so, today’s blog entry is presented in fuzzy vision, for solidarity to drunk people.

Yesterday I was feeling pretty pissed off by how things were going. But fortunately, the KDE community demostrated once more how great and friendly it is. =) I received a lot of virtual hugs and good words on IRC, on private mail and in comments. And I’m really thankful to everyone of you for the kind words, they really helped me. =)
Sebastian turns out to be our most favourite teddy bear ever, and today, despite he woke up at 5 AM and was just back from a long journey, popped up on IRC and pinged me, we explained ourselves, and in a few minutes the atmosphere and everything was back to the usual KDE hugs and kisses. Misunderstandings are pretty bad, but fortunately now all seems good. Or, as sebas writes… I love teddy bears! =)

So, today I finished my mockup for the battery, and sent it to the Plasma devel mailing list. I’ll show it also here, so that I’ll gather some more feedback.
However, before I’ll show it, a couple of notes:
The icons (especially brightness icons) are temprorary, as you might guess. I’ll probably add a brightness label too, I was just feeling lazy :P.
Some icons will probably also need to be made ad-hoc, for now I just borrowed some from the icon theme. In place of the ‘java’ icons there will be icons specific to each profile.

Apart for that, this is the mockup for the popup that will appear clicking on the battery in the panel, while on planar (desktop/dashboard/media-center…) contianments there will be just the ’status’ part (the part above the line) with a little togglable button (label for it? “options…”?) bottom-right which will slide out the configuration options and will make the plasmoid look like the following mockup, which is designed, as I said, for the panel.

Some other points that are worth noticing:

• I tried to pack up the space, and manipulating the background with inkscape is not the easiest thing ever. I’m sure that the end result (especially with better font rendering) will look less cluttered.
• a ‘brightness’ label on the slider might be good, I was just hoping for cleaerer icons. let’s see how this turns out.
• the checkbox “disable warnings” will become another thing, used to toggle “presentation mode” (no autosuspend, no warnings, no screensaver, …)
• yes, I will show the CPU frequency in the progressbar
• we need better wording =)

Ok, so, after the notes… here it is!

And, yes, this is meant to become the controller for powerdevil. =)

As a sidenote, and to unveil the last part of my title, lately I got pretty annoyed with the status of the development of raptor so far. Especially with the estimated developed times being 20.000 years (I’m saying the truth, check here if you don’t believe me! (towards the end)) . To put it bluntly, things were simply stagnating for way too long. So I sit down, met, talked to and recruited some devlopers (namely Dario ‘drf’ Freddi of PowerDevil’s fame, Davide Bettio and Lukas Appelhans), we created a git repo, and we started the fun.
We’re being hosted at github for now, like arora, and we plan to merge back to SVN right before moving to kdereview.

The repo URL is: http://github.com/ruphy/raptor.

The biggest work will likely be the view, so if you have some expertise in QPainter, layouts, or computer graphics, and feel like you want to give us a hand, don’t exitate to drop us (or me) a line or fork the repo on github. =)

So, now, our stated goal is to have raptor ready for 4.2, with *at least* basic functionalities and legacy category support.
Note that, once we’ll have some usable code, we’ll badly need some feedback from users so that we can see what we can optimize further and what are the concepts that work better, so that we can then optimize the menu the best way possible.

We’re all motivated and dedicated to do it, we’ve just completed the design phase, and me and drf will meet in RL weekly for some code sprints on it, too. And we’ll also be joining our forces with our good friend Ivan Cucik (please pardon me the accents, ivan =) ), author of Lancelot, to be able to faster kick, kickoff, off.

Wow, that was long! Later on!