GSoC Update 4: QML Plasmoids (almost) ready to use!

Don’t get tempted by the title, only 3 of the QML plasmoids are fairly usable by a user:

Battery monitor:

Lock/logout applet:

Device notifier:

These are one of the outcomes of my post-midterm work. There are of course some edge cases where these plasmoids go haywire, but all in all, they’re pretty much usable (I have started using them myself!).

Another outcome of post-midterm work is the QMenu QML component. I wrote a QMenu for use by task manager applet. I invested much of time in it, making it simple to use in the plasmoids, but was rendered unusable in task manager because plasma intercepts the right-clicks (to show the standard plasmoid config menu) and does not allow the plasmoid to receive the event. So I will have to make a C++/QML plasmoid for the task manager, which I will work on after GSoC’s final evaluation. Here’s the task manager so far:

Here’s something for developers, you can use the QMenu QML bindings as follows:

import org.kde.qtextracomponents 0.1

...
    QMenu {
        id: menu
        QMenuAction {
            icon: QIcon("foo")
            text: "foo"
            onTriggered: {
                // do your stuff here
            }
        }
        QMenuAction {
            icon: QIcon("bar")
            text: "bar"
            onTriggered: {
                // do your stuff here
            }
        }
    }
...
    MouseArea {
        onClicked: {
            var globalPos = parent.mapToItem(null, x, y);
            menu.showMenu(globalPos.x, globalPos.y);
        }
    }
...

The code is self-explanatory, it constructs a menu with “foo” and “bar” actions, with respective icons, and triggers. I know the popping up of the menu seems to be a dirty little hack, but that’s how it goes for now. This is the thing I spent most time on.

So this is my GSoC work, will continue after the final results are out. My mentor, Marco Martin, helped through a lot of issues during the project, and he’s awesome! GSoC was a great experience for me overall and gave me a great opportunity to get involved with KDE, which I was planning to do since long before GSoC, but never found my way in. But finally, I’m now a proud KDE contributor