Welcome to 4.3.

[Marco Martin]

On Wednesday 07 January 2009, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> Hello everyone.
>
everybody: heeello aaron :p
> But the real fun, of course, is 4.3. What are we going to work on? What
> will we do?
what we do every night pinky... try to take over the world!
> Well, there's obviously stuff in 4.2 that can use polishing and work and
> there's always the enjoyable business of making things prettier and faster.
>
> I would personally like to see us concentrate in 4.3 on *making things*
> with the framework we have errected here. We've spent the last year on a
> kick ass framework, let's spend 2009 blowing people's minds with what you
> can build with it.
>
> For 4.3 I'm going to focus on community, sociability and media.
>
> No, I'm not focussing on things other than Plasma! I mean I want to focus
> on making Plasma something that keeps you in touch with the KDE community
> and your own communities. Something that helps, rather than gets in the
> way, of you being social. Something that encourages the use of media more
> pervasively and more enjoyably.
bridging better with other applications like kopete could be a good start :)
(not that i know exactly what i'm meaning but well, yeah...)
> For me, this means a number of projects I'll be starting:
>
> * The Make A Widget Foundation (not sure if that's funny anywhere else but
> North America): make every myspacer able to make and share widgets!
> 	* The Plasma Design Studio; I've been working on design concepts since
> Akademy around this and have some, imo anyways, pretty decent ideas on how
> to do it
hmm, wouldn't we need some aid by qt like q qgraphicswidget based designer? or 
we will embark in the adventure of implementing everything  just by us?

> 	* Improving the Basic JavaScript engine more and more
> 	* Implementing that security framework!
>
> * Plasma Meets World: this is the JOLIE work that must finally make it into
> libplasma so that people can discover a new level of interoperability and
> power with their computers, and so Fabricio doesn't hang me by my toes ;)
>
> * Media Center: This is the one I'm least sure about ... but ... something
> to discuss at Tokamak for sure.

i would really love that, maybe not a mythtv like full featured monster but a 
pretty basic thin that features a cool looking fullscreen media browser and  
manager, now how intergrating with existing things like mythtv and amarok is 
an open issue, given our resurces dunno if could make it for 4.3 but well is 
one of the reasons of my video widget in  playground :p

a thing kinda coupled with that, since a media center would be a browse stuff 
type of thing is itemviews (deadly useful also in other areas), now we don't 
have a real way to do it in plasma, so would be like hmm, moving the 
folderview itemview into libplasma? (there was also a graphics dojo thing that 
was mostly identical to folderview, but didn't understood if it's something 
scheduled to be part of qt or just dead there)

aaanother thing on the same segway that i would love is plasma in totally 
different types of programs, to dispell the myth that plasma is just a 
collection of cruft to put on the desktop, so like providing a basic plasma 
app that loads a given config file and acts like well ap app could be an idea

aaand the big thing of course:
plasma-mid: this one as far i understood doesn't depend totally from us, but 
any development on that? i will give some amount of pretty basic love anyways, 
since i have a thing almost screencastable with an exactly crafted hand made 
config file... only problem is that the last thing i tried it on n810 was way 
more disastrous than this summer, slower and didn't load any svg, but could be 
my messy setup... aanyways at least for things like the eeepc we could have 
something..



> of course, there are more mundane things i'll also be plonking on, like:
>
> * bugfixing (*sigh*)
> * adding generic layout strategy support to Containments (something that
> makes it possible to create and re-use layouts like the ones we've done for
> the desktop or the panel in new containments)
> * context menu plugins
> * further work on per-desktop views
> * revisit the zooming system and refine, refine
> * cashew-pops-up-dashboard?
> * Plasma::Message for plasmoids to show messages in a generic but pretty
> fashion to the user, e.g. the folderview saying "can't reach the network"
> * Plasma::Colors: rethinking colour schemes in plasma
yeeeeeees, it makes keeping in sync with other text colors like links a real 
pita :/
> * new applet browser window
maybe a gallery with screenshots or something like that...
> * SolidDevice engine needs a Service
>
> i'm not hellbent on being The One to do all of the above, of course ;) if
> you're interested, i'm happy to help or just hand it on over.
>
> But definitely start putting on your thinking caps ... it's feature season
> again! Woo!
>
> Oh, and if you have a component that is ready to go in 4.3, you can start
> merging things into trunk.
>
>
> ... btw ... I think that if we just keep doing what we've been doing and
> keep having fun at it, we're going to BLOW MINDS with 4.3. =)
>
> Hugs ...
/me hugs back...
dunno if what i wrote makes any sense or is just a flu-driven delirium but 
well yeah :p

Cheers,
Marco Martin