Monday, July 21, 2008

Sweet Dreams

After not having written for a longer time I can say that I spent the time on a very interesting and usefull matter:

In the beginning of the week I worked on some missing packages for our already some weeks old release 4.0.83 which still is the most recent release before the next major version 4.1. I rebuild kdegraphics and added new packages for kdeutils, kdemultimedia and kdepim. Especially interesting is kdemultimedia as I fixed phonon the weekend before and so KDE windows platform supports sound output now. Kdepim was really easy since KDAB has fixed nearly everything (except the packaging bugs that I introduced;-)).

Then somehow Carlo Segato (_Brandon_) came to the idea that he could take another look again at plasma. I tried this before but I didn't invest a lot of time and so it was still unknown which wonders were awaiting us there. After _Brandon_ came through really well and most of the problems I hit last time had magically vanished (thanks to aseigo probably) _Brandon_ showed me the first picture of the analog clock on windows:



This was just the start and after working for two more days, a lot of plasmoids have been built. The most interesting thing was that even the plasma desktop(the containment) was not very hard to fix and so only two days after we started the first efforts "the world's coolest geek toy(tm)" is available on Windows too:



There is still a lot to do as e.g. the panel is still not at the place where it should be and some of the classes have been simply disabled. Some obvious bugs are existing as well:
Rotating plasmoids doesn't work, some of your favourite plasmoids might be missing etc.
Nevertheless I put up some preview packages for kdebase-workspace(which contains plasma desktop), kdeplasma-addons and kdeplasma-playground (which both contain additional widgets). To get the desktop, simply run plasma.exe from kderoot\bin.

Please keep in mind that those packages are previews; Bug reports in bugs.kde.org are still unwanted!

As this was a really historic moment for me, I want to thank all those Persons that made this post possible for the one reason or the other!

(to be naming some that come to my mind: Aaron Seigo, Carlo Segato, Pau Garcia de Quiles, Christian Ehrlicher and Ralf Habacker, Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Jeremy Whiting, our users and all those of course that didn't came to my mind).