This week in Usabilitity & Productivity, part 25

Usability & Productivity 2 Minutes

Hot on the heels of last week, we’ve got a ton more Usability and Productivity for you! Look at all this cool stuff:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

See all the names of people who worked hard to make the computing world a better place? That could be you next week! Getting involved isn’t all that tough, and there’s lots of support available. Give it a try today! It’s easy and fun and important.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Published by Nate

Published

18 thoughts on “This week in Usabilitity & Productivity, part 25”

  2. As always, awesome job and the best weekly lecture to keep us on track with Plasma development and excited! How could we live without such news? This is the best PR initiative for Plasma!

    I have a question. Where is the best place to post and discuss ideas? Bugtracker seems to be so far only way to present them but new features are no bugs.

    For example, I red this article:

    http://technastic.com/macos-mojave-dynamic-wallpaper-on-linux/

    I thought, will it work on Plasma? I checked, it doesn’t, although I can set xml script as a picture. I just get black background. Then I thought, wait a minute, I can use slideshow and set it to change to 1,5 hours so this would do exactly what was needed! Then I tried it and realized, slideshow shows pictures randomly… which beats the purpose.

    The new feature proposal:

    Add option to slideshows to disable randomness of the photos (just a simple checkbox, randomness would be on by default). This way it would allow us for fun with dynamic wallpapers (if ever will be more created or ripped off from mac ;p). So with 16 pictures, I could set change of picture every 1,5 hour, count which one should be used at certain hour (like 3 pm) and then next-skip to the appropriate one and then natural time progress would make it work.

    Just a small fun project. Nothing essential but such option to slideshow shouldn’t be hard to add I imagine? Or hopefully ;)? This would be an obscure setting, not used by many but one of those that allow for fine tuning and fun that only Plasma can offer :D.

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    3. I realized, this wouldn’t be so simple. Suspending system suspends also time count so we would need a switch to real time (computer) count so the presented pictures were accurate with the day/night time.

      Nate, we write here because as non-developers this is our only way to contribute: file bugs, give ideas, cheer up, discuss options or solutions as end users, etc. I know that your time is limited, but I hoped this would be a small thing to do, but it seems it needs more careful approach. Anyway, idea-seed is planted and maybe this will grow some day.

      Still, it’s good thing you started to respond often with links for bug submitting and getting involved – it’s not always clear how to do that so constant reminders are helpful. Maybe some of the readers will have idea how to do it and will want to start his/her journey into KDE world with this small project ;). We can only hope.

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    5. I agree that dynamic wallpapers like that one would be nice. Thing is, this is actually a perfect application for a custom wallpaper plugin. They’re just simple QML apps, really. You can see a couple at https://store.kde.org/browse/cat/419/ord/top/.

      If someone created a plugin for this, then distros could choose to ship it by default, and users could download and use it themselves once we have a user-friendly system to allow custom wallpaper plugins to be downloaded and installed (in progress: https://phabricator.kde.org/D12040)

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  3. “There’s now a global Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut that launches Konsole from anywhere (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.08.0)”

    Really-really-really thank you for this! Sure one can argue it was a minor issue, but I just hated that i had to configure such a basic thing. This was one of the remaining annoyances that has bugged me for a while. The less annoyances the better, so thank you!

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    2. Yeah, when I was new to Plasma almost 3 years ago it was one of the big problems. I didn’t know system enough to set it myself and I just wanted to work it out of the box as on other systems, so I think this is a small but big change in end result.
      In fact, now that such global shortcut already exist, it should be enabled as default. People expect it and it’s a very awesome shortcut. I use it every day and I can’t imagine living without it.

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  4. Thanks for the great update. I am worried about that new global Konsole shortcut though as I am sure it is going to hijack shortcuts from existing applications. I see it already conflicts with “Surround with” from Android Studio. It would be great if there was a policy to mandate the use of the Windows|Super key as part of all global shortcuts. This would separate global and local shortcuts.

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