyways) and maybe I'd use the new PolicyKit framework in svn for them .... but are they really needed? If not, I'd rather not implement them.
If you have used these features in KDE3, please include in the comments your use case (aka "the when, why and how"). They seem a bit ... esoteric ... to me and I'm not sure exactly how user friendly they are or how necessary in a run dialog they are, especially compared to the other two options which make immense amounts of sense.
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Haha, it looks like we are playing a 'cat and mice game': when trying to implement the same wallpaper plugin motivated by the same forum post I though: hhmm, probably we need a way to easily access data engines on wallpapers.... =P
Couldn't those be implemented as separate runners? For example:
hipriority important-task
realtime realtime-task
I actually think it would be a neat idea to also "sub-runners" which could add actions to the displayed matches could be enabled/disabled. So for example if I never switch users but I often need to start applications with realtime scheduling, I could just enable the buttons I want. It would then also open up a possibility of adding some other interesting things later on without worrying of bloating up the user's interface.
The ability for the active runner to give information to the user without before it is even executed could be very useful.
This could both help the user to execute the correct action and even mean the user did not have to run the command at all (thus incuring the cost of having to change focus to a new window and gather the information from there).
Yes I have blogged about this idea before. And probably been a pain trying to get people to listen to me ;) but you're asking for ideas.
Yes, also the ideas are heavily influenced by Mozilla Ubiquity.
Both KRunner and Ubiquity have undergone changes in layout.
Here is the new Ubiquity layout. And displaying some photographs
I think the vertical list (as KRunner now has) with the information about the active item displayed to the side (as Ubiquity does) seems a very good system.
Finally Just to summarise:
> Each matching item may act as they do now (i.e. be associated with just one action)
> Optionally a matching item may return a list of actions
> These sub-items are displayed as a list in the information-panel
> Optionally a matching search may provide formatted information which would also be displayed in the side-panel
> (Perhaps) Optionally a matching item may also provide formatting information for how the list of sub-items is displayed (eg use a table rather than a list for file search).
oops - hope that post makes sense, hit return accidentally :¬/
I think thery are no use... :-)
"Run with realtime right" is actually pretty common in the linux audio scene. And it doesn't require you to be root at all (unless you distro isn't configured correctly). With pam you can nowadays allow anyone in a certain group to use realtime rights. Should the the audio-group:-)
You implemented "Run as root"?
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