Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Plasma goes userfriendly (III)

University consumes a lot of time these days, however there are always some minutes for continue hacking on the comic plasmoid. During the last days I cleaned up the code and added nicer buttons with icons, which appear on hovering the plasmoid. As we have support for a new comic strip (xkcd.com) now, there was the need for easy configuration. You can see in the screenshot the new configuration dialog, where you can select the comic to show. Currently the selection is hard-coded, however in future versions it shall query the supported comics from the comic engine directly.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Plasma goes userfriendly (II)

During the last two days I extended the userfriendly plasmoid to show not only the comic strip from userfriendly.org but also other comic strips (e.g. dilbert or garfield). As the name doesn't match any longer I renamed to to 'comic' plasmoid. The code is still located in playground, however after some more code cleanup and adding a configuration dialog I'll move it to extragear as suggested by Aaron (@Aaron: thanks for the flowers by the way :)). Below you can see the obligatory screenshot of the current state:


As you can see the applet provides buttons (yeah, they look ugly, better ideas or code is welcome ;)) now, which you can use to browse all comics of the past week.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Plasma goes userfriendly

After the organization of the 5. Linux-Info-Tag in Dresden is over now I used this evening to relax a bit and implementing an nice idea I had some weeks ago: Why not creating a plasmoid which shows you the userfriendly.org comic cartoon of the day?

Although I'd taken a look at the plasma API several times I didn't do any development, but today I wrote my first plasmoid. As many other developer have already proven, it's quite simple and makes fun. The result of my hack session you can see on the image below.


The code for the engine and the applet is in playground already.
Have fun testing it!